Placemaking & street vitality

[Multimodal]

Mixed-use developments are the current trend, and they solve all our problems, right?

Well, sometimes not.

Anyone ever go by the TowerLight on Wooddale building, at the corner of Wooddale Ave. & 36th St. (just south of Hwy 7) in St. Louis Park? It’s got all the right things, right? Multistory, dense use, residential on floors 2 & up, commercial uses on the 1st floor, parking behind/underneath, and it even has a pocket park on the corner with benches. Urbanists’ dream!

So why is it completely dead all the time?

It might as well be a big box store or windowless mall, for all the activity on the street it generates, which is to say none. Even the pocket park is dead. No one ever uses the benches.

My theory is that it acts like a suburban mall in that it is completely introspective & navel-gazing. Sure it has windows on the street, and they’re even uncovered! But there is no public retail on the first floor—it’s all internal uses (cafeteria, day care, offices, etc.). There is no reason to walk by or into the building unless you live there or are visiting someone there. There is nothing interesting to see—not even signs or advertising in the windows—because it’s all internal uses.

Here is an old article about it when it was first built:

http://www.startribune.com/hot-property ... 143871916/

A similar, inwardly-focused senior housing building was proposed in the Pentagon Park/Fred Richards Park area of Edina, and this building explains why that wouldn’t work as a place to attract people to and from the park & Nine Mile Creek Trail. Sure, it’s density, but it’s the wrong kind of density. Without any destinations in the building, there’s no sense of place and no street vitality. It just feels dead, like a pretty big box store. A pocket park doesn’t fix that.

[Multimodal]

In exurban Florida, there are progressive city councils that are trying to make things better, and regional rail has been introduced that will push that further, although it has just started.

There’s a decade+ old new urbanist development here called Abacoa that tried real hard to create street vitality and a sense of place, but it still feels somewhat car-oriented and I’m not sure it has quite enough density to support its little downtown, although it seems improved since the last time I was here.

There seems to be this push & pull between “green space” and “pretty” vs. density, and all this green space just makes everything further away.

One good thing is that cars do seem to drive slowly on the narrow, curving side streets.