Pedestrian Malls

Minnesota's pedestrian and shopping malls are kind of their own microcosm - I grew up a couple of blocks from Lilac Lanes (torn down around 1980), the first 'strip mall' in America, a couple of miles from the first atrium mall, Southdale (still there, still considered posh) and in the late '50s my grandfather and his brothers owned the land where the MOA is today (weird). Owing to the severity of Minnesota winters, it's been VERY hard to entice people outside. At street-level Nicollet Mall has been patchy ever since the 1970s (it's run on similar principles to London's Oxford Street - cars can drive it in the wee hours), because the real action is at the Skyway level in downtown Minneapolis, but recently it looked a lot more polished than I'd seen it in ages. The massive improvements in public transport in the Twin Cities might also help people onto the streets in a way they haven't cared to since the '60s (my mom remembers the streetcars and trams).

the danger with some of these is how windswept and desolate they become if there aren't enough people, which then of course makes them uninviting, and the circle grinds on

cumberland, marylands pedestrianized mall seems reasonably succesful, street cafes etc keeping people there, but even then there didn't seem quite...enough, it looked as though it might fall into emptyness at any point

the thing that interests me, is that i had assumed that pedestrianized malls were something that was being turned away from, somewhat discredited, with cities removing them. so i was quite surprised to see that there might be oen on the cards for alexandria

buchanan st in glasgow (scotland) has been a huge success, but i think that part was never really abandoned in the first place. i could be wrong about this.

This is quite right. Where there's already a critical mass of people and the streets are being used, etc., a "pedestrian mall" may be appropriate, although I think they should be used sparingly. It's helpful to think of them as park space - if you already have a lot of open air in that end of town, it may just turn into a dead zone.

The photo Tracey posted of ??? looks like a good example - dense, successful urbanism already yes? And at least to my eye it seems that the pedestrian mall replaces something not much wider than a one-way street or alley, which is appropriate. Two lanes or wider, plus generous sidewalk width, and you start having a problem getting a sense of enclosure (depending on building height, of course). I'd say the malls are a good idea ONLY where downtown is already thriving AND you're inclined for some other reason to delete an alley ANYWAY, like nobody drives on it or it leads to a hazardous intersection or something.

In a sort of related topic, the University of Georgia here in Athens has been undergoing a lot of pedestrian mall construction, although "mall" here means more the traditional "long, straight park" rather than having any shopping/urban connotations. (Think the National Mall in DC.) This is part of a larger master plan to eliminate superfluous asphalt on campus - they're also phasing out most surface-level parking, to be filled in with buildings and parks. The one that they've built so far is sort of pretty, but over-wide and too sunny since the trees haven't grown to maturity yet. Also, it just doesn't have enough buildings fronting on it to really deliver the "campus quad" vibe they're going for (the explicit reference point was UGA's 18th-19th century north campus). But given that it's campus and you're never going to really have a "normal" pedestrian space, it's not a bad piece of work.

Oxnard converted a three-block section of a downtown street to ped-only in the early 70s, but it ended up a ghost town because there was not much else in the area to draw people. The large enclosed mall on the edge of town which openned at about the same time became the place to go.

A car travel lane is, what, 10' at minimum? If you scraped out most of what's plain old sidewalk here, then you could put two lanes in there, but I'm assuming that the sidewalks were there and they just converted the road surface to make the mall....

we're lucky; in the late 60s, vancouver avoided the mega-freeway development that has hampered almost every comparable NA city. we're rightully quite proud of that decision!

eugene, oregon has a pedestrian mall that has failed, i think. it's dull.