As profiled in the previous entry, the Temple Bar quarter is a wildly popular and economically successful multi-block pedestrian-only district in Dublin, Ireland.  The question is, how did a city begin to establish such a place to reap such fiscal and cultural benefits?

It starts with affordability and pedestrian-oriented urban fabric.  As late as the 1980s, the state began to buy up and demolish buildings in the area in favor of a major bus terminus. While the plans were delayed due to

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In our tribute to Jane Jacobs this week, the following is classic Jane.  Here’s a favorite study conclusion she included in her last book, Dark Age Ahead (pg. 75.)  The question is what happens when you close roads?  The study findings from over sixty cases worldwide:

“Planner’s models assume that closing a road causes the traffic using it to move elsewhere… The study team… found that computer models used by urban transportation planners yield incorrect answers… When a road is closed, an

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How can a city best create a strong identity for itself, provide that place one can count on for weekend entertainment, set the stage for public gatherings and pass the postcard test?

Project for Public Spaces (PPS) features an ideal solution: Beautiful central public squares, or for more progressive cities, a piazza.  If you’re looking to understand, design, or better yet, develop a square, there’s no better resource than their December newsletter on squares, which includes design

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Why is it that the most pedestrian-oriented streets in the U.S. are found in resorts? The reason being that people in second-home communities have no need to commute to work, so the car is de-emphazed. Plus, they’re looking to pay for a higher quality of life. Well, that sounds a lot like the lifestyle of minipreneurs, so expect to see these pedestrian-first principles in more everyday, urban neighborhoods.

Here’s a preview - just use your imagination and apply the following to urban settings

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As they say, “If San Francisco had a French quarter, Belden Place would be it.“  It’s an intimate, human-scaled alley lined with cafes, tucked away between Bush and Pine, Kearny and Montgomery streets in the Financial District.  The entire pedestrian-only street (paseo) is one elongated dining room, and a larger version of the ones in Sienna, Spain.

While they do celebrate Bastille Day in the alley, the day-day culinary experience is anything but exclusively French.  On any given day, one can

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The answer?  When you focus on designing great alleys.

Narrow, pedestrian-only streets (paseos) are becoming quite popular.  They help focus attention on people, the most interesting subject matter to the human eye.  This ‘people stage’ is made more dramatic with a terminating building(s).

Building facades that feature human-scaled, human-designed detailing are that much more appealing to - humans, especially if you intend to look at it longer than a minute or two.  The same goes for the

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For a vibrant, active, economically successful pedestrian street (paseo), it must have the following:

1. Unique, independent restaurants, cafes, coffeehouses, bars (preferably half the number of venues) so the area is worth visiting in the first place.
2. Outdoor seating for all of the above, providing a strong sense of street life.
3. Significant amounts of housing surrounding the district, ideally also above the first or second floors of the pedestrian street.
4. Lots of trees to provide

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Hundreds of pedestrian malls built in downtowns across the country in the 1970s and 80s failed.  However, downtowns overall failed during that time, as regional malls became all the rage in a time before people experienced traffic congestion.

Back to the future:  However, regional malls are failing in the 2000s.  Cities and downtowns are regaining population for the first time in 30 to 50 years in the 2000s.  People are migrating back to city centers because sprawl traffic is relentlessly

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Italians in the second millennium were all about socializing.  Not only does the city have a grand piazza upon where city-wide events, announcements and demonstrations took place, but every neighborhood had one, two or three of them for their own purposes as well.  In fact, the neighborhood piazza has its own name - the campo, or campi for plural.

There were probably fifty to sixty campi in Venice alone - the piazza capital of Italy.  Of course it has its grand piazza, the famous Piazza San

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No.  There will be one day, but right now there really isn’t anything close.  A true piazza is an urban square enclosed on all four sides by buildings to make a grand outdoor ballroom of sorts.

The closest new development resembling a piazza is Pentagon Row by Post Properties, image below.  It’s much better than what’s been developed over the last 50 years.  However, they’re calling it a piazza, and here’s why it’s not:

1. It’s only enclosed on three sides, not four.
2. Just as a grand

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