Experts say the real estate market in our cities is responding to the dramatic changes caused by COVID with a “flight to quality.” This headline suggests optimism that a safe harbor still exists out there as does the fear that we all need to act fast and run (for our lives) before things get bad. It reflects a winnowing to the essential characteristics that can ensure the best overall return and insulate us from the changing winds in the economy.
Cities around the world are struggling to adapt and respond to these rapidly changing preferences. We are changing the way we inhabit our urban centers. The reemergence of walkable pedestrian districts shows that when we design a quality public realm that includes a wider array of uses than in recent decades, we create quality urban destinations that are timeless and resilient.
Adaptive reuse of districts
One thing the pandemic has shown is that the time and space we need inside office buildings are shrinking. We all want quality, choice, and convenience in the places and spaces we use in our daily lives. We are embracing the freedom that technology has enabled and, as a result, we want more variety from the traditional work environments.
City centers need to move away from single-use districts and encourage more variety. The design of urban spaces must also evolve, and the traditional boundaries between public and private spaces need to blur. We need spaces and places we can easily access that provide choices for our daily itinerary.
Residential conversions of empty office buildings command an important part of the reimagination, as do other new uses, such as academic, cultural, community, and entertainment venues. These expanded programs should be part of the vision so urban districts can be alive at all times of the day. Simply filling our office buildings with amenities and resources under one roof is not enough. So they can help activate the street, these added uses should not cannibalize the opportunities to locate such amenities in the ground floors of buildings.
Designers and planners must have the creativity and forethought to recognize the cultural and lifestyle changes happening in our cities and to focus on bold design responses. Making our cities more walkable and adding new uses and functions in traditional business districts creates a new dimension and can create design progress in our cities. The purposeful design of a walkable public realm creates the ties between people that make things all work together.
Simultaneity; space/time
Digital technology has blurred the lines between our physical spaces. Everything can happen regardless of space and time. We have grown accustomed to having instant access to everything, from anywhere at any time. Our cities need to evolve in the same way to respond to our dramatically changing world. We need to build our city centers and districts so that they provide “simultaneity” (making it all work together at the same time) with spaces that flow between each other. Creating mixed-use, compact, walkable, adaptable, and interrelated spaces is crucial.
In Minneapolis, Target Field Station by Perkins Eastman for Hennepin County and Metro Transit and the adjacent North Loop Green by developer Hines constitute just this kind of place. Fifteen years ago, Minneapolis broke ground on a new home for the Minnesota Twins in hopes of fostering growth of the downtown area. The location they chose was the old warehouse district north of downtown, which was empty and crisscrossed by elevated freeway ramps.
The area was an infrastructural junk drawer with surface parking lots, a mix of old warehouses, and the HERC, a municipal facility that burns trash to generate steam for downtown. It was not a walkable place. Distances were long, and a public realm did not exist—not exactly a “flight to quality” that most people would consider for optimizing real estate value.
With a series of strategic design interventions that brought together a creative mix of new public spaces, including a signature transit station, a baseball stadium, historic warehouses, and an urban trail system, slowly but surely the pieces started to come together. Old warehouses were converted to offices and residential lofts. New multifamily buildings and new offices were added to fill in the many empty blocks.
Target Field Station, a new development, features a town square and amphitheater and the Fillmore performance venue along with the North Loop Green, all of which are packed in, close to the new stadium, with light rail transit in the middle. The newly created pedestrian-friendly area has become the bright spot in the post-pandemic Minneapolis downtown, and it has been transformed into a compact, walkable district with offerings to attract a wide swath of the marketplace.
Schools and academic institutions can also be introduced to provide educational access to a walkable district and create activity at various times of the day. Perkins Eastman’s new Wheeler building in downtown Brooklyn is a collage of structures both new and old, including a Macy’s flagship store at its base. Tishman Speyer conceived of this place as a signature office building intervention that would serve tech, advertising, media, and information (TAMI) tenants in the heart of downtown Brooklyn.
With the current dearth of office users, Saint Francis College has now taken space within the building and is occupying floors that were designed to be leased to office tenants. This pivot by Tishman Speyer, with an innovative reprogramming of office space into academic space, brings new life, diversity, and vitality to downtown Brooklyn that will have great staying power.
