UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Date:______
I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:
It is entitled:
This work and its defense approved by:
Chair: ______
Stepping in Suburbia:
Designing Pedestrian Spaces in Suburban Settings
A thesis submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE in the School of Architecture and Interior Design of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning in 2008 by
Jay Thacker, B. S. Architecture, University of Cincinnati, 2004.
Committee Chair: Jay Chatterjee
1
ABSTRACT
Along with the rest of suburbia, the suburban commercial strip has been criticized for decades for its antagonism towards the pedestrian – towards walking as a way of coming or going somewhere. The buildings along suburban commercial strips are separated by terrain that is unfriendly to the pedestrian. Parking lots, driveways, wide avenues, perimeter fences, and even landscaping prevent pedestrian connectivity and comfort and therefore discourage individuals from walking rather than driving, even for short distances. What can be done to adapt these environments not just to accommodate pedestrian circulation, but to create a desirable pedestrian experience while still efficiently accommodating automobiles? What is being asked for is ‘good’ pedestrian spaces for suburban commercial districts. The solution to this problem involves pedestrian oriented space, its character, and its features and the composition of those features.
Pedestrian spaces have been studied by many authors and architects, from Louis Mumford to Mark Childs. Increasing credence is being given to community design that seeks to restore the notion of walking as a realistic method of going places in the suburbs. What is proposed here is a thesis that draws from those studies a set of principles that will function as a guide for interventions in the suburban commercial strip. When implemented, these principles will result in good pedestrian spaces—spaces that are comfortable, beautiful, and enjoyable. The principles and the research from which they were drawn will be presented in this thesis document. They will then be put to use in a design project focused on the suburban commercial strip toward the end that its visitors will walk a little more, drive a little less, linger and even loiter, and experience a sense of place and of community. This study will be valuable to anyone who is interested in urban design in the suburbs or is concerned with and looking for solutions to the ravages of the automobile on the suburban commercial strip that have rendered it unsightly, uncomfortable, and plain unaccommodating to the pedestrian.
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations Introduction
PART i: SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT AND PEDESTRIAN ORIENTED DESIGN 1. Automobile Domination and the Importance of Pedestrian Environments … 7 A History of Suburban Development Early Suburbs Transit Suburbs Automobile and Sprawl Suburbs 2. Calls for change ………………………………………………………………………………. 11 3. Ingredients of a Pedestrian Environment …………………………………………… 14 Activity Automobile integration Context Experience Scale 4. Shopping Malls: Prime Locations for Intervention …………………………….... 28 5. Precedents: Examples of Pedestrian Oriented Environments ……………….. 31 6. Background Summary ……………………………………………………………………… 43
Part ii: Re-integrating the Pedestrian in Suburban Cincinnati 7. Colerain Township History ……………………………………………………………….. 45 Colerain Township History Northgate Mall History Demographics 8. Redevelopment of Northgate Mall …………………………………………………….. 50
Bibliography ……….…………………………….…………………………….……………………………….. 55
3
LIST OF FIGURES
01 Bond Hill plat map………………………………………………………… 10 Online image. Simpletone.com. July 23, 2006.
5 “Piccadilly_1106160612”. Online image. Date unknown. Picturesoflegend.com. May 2, 2006.
6 INTRODUCTION
The suburbs have evolved from what, for thousands of years, were usually small, tightly knit developments that were discernibly distinct from and external to, yet still highly dependent on a supporting city to vast, sprawling regions of low density development. Like everything else touched by technology (and, it must be said, no small amount of government policy), they have undergone a transformation. For the suburbs, the transforming technology has been the automobile, and the transformation involves a spreading out of buildings and of land uses and the utterly pervasive installation of automobile infrastructure. Today, conventional suburbs are completely dependent on the automobile and completely designed for the automobile and this almost always results in an environment that, to be candid, is ugly and in which walking for any real purpose, that is, walking for anything other than recreation, is practically impossible.
