Just got this link from a fellow Xer Bill Santos, who is a regular reader of Cooltown Studios. Why does walkability have to be only an urban thing? Why can’t we take the suburban scene and add some adaptive thinking and create a functioning, walkable shopping area?
My, how I wait for / push for / pine for the day when there will be public will to create places (or convert existing village and shopping centers) into vibrant, walkable areas. Last night I was driving past the mess of sprawl and deplorable land-use choice of Target, Dick’s, CompUSA etc. Whatever they call that place.
I thought, what a wasted opportunity. Why didn’t they stack? Why didn’t they develop the place as “a place?” Stack the big boxes. Stack the parking. Add some sweet, fun restaurants — INSIDE, where people could walk to them rather than have to drive to them even if they just shopped right across the parking lot. Create a stacked shopping big-box center with some open, public, happy areas inside. Add some small spaces for smaller retailers and fun, quirky little shops. The thinking behind these developments is so mediocre and old-style it boggles me. And yet another one was developed just of late (Lowe’s, Office Depot, etc.)
Yeah, yeah, market forces. Competition. Price. Formula. Do what works.
Lord, have mercy. Have people lost their minds and not realized that times, they be a-changin’? Always! Have those developer and zoning approval types not realized that once a trend is popular (as in the big box stores spread out over vast areas) that it’s just a matter of time before said trend becomes passe, undersirable and unsustainable? PAY ATTENTION: Once a trend becomes so common as to seem the right way to do things, you’re in a dangerous period when it’s about to become outdated. Really.
Stack. Stack. Stack. Bring people closer together. The era of Unraveling (high personal optimism and success with little connection to community and little belief in the power of institutions) is about to be over … very soon. The shift will be sudden and sharp. People are going to want to be in public spaces, seen by their neighbors, able to come together in public spaces and to FEEL protected and safe. The vast stretches of land — as evidenced by the big box sprawl — while currently satisfying needs is about to become a very outdated model. Says me.
So what about Howard County? Are we going to get slammed? Caught unprepared for the shift? Standing, jaws dropped, as a significant bandwidth of our community moves to places that do provide such gatherings and safe community places? See, believe it or not, GenXers for the most part orient toward SURVIVAL, as they define it for themselves and their families. They look for “a fit.” They are not, for the most part, orienting toward values-based communities and talk about our importance in the history of suburban developments. Hey, it’s not that values aren’t important, but they tend to take a second seat to survival for the Gen X peer personality.
I take a stand, here and now, for what I believe is a key and critical component of a healthy community: Safe, dense community spaces and shopping areas that support easy pedestrian movement and plenty of public gathering spaces for individuals and small groups to be visible, public and engaged.
What about you? What do you think?
6 Comments
February 22, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Message to “WhoWhat” at na@na.com. I’m so sorry, but I have to delete your comment. Not for content, of course. But because you’re essentially posting anonymously with a bogus pseudonym and a fake email address.
I like your thinking and would love to have your comments on my blog. Here’s what I recommend. Go to WordPress.com and create a user name. Not a blog, just a user name. Pick a pseudonym. Create, if you need to, an email that you only use for your blog comments.
Looking forward to hearing from YOU.
February 22, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Jessie, you take this blog a little too seriously. By not allowing WhoWhat’s comment, which you admitted was a good one, you show that you don’t care about ideas- you care about appearances. You should stop blogging and run for political office if that’s your game.
I would love to know what WhoWhat said.
February 22, 2008 at 5:54 pm
For me, the area between Dobbin Road and I-95 has been perpetually behind the times. From it’s inception as the Sieling Industrial park (intended to be the home of warehousing and “stackless” manufacuring) and the ill-fated General Electric Manufacturing facility, to its modern day big box, strip mall and single-use office park persona, it has never been cutting edge.
I belive we will see yet another downturn in the area before things get better. Can anyone else remember the business failures from the 1980’s: Roy’s Place Too, Hanover Hamburgers, Red Robin (the same as, but long before the present day Red Robin), Pace, Bradlees, Skateland, The Supreme Court (at one time, a raquetball-themed fitness center (a comparable Lifetime Fitness for its time) that ultimately failed and was purchased by the Columbia Association). Yes, all these ventures failed in what we now call the “Snowden Corridor.”
