You can learn a lot from a shopping center.

These are a few shots from Riverside Plaza in Riverside, CA. This small stretch of the Plaza is an example of how cities should build neighborhoods.  (The street could be narrower though.) Plenty of public space for people to sit and eat or just linger. The single ownership makes it easier to maintain and police these quasi public spaces than an public sidewalk, but the same sort of amenities could easily be provided on city sidewalks and paid for and maintain by a business improvement district.

 

 

 

It's unfortunate they didn't go all the way and better connect this shopping center to the streets around it. There's a mid century shopping district right across the street that could benefit from the connection. Oddly, they placed the traffic signal north of the street that could have easily connected with Riverside Plaza and made it easy for pedestrian to cross directly into that shopping center.

 

The intersection of Sunnyside Drive and Riverside Plaza is shown below. 

Don't try to compete with the suburbs.

This is a dead mall in downtown Buffalo, New York. One day before I took these pictures Andres Duany insisted that cities should never try to compete with the suburbs because the city will always lose. In other words, the correct response to "competition" from the suburbs is not to become more suburban. The response should instead be to double down on the urban character of the city. And now that we are witnessing the death of malls in even the suburbs we should especially avoid trying to mimic the suburban shopping experience. (That empty food court in the last photo is the most depressing image.)

Critiquing the Critics

I generally roll my eyes when the biggest criticism people have of new subdivisions is that all the houses look the same. Kevin makes a great point about this sort of criticism and urges one critic to have a little perspective.

All of our older communities that we love now, like for example Silver Lake, were new once, too. The trees weren't planted yet, the houses were probably all painted bright colors and some might even say they felt a little creepy or surreal at the time. Were all those Spanish colonial houses in southern California from the early 20th century built by Spaniards? My gosh - I feel so dirty and fooled by their charm!

Instead of comparing how a relatively new place feels today against places that have been around for far longer, compare places of the same relative age. How does Seaside hold up against early 1980's strip malls and subdivisions? How does South Main hold up against the nearby power center or apartment complex?

This is an incredibly important point to make. If the biggest criticism you can make of a subdivision is that it is new, "cookie cutter," or that the trees are small, you are missing the real issue. I think it is important to look at the over all built environment surrounding the new development. The vast majority of new subdivisions lack the urban design elements that make a place attractive and livable in the long term, but that doesn't mean they can't be fixed.