While a variety of circumstances and forces have permitted and encouraged the suburban landscape to be almost completely oriented to the automobile, it does not automatically follow that such a state is in our best interests. Initially, I chose this thesis because I live in the suburbs and I frankly find it to be a drag to have to drive everywhere, and most of the places I end up going in the suburbs look simply awful – even though walking makes sense for so many things, who would want to walk through such a landscape? So light research revealed even more reasons to pursue this topic. Objectors have been voicing their concerns about automobile oriented development for several decades – Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s, numerous books in the 1970s, and New Urbanists from the 1980s to the present. Their concerns relate to our physical, psychological, and social health as well as the health of our cities and the larger global environment. Simply put, the pedestrianization of the commercial strip will make it a more attractive and healthier environment for people to gather in, and in the long run, if pedestrianization of suburban environments is executed on a national scale, it will result in a healthier planet. On an American Institute of Architects webpage, the notion of walkability is referenced in four of the institute’s ten principles for designing a livable community1 - this is an indicator that the subject of this thesis is of great importance not only to planners and the general public, but to architects too. 7 This study is guided by two questions: what is ‘good’ pedestrian space? And how should it be integrated into the suburban strip? Good pedestrian space is pleasant to walk in and it should actually inspire one to walk in it rather than get back in the car. This means that it should be beautiful, comfortable, visible, and convenient—even more convenient than using the car, to the greatest extent possible—and it may mean more than that. One of the research tasks is to determine what the important features and characteristics of pedestrian spaces are. What things are they made of? How should they be configured? What sorts of experiences should be incorporated? Another task is determining a response to and integration with the suburban commercial strip locale. How can the pedestrian and the automobile both be accommodated and share in the attention of developers? How will the pedestrian space negotiate the different conditions of parking lot, road, and building? How can we knit the commercial strip together on a pedestrian scale and level of detail. These are the central design questions and problems that this thesis will address.
Each section of this document is directed toward a specific purpose. The first section of the document is the problem statement that describes environmental design questions and problems. The second section provides background on the needs and desires that justify this thesis. Following that is a section devoted to practices and theories—the nitty-gritty—of pedestrian- oriented design as found in both literature and in physical examples. The fifth section encapsulates the fundamental principles drawn from the research, and a conclusion is submitted in the sixth and final section of the thesis document.
1 "AIA Communities by Design's 10 Principles for Livable Communities." American Institute of Architects. 21 Apr. 2008
8 AUTOMOBILE DOMINANCE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF PEDESTRIAN ENVIRONMENTS
The thesis question, what constitutes the design of good pedestrian space, constitutes an urban design problem. Urban design deals with outdoor space that is meant to be densely and intensely occupied and used by human beings, an architectural space that has form and order, material connections and transitions, a space that is designed and built. Such projects require scrutiny of architecture, planning, landscape, and role of the automobile in the locale of the project’s site.
Local and especially adjacent architecture is something with which an urban design project must relate. Urban design operates in the space between buildings and therefore must respond to some of the exterior features of these builidings. Aesthetics of the exteriors may not be the primary concern, but the attitude of each building towards the outside world and the positional relation of each to the other are vital. Is the building inviting or foreboding? Is it featureless or ornamented? Does it disregard its surroundings, or does it engage them? Does the building obscure or frame a view? These and similar questions characterize the important aspects of any given building in an urban design project.
The thesis problem must also take into account a few aspects of local development that are usually in the purview of the planning profession. Even though it is the planner that dictates what use group a region of land is assigned to, what building types are allowable, what course a road will follow, and what forms of transportation are made available, these considerations are also of interest to the urban designer. An urban design solution will often call for changes to these items, thereby affecting an area’s development plan.
An urban space is commonly a space without walls or ceiling, and so the landscape—the environment outside of the project’s own boundary—must be considered during the design process. What will people see as they approach, arrive at, and pass through the site? Are there landmarks or scenic views? Does the developed environment require any special consideration, such as maximizing the views to retail signage and entrances? Are there any particularly 9 important aspects of the landscape itself—topography, geology, history—that deserve expression? Such a line of questioning will guide this projects exploration of landscape.
Some of the most important considerations this thesis has to grapple with will be those that allow pedestrian space to be successful in an otherwise automobile dominated world. The experience of walking will have to compete with the experience of driving. Convenience emerges right away as an important factor. How can it become just as or even more pleasant and convenient to walk without degrading the driving experience?