What we have now is effectively “Plan B.” An office park and big box. Currently, I think we can all agree that the area is popular. Many people use the establishments there. What I believe is also true is that it is largely a soul-less activity.
February 22, 2008 at 6:39 pm
FM, While I appreciate your thinking, I’d prefer to speak for myself. The stand I take vis-a-vis comments has to do with a much bigger picture of transparency inside of social media; in particular, I’m a proponent of transparency inside of local communities. While I can blog about this til I’m blue in the face (fingers?), the most specific and proactive way I know to stand for my principles is to apply them where I can. And in my blog, I can. I don’t support anony-mouse postings, and a bogus username and fake email (as used by WhoWhat) is effectively an anonymous comment.
Perhaps “WhoWhat” will respond to your curiosity and will follow my recommendation that WhoWhat create a username in WordPress, or elsewhere. Then, were WhoWhat to find value in having a username and online identity WhoWhat might continue to post comments under said name. Wouldn’t that be a delight and a boon to the local blogging community to have another voice in the ongoing conversation found here in the Hoco blogs? I, for one, want more of this. And, I for one, will continue to delete faux anony-mouse comments.
You do as you please on your blog, Freemarket. I do as I please on mine.
February 22, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Wasn’t the whole idea of Village Centers to be walkable? The hub of the village, in walking distance from most homes, a place to visit, meet neighbors, for kids to play. That was the vision, as I understand it.
So why aren’t they more vibrant? Well, some of them, in fact, are. Kings Contrivance has a nice energy in the summertime, when people are eating lunch outdoors, enjoying the lunchtime concert series they have.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is the degree that most of us are over scheduled. We schedule time for shopping, time for playing, time for sports, and the idea of just going to the village center to hang out and socialize, while a lovely, romantic idea, just doesn’t fit into our busy lives.
Perhaps we’re suffering from too much of a good thing. We’ve got the ultimate walkable environment, The Mall, available rain or shine, at one end of the spectrum, and we’ve got the big-box stores at the other end, where we go to get good deals. The village centers fall somewhere in the middle, and maybe they get lost in the shuffle.
At any rate, I submit that Columbia and Howard County have no shortage of walkable environments. They may be underutilized, some of them, and perhaps we’ll end up facing a reality that not every village can support a village center. (I hope it never comes to that, but you never know.)
Because we enjoy such a variety of shopping environments, I submit we’ll do better than most at adjusting to whatever shifts in shopping preferences come our way. Not to mention that our education level and affluence tends to insulate us from the severity of many of those kinds of shifts.
But who knows. The rate of change is accelerating, and there are so many unpredictable and chaotic forces at work. It’s not unlike predicting the weather. A few days out and we’ve got a pretty good chance of accuracy. Beyond that it’s like astrology. Fun for entertainment purposes, but of little real use for serious long term planning.
February 24, 2008 at 9:29 pm
David, You wrote (above): “Wasn’t the whole idea of Village Centers to be walkable?”
I don’t see it the same way. I see village centers as being designed to be meaningful places for a regionally connected group of people to gather, shop and have, on occasion, community activities. If village centers were meant to be walkable, I wouldn’t live — as I do, according to a Mapquest calculation — 1.59 miles and a 5-minute drive from my village’s shopping center. So, first, I say let’s reframe this conversation. Village Centers were never designed to be walkable (as in I can walk to them and comfortably walk home with groceries). There was, of course, in the early days, placement of housing closer to the centers so that people who wanted to be within walkable distance to the village center could choose such an option.
Columbia, as I see it, suffers from too much of a good thing: too many retail options spread too far apart. The village centers, as originally defined, have lost their value. Many people bemoan the decline of the village centers and continue to hold, what I see as, an outdated definition that the village centers are important. As they currently stand — in isolated spots with minimal unique shopping opportunities — they’re just strip malls with a little bit of landscaping and a few benches. Whoopeedoo.
If you haven’t done so yet, take a look over on Hayduke’s blog about the subject. There’s quite a stir of a conversation going on over there.