Tag Archives: New Urbanism

New Urbanist plans for Waco, Texas

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New Urbanist ideas about mixed-use neighborhoods are often appealing to municipalities: they suggest one can design and produce vibrant, diverse, and walkable communities. Waco, Texas, which according to a member of the Greater Waco Chamber is perceived by many as “Texas’ largest bathroom break,” has hired a firm to develop such plans.

The goals of the city sound ambitious:

Waco’s plan is bold for a city that’s been without a vibrant downtown for about half a century, much of it destroyed by a 1953 tornado. The city wants half the growth projected by 2050 to locate downtown and have 100,000 people living there…

The consensus: develop the banks of the Brazos River, attract the young and empty-nesters from Baylor University’s growing student body and faculty, and highlight tourist attractions (Waco Mammoth Site archeological dig, Dr Pepper Museum and replica of the drugstore where the soft drink was invented, an 1870 suspension bridge over the Brazos, Texas Ranger Hall of Fame & Museum).

If they build it, will people come to downtown Waco?

h/t The Infrastructurist

A new traffic control device: painting a picture of a child on the road

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The battle to control speeders has a new weapon:

On Tuesday, the town [West Vancouver, Canada] unveiled a new way to persuade motorists to ease off the gas pedal in the vicinity of the École Pauline Johnson Elementary School: a 2-D image of a child playing, creating the illusion that the approaching driver will soon blast into a child.

According to Discover magazine, the pavement painting appears to rise up as the driver gets closer to it, reaching full 3-D realism at around 100 feet: “Its designers created the image to give drivers who travel at the street’s recommended 18 miles per hour (30 km per hour) enough time to stop before hitting Pavement Patty — acknowledging the spectacle before they continue to safely roll over her.”

I would be very curious to know how effective this is. While the article suggests that drivers may then be more prone to hit real children, drivers might also just eventually tune out the painting, much as they do with traffic signs.

Another school of thought would suggest measures like this painting are missing the point. What really should change are the structure and design of streets. If you want people to drive more safely, make roads narrower and include parked cars on both sides. Or, one could go as far as European traffic engineer Hans Monderman who advocated removing all traffic signs – since drivers ignore them much of the time anyway, having no signs might force them to pay more attention.

Retrofitting suburban malls

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Amid tough financial times and many retail vacancies, the story of a project aiming to turn Randhurst Mall in Mount Prospect, IL into “Main Street.”

A quick blurb from Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin:

“Today, in an act of radical design surgery, Randhurst is being remade into an open-air, mixed-use development that will have many features of a traditional downtown, including shops, movie theaters, offices and a hotel. The dome and core of the mall have been demolished, and next year a developer plans to open an old-fashioned Main Street lined with Prairie Style-influenced buildings in their place (above). There will even be angled parking spaces that promise to let you drive right up to a shop, though chances are you’ll really be parking in a vast field of asphalt much farther away.

The revamped mall already has been given a quaint variation of its original name: Randhurst Village.

The catchphrase for this promising — and provocative — type of remake is “retrofitting suburbia.” From Cape Cod to California, its advocates aim not simply to remake dead malls, strip centers and big boxes, but to alter suburbia itself, making it more dense, more walkable, and sustainable — in short, more urban.”

These sorts of plans are not uncommon in recent decades. A number of architects and planners, often following New Urbanist principles, have tried to create traditional atmospheres among suburban amenities. This story mentions original plans to include roughly 200 residential units but this component was scratched. From a more cynical perspective, this sort of planning is just dressing up suburban big box stores – think of the name change from “Randhurst Mall” to “Randhurst Village.” From a more positive side, changing the design might make malls more palatable to more shoppers and most importantly, more profitable.

(Some interesting pictures in this story highlight the history of this particular mall and the proposed changes.)