A HISTORY OF SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT
What created and contributed to the problem of the exclusion of the pedestrian from the suburban environment and therefore from the suburban commercial strip? Why is the problem Figure 1: Early suburban development took on an important one to consider? Answers to these questions begin with a look at how one of the the same efficient block pattern that was most powerful forces for change in the built environment has been the advance of transportation common to cities technologies. The effect of single use zoning is examined, and then the role of changing attitudes is examined as a contributing factor. To establish why the problem is worthy of attention, focus will turn to literature that problematizes the lack of pedestrian environments in the suburbs, and to literature that discusses emerging models of suburban development in which the importance of pedestrian environments has been revived.
The automobile, already assailed for various other reasons external to our concerns here, receives the bulk of the blame for the anti-pedestrian conditions of the suburbs. Before the advent of the automobile, suburban environments were designed around pedestrian mobility and the use of horses. Many might think that suburbs could not exist without automobiles, but Henry C. Binford remarks that it is an oversight of twentieth century thought to “think of suburbs as inextricably linked to mass transportation.”2 David Popenoe sees variations of suburban development in ancient Mesopotamian cities and then in medieval cities as well. He states that Figure 2: Automobile suburbs have a much the origins of the suburb “go back almost as far as the city itself.”3 Jackson also refers to more dispersed and meandering pattern that uses more land and creates distances to long semblances of suburban development dating as far back as 2,300 B.C., but he notes that the to walk term suburb didn’t appear until the writings of John Wycliffe in 1380.4 These earlier instances
10 differ from the concept of the modern suburb in that the latter is created by “a process involving the systematic growth of fringe areas at a pace more rapid than that of the core cities, [with] a lifestyle involving a daily commute to jobs in the center … where it can be dated from about 1815.”5 Pre-modern and early modern suburbs did not require the automobile in order to exist.
Texts generally agree on three eras of suburbanization since 1815: transit suburbs, infill suburbanization, and sprawl. Omnibus suburbs (from about 1829), railroad suburbs (from the 1850s), and streetcar suburbs (from about 1888) demarcate the development of transit suburbs throughout the nineteenth century.6 Neighborhood development would only occur within approximately a half mile of the transit line because one usually traveled by foot throughout the neighborhood. Buildings in these neighborhoods tended to hug the street and sidewalk rather than shrinking back from them, streets were commonly lined with trees, and the front porch was generally one of the dominant features of the house. Shops and stores were also interspersed throughout the neighborhood.
Knox and McCarthy provide a fast paced general account of suburbanization since the 1920s—the beginning of the era of infill suburbanization. During that decade, automobile ownership quickly rose as production dramatically increased and prices dramatically decreased. Figure 3: Change over time from a street Segments of the population began to trade reliance on transit lines for reliance on the occupied by people to a street occupied by automobile. Large shifts in public funding were made to both improve the quality of existing machines roads and also to increase the pace of construction of new roads. Suburban development took place between the already established transit line suburbs, hence the term, infill suburbanization. Whole neighborhoods were built as a single development, houses moved away from the street, and sidewalks began to be omitted.7 Together, transit suburbs and infill suburbs formed the ‘first ring’ suburbs around the core city.
As the U.S. emerged from World War II, the third era of suburbanization—sprawl—began. The suburbs of this era exhibit four important characteristics: they were built at an unprecedented rate, land use zoning governed development patterns, the contemporary commercial strip emerged, and the suburbs lost their dependence on the core city in almost all ways.8 9 10 11 After the automobile, land use zoning was perhaps the next most influential force
11 in the marginalization of the pedestrian. It ensured that neither office nor store could be located at walkable distances throughout the neighborhood, while the increased scale of development put the zones that contained such functions even further out of the reach of the pedestrian. Therefore, all of the patrons of the commercial zones arrived by automobile, which necessitated that those environs be designed for the automobile.12
Changing attitudes should also be mentioned as having contributed to the decline of pedestrianism and the enthusiastic embrace of the automobile. A changing attitude about the general purpose of the street is captured neatly by Knox and McCarthy: “Streets in industrial metropolises everywhere, previously used only for local access, for informal economic activities, Figure 4: The garage rather than the front and for social life, were now seen primarily as part of the circulatory system of a functioning porch has become the dominant feature of metropolitan “machine.”13 The street was no longer a place for people or a place for walking, the suburban house and mobility was no longer accomplished by walking. The authors’ mention of the machine is convenient for this discussion on changing attitudes—the twentieth century is often referred to as the machine age.
