> Until you deal with the parking problem—which is done by building truly mixed-use places where people can meet their daily needs without hopping in the car—you haven’t created true urbanism. Daily needs means jobs for both you and your spouse, which won’t be in some random subdivision in Florida. It means schools, which don’t appear to be there either. It means the kids’ after school activities, again, missing from…
That doesn't mean that this much parking is necessary, however.
I'm curious if the developer chose this much parking, or if land use requirements mandated it.
I think he's barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn't "movie set urbanism", it's just boring, old "too much parking". Too much parking creates sparseness which reduces walkability. But putting parking behind stores ("movie sets") creates a human scale street space. While organic urban growth should be cherished, there are extreme cases, like most American towns and cities, where urbanism needs to be forcefully bo…
>Too much parking creates sparseness which reduces walkability Anecdotes and all that but for me, there is also definitely a weird psychological factor when walking past big parking lots in the city I live in. It's just... weirdly oppressive in ways I cannot properly articulate, especially living in a city that predates cars by a couple hundred years. It feels like it takes longer to walk past even if it is the same…
You might be interested to learn about the Gehl Door Average, a metric that Jan Gehl came up with (based on his book Cities for People). It measures the number of doors per 100 meters of street frontage, and is a contributing factor to walkability: https://streets.mn/2014/11/06/front-doors-and-walkable-citie...
Parking lots have a 0 GDA, and so feel weirdly empty when walking. (So do parks, but one easily-calculable metric can't capture everything.)
Really I think these "main streets shops" are designs to replace strip malls in suburban environments, which in my opinion is infinitely better.
Isn't it pretty much the exact same thing?
But worse, now you're at the mercy of inclement weather. Near where I live there's a movie theatre at the center of one of these outdoors shopping mall. You line up outside the building to buy tickets. It's a nod to the old-time theatre with the kiosk and ticket-taker but it's cold to queue up in the winter and miserably hot in the summer. There's no awning or overhang or trees. One good-ish thing: in the summer they turn on the outside fountains and kids play there, in the evenings people hang out outside. But it's all driven by commerce, it's not a place that people just gravitate to, it doesn't have its own sense of place, the way a small little urban park is its own place. I wish there were more tiny little urban parks, nothing major, just a small oasis with trees, grass, and some benches. But because we're surrounded by a concrete ocean, who would ever drive to such an insignificant park and enjoy it. The bench will attract the homeless, even less reason to make this space. I can't even articulate the problem - other than infrastructure seems to be going in the wrong direction.
> Until you deal with the parking problem—which is done by building truly mixed-use places where people can meet their daily needs without hopping in the car—you haven’t created true urbanism. Daily needs means jobs for both you and your spouse, which won’t be in some random subdivision in Florida. It means schools, which don’t appear to be there either. It means the kids’ after school activities, again, missing from…
That doesn't mean that this much parking is necessary, however. I'm curious if the developer chose this much parking, or if land use requirements mandated it.
these are popping up in the DFW suburbs where they can be built from scratch. The standard setup is retail at street level with apartments on top and parking underground or at least concentrated in one large garage. They're not completely car free in the center of the development but it doesn't make sense to drive on the interior, there's no point. I think the streets on the inside are there mostly for fire/emergency access. It's ok I guess, the developments are like walking around an amusement park but it's retail instead of games and rides.
Another setup I see in the exurbs are planned communities. You basically take everything a neighborhood needs and build a wall around it. My sister lives in one on a lake, it's pretty neat, everyone drives golf-carts around instead of cars which is funny/interesting. Also, they have their own holiday festivals and events so the community is pretty close knit. My sister's kids know all the other neighborhood kids and all the parents know each other. The parents keep an eye out and so the kids are given a lot of freedom to roam and do kid stuff they wouldn't normally be able to do in the standard suburban neighborhood with heavy and fast traffic everywhere.
When manually driven cars become a rare exception expect these layouts to change again. Instead of vast parking lots somewhat integrated with the destination, cars in surplus to immediate requirements drive themselves to "inconvenient" staging lots or back to their corporate homes. Developments become more dense again.
That's probably true, but in the intervening 75 years, cities would do well to build up their public transport.
The only thing that will cause cities to build up public transport is if people start living in more dense quarters. And the only thing that will make people start living in more dense quarters is if the cost of moving people and all the mass associated with their lives increases drastically. Therefore, the only solution is to cause the price of fuel to rise dramatically, or wait for the consequences of fuel use to raise the cost for us.
And then once people are living in smaller homes in higher density environments, a city government will be able to propose public transportation that is actually feasible.
People with jobs and families like these neighborhoods because they provide a walkable downtown main street with access to jobs. Strongtowns is becoming Jacobin like in its militancy against compromises that serve real people in the real world.
Its almost as if we built a building... then put all the stores inside of it. People could walk around without concern for the weather or cars. Hell we could surround it with parking even!
-Pre-2000's Mall designers
Screw the building lets just cram the stores up close to each other in an outdoor square with trees and surround it with, parking.
A bit more expensive but they could add a few underground floors for parking. In cold , snowy climates this might even be an advantage. This would waste less surface area to parking lots but would add some cost.
Except this particular development is in Florida, where you can't go under ground, and hurricane building codes make building up more complicated and expensive. As a Florida resident, I would love to see more parking garages, so parking takes up less ground surface area.
Going "underground" in Florida is typically prohibitively expensive, but it's possible if you're willing to fudge things a bit. Disney's Utilidoor System is a tunnel system that sits above the water table by itself being mostly at ground level, and then having the parks built a story above it. The Lagoon around Disney comes from the dirt dug up to create the effect.
I believe the concept for a underground transportation/roadway layer in the original Epcot city worked on the same idea but massively expanded, somewhat similar to a modernized/expanded Chicago Tunnel Company lines.
A photo of the Epcot "Transportation Layer" concept art can be seen here.
This sort of development is crying out for a big parking garage near the highway, and an automated train to shuttle people between the parking structure and the walkable/bicyclable city core.
That, along with commercial-under and residential-over vertical zoning, is the bridge we need between traditional suburban sprawl and walkable cities. You can't walk around if you can't get there, and you won't want to stay if you can't leave.