Urban Renewal

Reinventing our urban landscapes should be a top national priority. Scholars and visionaries have written volumes detailing the advantages of urban designs that can be healthier for humans and less damaging to the environment. Our challenge is not a shortage of great ideas rather a shortage of public understanding of how massive is the cost of the existing auto dominated urban landscape. Any effort to reinvent our urban areas must also include a public education campaign to explain the social, public health, environmental, economic and foreign policy costs of our current auto dominated transportation system and the urban design it requires. A public education campaign should also explain the many benefits of smart urban design based on mixed use pedestrian friendly areas, convenient public transportation while redesigning areas already impacted urban areas. We should be focusing development on downtown areas and in fill and redevelopment along transit lines, brownfields, excessively large parking lots, block planning and other creative opportunities.

Creating greater residential density is the beginning of an extended chain of benefits. In fill and redevelopment makes more use of exisitng infrasturcture like streets, fire protection, schools, parks and more. Increased residential density can stimulate local neighborhood scale busines that can make for more walkable neighborhoods, safer for kids, new employment opportunities, improved transit due to increased rider base. Block Planning is wonderful and little known process for redesigning entire residential blocks.

Downtown Eugene offers many possibilities to build up rather than building out. One survey found that there is enough underused land in cnetral Eugene, surface parking lots and one story buildings, to provide, with only modest upward building, enough stock to last for over a hundred years of office construction at current rates. St. Vincnet de Paul's Aruora project at 11th and Oak is the best example of downtown infill in Eugene. the Building will be five stories high with 57 affordable residential units with offices and commercial on the ground floor. The place will have geo thermal heating as well.

Brownfields and parking lots offer tremendous opportunities. Like many towns, Eugene has hundreds of acres of former industrial sites totally unused. Portland's Riverview and Pearl areas are redeveloped near downtown areas. Part of the area was a railyard that was a superfund site, now some of the hottest real estate in Portland with a trolley line already in service. A great example of transportation oriented development. Some of the residential projects include affordable housing and some do not offer car parking as a given, one pays extra for car space.

Over sized parking lots are the redevlopment sites of the not so distant future. I am hoping to have fotos of a location I am told about in Seattle that was an oversized parking lot that is now small shops and cafes. I have seen in several places in Eugene drive through espresso businesses in rather bleak concrete scapes. They are a kind of pioneer species, recolonizing a former wasteland after some sort of cataclsymic event- auto dominated urban landscapes. The drive through aspect is ironic but the up side is that someone sees an economic value to making new use of a wasted space. Watching the redevlopment succession over the years will be interesting. That succession could be accelerated with well thought out and transparent public incnetives while removing the public subsidies that are typical of new devlopment at the edges of so many urban areas.

Within this part of the website you will find some suburban history, statistics, charts and images that are intended to illustrate the downside of our auto dependence and a variety of approaches to repair some of the automobile damage by redesigning and redeveloping urban spaces.

Punch the Image of Your Choice