2 Binford, Henry C. The First Suburbs : Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1985, 3. 3 Popenoe, David. The Suburban Environment : Sweden and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1977, 1. 4 Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier : the Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford UP, 1985, 12. 5 Jackson, 13. 6 Jackson, 119-126. 7 Knox, Paul, and Linda McCarthy. Urbanization. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall Higher Education, 2005, 142. 8 Knox and McCarthy, 151. 9 Gerckens, Lawrence C. "American Zoning & the Physical Isolation of Uses." Planner's Web. 21 Apr. 2008
12 CALLS FOR CHANGE
The margr inalization of the pedestrian went unnoticed for a time, but critics eventually emerged, especially after the post-World War II building boom. Even before the war the prolific Louis Mumford penned criticisms of the suburbs in general. Sociologists began studying the effects of the suburban environment on behavior, with varying results. At first, studies suggested that living in the suburbs resulted in abnormal behaviors and possible mental illnesses and afflictions.14 Such findings were later refuted15, but have since resurfaced.16 Another study published in 1977 compared the residents in the pedestrian-oriented community of Vällingby, outside of Stockholm, Sweden, with their counterparts in automobile-oriented Levittown. The study found that Vällingby residents were more satisfied with their neighborhood, communicated more with their neighbors, and were more physically active.17 Behavioral differences seemed to be pronounced in youths. The notion of the lack of community in the sprawling suburbs seems to have taken a strong hold in literature. Jane Jacobs is quoted as saying, “Sidewalk interaction Figure 5: Machine Agee visions is the glue that holds society together.”18 New Urbanism would later congeal around the issue of of communities community. Douglas Kelbaugh, who is actively involved in the New Urbanism movement, says, “We desperately need new, compelling typologies for our suburbs—ones that take the low- density, homogo enous net that has been thrown over the outskirts of our cities and gather it into finite knots that are bounded, contained, lively, and walkable communities.”19 The ideal neighborhood size, for Kelbaugh, is “a comfortable walking distance,” which is about a half-mile across by his measure. He advances the concept of the “Pedestrian Pocket” as a specific model to serve as a basis for neighborhood development. New Urbanism has been steadily gaining popularity and influence and appears to be the primary alternative to sprawl.
This background has shown how new forms of transportation have marginalized walking and how design for these new forms have displaced pedestrian-oriented urban design. In particular, designing the environment for the automobile alone has led to a suburban condition of sprawl. Sprawl not only defines the pattern of development, but also the physical quality of the environment. Infrastructure for the automobile—roads, highways, parking lots—uses up to 70 Figure 6: today’s visions of pedestrian oriented 20 percent of the space in the suburban landscape. Many have reacted strongly aagainst this way communities 13 of development and have called for pedestrian oriented communities. A recent trend in shopping center design has been the town center mall. These designs are laden with pedestrian features. Perhaps the principles of pedestrian design can be applied along the busiest and densest parts of the suburban commercial strip.
14 Endnotes
14 Popenoe, David. The Suburban Environment : Sweden and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1977, 3. 15 Popenoe, 3. 16 Morris, 77. 17 Popenoe. 18 Morris, 12. 19 Kelbaugh, Douglas. Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design. Seattle and London: University of Washington P, 1997, 128 20 Morris, 10
15 INGREDIENTS OF A PEDESTRIAN ENVIRONMENT
Introduction This review will focus on literature pertaining to pedestrian-oriented design that deals with urban design, streets, malls, parks, squares and plazas, etc. The literature presented here was chosen according to its focus on design for the pedestrian, its present day relevance, and its architectural content. The aim is to provide a picture of the current state of pedestrian-oriented design literature and to draw principles of design from the texts. It concentrates on a few key texts that focus exclusively on the design of pedestrian spaces, while secondary texts that are not so exclusive in their scope are referenced as supplementary resources. The primary texts include For Pedestrians Only (Roberto Brambillia and Gianni Longo, 1977), Accomodating the Pedestrian (Richard K. Untermannn 1984), Pedestrian Malls, Streetscapes, and Urban Spaces, (Harvey Rubenstein 1992), and Squares (Mark Childs 2004). Although each text looks at pedestrian spaces from a distinct perspective, they also tend to overlap on points that may be construed as the underlying ideals of the design of pedestrian spaces. These underlying principles are the best candidates to serve as design principles for this thesis. This literature review will begin with some general remarks and then proceed from one ideal to the next, illustrating how the texts engage one another at those points. It will conclude by presenting a set of design principles harvested from this exercise.
