With the news today that Forest Fair Mall/Cincinnati Mills Mall/Cincinnati Mall or more recently Forest Fair Village is back on the selling block, we have to wonder if the Cincinnati region will begin to accept the idea of suburban mall retrofit. In metro Washington DC several malls have already been converted into walkable town centers with significantly beneficial results. Read more at the Atlantic Cities:
Bethesda, a once-sleepy if upscale inner suburb in nearby Maryland, was almost totally automobile-dependent in 1994 when the mixed-use, multi-block development was conceived for a decaying commercial/industrial strip; now, in no small part because of developments like Bethesda Row, Bethesda feels both urban and urbane, yet still human-scaled. It’s a great place to be.
Auto-dependent development surely helped create economic fragility argues guest blogger Sam Bunting at Strong Towns. This was seen in Detroit where suburban growth helped destroy the central city. While Cincinnati is in a far different position than the Motor City, this is a teachable moment to cities and suburbs who continue to rely on automobile oriented development as a measure of success. Read more at Strong Towns:
One measure of Princeton’s fragility is our limited ability to react to changing economic demands. We know that there is growing demand for compact, walkable homes. But we struggle to add those homes, because people have got used to the idea that Princeton is a low-density ‘burb, instead of the compact, walkable town that it was throughout most of its history. Worse, residents in more suburban neighborhoods are so dependent on cars that they tend to oppose walkable development based on the slightest possibility that it will reduce the availability of parking in the downtown.
In January 2013, Cincinnati City Council voted to ban advertising on public right-of-way. The idea was to rid the city of all those bus bench billboards and other seemingly unsightly ads, but what the ordinance also did was force the removal of advertisements at all bus shelters throughout the city.
In a classic case of unintended consequences, City Council actually may have made the public right-of-way less attractive by making bus shelters to appear as abandoned and leaving scared sidewalk spaces where bus benches once sat.
Metro Art Shelters Artist
Designs for a Metro Art Shelter
Metro Art Shelters Students/Artists
Metro Art Shelters Students/Artists
Metro Art Shelters Students/Artists
The situation surrounding the bus shelters was so bad, in fact, that Downtown Cincinnati Inc. (DCI) found, through their annual safety perception survey, that individuals had a negative perception of safety around bus shelters.
Later this month, Cincinnatians will see the former ad space at 24 of these bus shelters, throughout Downtown and Over-the-Rhine, re-purposed as a canvass for local artists. The specific end product will include varied artistic styles all portraying some work of literature.
“Through this collaborative partnership between ArtWorks, SORTA, the Main Library, and DCI, these twelve bus shelters will receive a playful face-lift and add to the public art vibrancy in our central business district,” explained Cait Barnett, Marketing Manager at ArtWorks.
Barnett went on to say that SORTA will clean and paint the shelters and that the lead artist for ArtWorks, Ryan Little, and youth Apprentices between the ages of 14 and 21 will design graphic prints for the empty spaces.
The literary designs, ArtWorks officials say, were determined by the community through a public survey conducted by the Public Library of Cincinnati through June 30. Those literary inspirations came from the following pieces of work:
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Six Dinner Sid by Inga Moore
Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown
The Odyssey by Homer
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Man in the Iron Mask by Paul Mantell
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister
The Tortoise and the Hare by Aesop
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Metro Art Shelters project has also been championed by the Downtown Residents Council (DRC), who is hoping to raise $5,000 for public art throughout Downtown. Those interested in giving to the project can do so through the DRC’s power2give webpage.
According to ArtWorks, all donations will be matched dollar-for-dollar by The Johnson Foundation.
Northern Kentucky leaders certainly cannot be faulted for their lack of big plans, but their implementation has been suspect over the past decade. A multi-billion plan in Newport, for example, called Ovation sits as an overgrown lot on the city’s riverfront. Meanwhile, in Dayton, KY, officials there have been working for years to try to make Manhattan Harbour a reality. The 73-acre riverfront development would include high-rises, condos, shopping, a marina and more, but will it ever happen? More from the Cincinnati Enquirer:
DCI’s project with the city has been scaled down from a $1 billion investment to a $300 million to $500 million development. The newest version will have 45 upscale single-family building lots under the name the Commons, a combination multifamily, high-rise condominiums and single-family homes with a mix of commercial development in an area called the Lookout, and luxury multifamily apartments in an area called the Vistas.
Manhattan Harbour’s mixed-use development has been in the works since 2005, when DCI signed the development agreement with the city, which owns the land. In 2008 and 2009, nearly a half-billion dollars in state and local tax incentives were approved for the project. A $10 million sewer line was laid in 2010 to prepare for development. A 20-year tax increment financing district was created for the site.
Engineers are well-known for coming up with solutions to rid our communities of dreaded traffic congestion. To most people this seems logical, but do we always want to rid ourselves of traffic congestion? In urban shopping districts you want lots of pedestrians, cyclists, transit and cars…it means that there are lots of potential customers. More from Strong Towns:
If people enjoy crowded places, it seems a bit strange that federal and state governments continue to wage a single-minded and expensive war against traffic congestion. Despite many hundreds of billions dollars spent on increasing the capacity of our roads, they’ve not yet won, thank God. After all, when the congestion warriors have won, the results aren’t often pretty. Detroit, for example, has lots of expressways and widened streets and suffers from very little congestion. It also has lost 2/3 of its population and is in the hands of a bankruptcy trustee.
After all, congestion is a bit like cholesterol – if you don’t have any, you die. Like cholesterol, traffic exists as a “good kind” and a “bad kind.” Congestion measurements should be divided between through-traffic and traffic that includes local origins or destinations, the latter being the “good kind.”