It is not enough to provide class A office spaces with amenities in a building or to repurpose our building stock for residential uses. A more imaginative design vision that creates an entirely new type of urban center is required.
A lot of new uses and programs can be introduced, including residential conversions, to make the new city a dynamic place that mirrors the new economy and new culture of urban life. Residential apartments, along with all the services and spaces that support urban living, need to be integrated and nearby. Most importantly, the district must be designed for places that are accessible and encourage pedestrians more than vehicles—not to eliminate vehicles but to make everything accessible within a short walk.
The convergence of the pandemic with new technology and environmental imperatives has created a once-in-a-generation opportunity for building the new city. We need to repurpose and redesign our buildings and streets in a way that makes them more desirable, more habitable, and unique in the marketplace.
If you connect the spaces and uses in one way, you get a certain result. The patterns affect our social groups. Our social network connections matter. These ties between people make our relationships unique. The enlightened design of buildings and spaces together is what has impact. The key ingredient is a walkable district with all the uses and amenities that will support the public realm to provide a new destination in the city center.
Hoffman Associates and Perkins Eastman blurred the boundaries at the new District Wharf in Washington, D.C., creating a sense of space and tempo so that the area maintains its vitality at all times of the day and the week.
The firm’s interventions do not make it always busy, but when things do quiet down, it doesn’t feel isolated or empty. The spatial change is there, and the district feels inhabited, with everything near at hand. Every space that makes up the public realm is carefully considered and linked to an entire network of spaces that gives the district its unique character. Walkable and mobility-rich spaces are the essential ingredients.
The design approach for these new pedestrian districts is multi-faceted. First, the district design must take its cues from the local context, so the development feels organic and reflects qualities unique to the area. Designers also must think about what a district will look like throughout the day, week, month, and year.
Successfully designed spaces ebb and flow with the changes in the seasons. Residential and workplace environments need to be integrated so the ease of access is maximized and there is safety, security, and activity at all hours. The district becomes desirable if everything is within a short walk. The uses need to be local and reflect the unique culture and quality of the place.
These uses must be choreographed with a compelling and adaptable merchandising plan, the “urban layer,” which is the glue that makes it dynamic and ever changing. The emphasis must be on the first few floors of buildings, which creates the pedestrian scale that makes people feel welcome and want to be in a place. This arrangement has the highest occupancy and visibility. Property owners, public agencies, and businesses need to collaborate and incentivize active uses and programs, and how they operate, to ensure that the streets and public spaces are active and full of life.
Infrastructure is about saving time
When you think about infrastructure, large construction projects come to mind. Infrastructure is also something everyone needs but no one can afford to own and build themselves. All infrastructure usually involves time savings, whether it is a bridge, a road, or a transit facility.
Most infrastructure is designed in the interest of saving time. Time is the most precious commodity we have. We need to make the most of the time we have to succeed in business, as well as to create community in our daily lives. Making everything integrated and accessible with a short walk may seem obvious and small. The key to large-scale design is to create smaller, more human-scaled environments that make people feel comfortable and engaged with the city.
In our struggling downtown areas, we need to reorganize, reinvent, and recast the streets and buildings so they achieve a different result. The design and relationship of spaces, uses, and buildings affect how we inhabit our cities. The creative integration of buildings and the public realm make the greatest impact.
Graphite and diamonds consist of identical carbon atoms, but the atoms have different arrangements, which produce drastically different results. The same is true with our cities. Public officials and building owners need to change the arrangement and how we develop our buildings, streets, and public realms so we achieve a result that responds to the new way we inhabit our cities.
We can create a design vision that gives rise to an entirely new type of urban center—one that is resilient and not dependent on the way we used city centers in the past. The dramatic shift caused by COVID can be met with an equally bold, new way of reimagining our urban centers and the buildings and places that will allow for more flexibility, for many experiences, and for many ways to grow our economies. Our city centers must be walkable and easily accessed, with a vibrant pedestrian public realm that stitches together the various services and amenities that make these locations desirable. The physical design needs to be balanced with key strategic design ideas and programs that make it work as a cohesive and resilient place.
