Do you have a corner stores in your neighborhood?

City Beautiful YT makes the case for adding retail in single-family neighborhoods, changing "the health, traffic, and environment" of an area.

Renewal - one building at a time

 "Less than a decade ago, Water Valley, Mississippi was a forgotten small town: there were 18 empty storefronts lining its four-block Main Street and plenty of decaying homes for sale. Located only twenty miles from the University of Mississippi and the pricey town of Oxford (also former home to William Faulkner), it was well-placed for revival.

In 2002, Mickey Howley and his wife Ole Miss professor Annette Trefzer bought an $80,000 century-old home and one of those empty storefronts for $60,000. They were early pioneers in the effort to rehabilitate the old 19th Century railroad town- turning their former drugstore into the Bozarts art gallery, but it took the formation of a community to create real change.

“In the last seven years,” explained Howley- now director of the Water Valley Main Street Association - in 2015 to a White House meeting on rural placemaking, “and remember Water Valley is 3,500 people with a four-block long downtown, this team has been instrumental in bringing 88 new jobs to downtown. Adding 26 new businesses. Fixing buildings and I don’t just mean façade jobs, but major renovations in 29 buildings. Adding 14 upper floor apartments. In that new business mix, we’ve added four new restaurants, three art galleries, one grocery store, one doctor’s office, and one brewery.”

Howley calls it “reimagining” structures: a foundry is now a brewery, a service station is now a restaurant, a drugstore is now an art gallery and a department store is now a grocery store/school."

New ways to build shopping malls

"Hong Kong’s urban mall developments have become the envy of other cities—including Shenzhen and Shanghai—that are looking for ways to build compact, transit-oriented, lucrative developments. The Asian hyper-dense urban mall is also making an appearance in American cities. Miami has Brickell City Centre, a five-story mall in the heart of the city. Covering three city blocks, it’s topped by three high-rises (and was built by a Hong Kong developer). New York City is building a seven-story mall attached to two skyscrapers in Hudson Yards, America’s largest private development. The Santiago Calatrava-designed Oculus—the centerpiece of the World Trade Center—has a mall with over 100 stores, with its white-ribbed atrium attracting an army of tourists taking pictures with selfie-sticks. Since the hub connects office buildings with train and subway stations, the stores are also “irrigated” by the 50,000 commuters who pass by each weekday. In short, the mall isn’t “dead”—it’s just changing."



from: https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/05/decline-of-shopping-malls-hong-kong-design/526764

Better intersections

"If you think the only purpose of intersections is to move cars past each other, you solve problems like a plumber: with bigger pipes. But wide, barren streets full of traffic don’t make a livable city. One solution would be nothing. No lights, no curbs, no sidewalks—just colored pavers. It works. Accidents decline, traffic slows, and property values rise. “You’ll never do as good a job as two ­people using body language and eye contact,” says Sam Goater, a senior associate at the Project for Public Spaces. But don’t rip out the infrastructure just yet. Urban designers have a good set of tricks to turn a city intersection into something more like a plaza and less like a freeway interchange. Cars pass, people walk, bikers bike, and everyone’s lives flow more smoothly."



from: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-to-design-better-cities/

Instagram pick 2

#broadway and #granville #vancouver #streetview #retail

A photo posted by Cherish (@cherish2028) on Aug 5, 2016 at 5:34pm PDT

Lately on Instagram

#vancouver #bikelane #downtown

A photo posted by Cherish (@cherish2028) on Jul 21, 2016 at 5:21pm PDT

#robsonstreet #Vancouver #retail

A photo posted by Cherish (@cherish2028) on Jul 29, 2016 at 6:38pm PDT

Converting big boxes

Integrating big box stores in an urban area is important because blank walls reduce walkability. "Large retailers have adapted to a densely populated, foot-oriented urban area."



"One key to walkability is to have as many destinations as possible within walking distance. In an urban area like Hoboken or Manhattan, a fine grained block can fit over 40 or so destinations. Single destinations - a large retailer, a museum, or a cathedral - that take up an entire city block reduce the number of destinations within that block to one."



"The Home Depot is unintrusive because it is surrounded by plenty of other retailers both big and small, so there are plenty of destinations within walking distance in this neighbourhood, and The Home Depot itself is comfortable to walk past. The reason this works is because these large retailers are the exception. If every store in this area had a such a large footprint, there would be significantly less destinations (less things to do, less reasons to be there, less within walking distance, thus less activity) in the area."



from: http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/7/12/big-box-stores-in-the-city