Memphis and Urban Magnets

URBAN MAGNETS: ALAN BONIFACE LECTURE from Crosstown Arts on Vimeo.

Alan Boniface of Vancouver's Dialog design group spoke last month to Memphis about the pieces that make a place into an urban magnet.  To be successful, an urban magnet requires

1. retail
2. production
3. education
4. programming
5. form.

After his talk, a local panel representing various Memphis-area districts (Soulsville, Overton Square, South Main, Crosstown, and Hernando) discussed what parts of the urban magnet recipe they have and what they are missing.  Of the groups, the South Main district had them all.

Besides the urban magnet template, the part of the talk that really grabbed me was the statistic that Memphis has 1/30th the density of the densest part of Vancouver (and 1/7th of the overall density of Vancouver).  Which leads to a problem I see over and over again with Memphis' adapting to many urbanist ideas -- that the ideas come from places of categorically greater density, and assume categorically greater density.  So, although South Main has definite and growing magnetic quality, it isn't enough to fill or sparsely populate streets even now on a workaday basis. Obviously it wouldn't happen overnight even in a denser place, but Memphis has to be particularly aware of density and population as its major urbanist challenge.  Which I don't believe we are.  And the danger is that we'll be transporting the same marginally expanding group of people from Soulsville to Overton Square to South Main to Crosstown to all the other districts, with economic sustainability for few.

Still, figuring out how to fill Memphis with people is a fun problem to solve -- once Memphis admits that it is the problem.

Public Life in Los Angeles

I have been in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles sobre El Rio Porciuncula for the past week. Although the pueblo had internet access, I used it rarely.

Instead I walked and drove around alot and read (not finished) Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She had something to say of Los Angeles in 1961:

Lowly, random and unpurposeful as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

Los Angeles is an extreme example of a metropolis with little public life, depending mainly instead on contacts of a more private social nature.

True perhaps in 1961, but a lot less true in 2008. From what I saw, the street life of Los Angeles has become very rich. (An exception: the urban renewed parts of downtown Los Angeles. They are clean, modern and neat, but have few pedestrians.)

I think Los Angeles is moving from suburban sprawl towards major clusters of density based on mass-transit and neighborhood attraction. And with it is coming the strong public street life that Jacobs championed.

Memphis has much to learn from Los Angeles' transformation.