Shopping centre to downtown

"A new downtown is being built for Westminster, Colorado, a suburban city with no previous walkable downtown—on 105-acre former shopping mall site. Downtown Westminster will include 2,300 residential units with substantial affordable housing, and 1.7 million square feet of commercial uses—such as a grocery store, shops, restaurants, a movie theater, and office space. There will be 18 publicly accessible parks and civic spaces."

"The plan allows for the site to:

• Provide a pedestrian-oriented environment, with building-to-street relationships that foster an active, engaging pedestrian realm;
• Become the visual and physical center of the City of Westminster, with an urban form that reinforces the human scale and an urban environment; and a street-grid orientation that visually connects the site with prominent peaks of the Front Range;
• Provide an interconnected circulation network for vehicular, bicycle and pedestrian circulation including the re-routing of Westminster Boulevard through the site to become the ‘main street’ of the new Downtown;
• Connect the City’s green space system into the site with a multi-faceted public-space and park network;
• Ensure direct, convenient access to transit with facilitated access to the Downtown Westminster BRT station and a future Regional Transit District FasTracks rail station."

from:

https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2019/06/26/converting-shopping-mall-downtown

Chat Bench

"Have you seen our ‘Chat Bench’ in Burnham or Taunton? To help us tackle loneliness and isolation in the community we have introduced a ‘Chat Bench’ in Vivary Park in Taunton and also on Burnham Sea Front.  Simply stopping to say "hello" to someone at the ‘Chat Bench’ could make a huge difference to the vulnerable people in our communities and help to make life a little better for them."



from:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/07/17/this-towns-solution-loneliness-chat-bench