Literature Overview During the urban revitalization fever that swept over America in the 1970s, a number of books on pedestrian malls and transit malls were published. Such is the lineage of For Pedestrians Only, and also Pedestrian Malls, Streetscapes, and Urban Spaces (the latter is actually a revision and republication of Rubensteins 1978 work, Central City Malls). The 1980s could be seen as a gestation period for New Urbanism, before the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) was officially established in 1993. CNU is concentrates much of its attention on mixed-use town or neighborhood planning and design projects outside of central cities that revive a focus on the pedestrian. Untermannn’s text is pioneering in this regard because its look at 16 pedestrianism in the suburbs predates the founding of CNU by nine years. Untermann’s text, with its focus on the suburbs, stands in contrast to the two previous texts that focus on pedestrian spaces in the city. Childs’s text implicity affirms both the suburban and the traditionally urban—while his subjects are overtly urban types he does not use restrictive language to confine those subbjects to “downtowns.”
Activity All of the authors speak out on the necessity of designing pedestrian space for the activities that will take place in it. Brambillia and Longo state that “Designers often concentrate on refining the formal architectural components of public spaces without understanding how people use the Figure 7 space and what makes a place successful”.21 Untermannn implies that taking part in an activity that is exclusive to pedestrian environs—socializing, recreating, relaxing, exercising, and people A wide rannge of pedestrian activities 22 watching—is a fundamental reason that people use pedestrian space. In other words, should be designed for. pedestrian space is not just for circulation. Rubenstein focuses least on activities but he still gives them some consideration by categorizing the types of pedestrian trips. He identifies terminal trips from and back to an originating point such as the home or the automobile, functional tripsp such as “shopping, dining, or gooing to a doctor’s office,” and recreational trips that simply entail leisurely activity.23 Rubenstein’s contemporaries, Brambillia and Longo, find activity planning to be essential to the programming of pedestrian space. They write, “The design must be made to support the intended activities in the mall area, not the reverse.”24 They define six primary activities: walking, standing,, sitting, lying, running, and playinng;” and various optional activities including “strolling, standing to enjoy a view, sitting in the sun, and watching a passing scene.”25 Perhaps the most fundamental assessment they make is the following:
Extensive observations of pedestrian areas indicate that it is not Figure 8 the weather, the shops, the urban spaces, or architecture that is the focus of people’s attention, but other human beings. Space, building materials, and street furniture are only a frame around the interactions of people. If the frame is good, it helps; if bad, hampers this activity. Although good design features are
17 important components of a high-quality public space, the main consideration should be the generation of high levels of activity. (Page 48)
Childs provides the broadest coverage on the topic of designing pedestrian space around the activities that take place within it. Various sections of the book, such as “Finding Seeds,” “Meeting the Hierarchy of Needs,” and “Games and Local Rituals,” offer starting points for the design effort. He says, “The mix and distribution of needs addressed by a civic place is critical to its character and success. Often the delight of a commons emerges from a complex interweaving of activities.”26 It is worth mentioning that Childs appears to take pains to be vague Figure 9 about the design process—he offers examples of design rather than conventions or prescriptions. He alludes to the reason behind this avoidance of prescriptive writing when he states his preference for the term “syllabus,” which “suggests that the process is one of dialogue and ongoing study” rather than “programming” which “suggests a mechanical process of inputting needs and outputting a completed design.”27 Bearing this in mind, many of this paper’s applications of Childs’s text must rely on inferences that seek to unite his dispersed statements into unified concepts.
From this section on pedestrian activities a design principle can be elicited that says designers of pedestrian spaces should begin design by considering what activities the project needs to support. The project’s design should proceed from an understanding of these activities and should facilitate them. Develop a list of activities and attending design responses as the basis of an urban design program. Recreation, for example, could mean people playing a game together, and the game might require an open grassy space. Once the set of activities is known they can be diagramed onto the site, and relationships between the activity, the particulars of the site, and the character of the space to be designed can be established.
Automobile Integration The integration of the automobile and pedestrian environments is another area of overlap among the primary authors. The general consensus is that automobiles and pedestrians should share the street and not be spatially isolated from one another unless absolutely necessary. 18 Untermann warns us that removing pedestrians from the street to a separate pedestrian network such as “skywalks”, though seemingly ideal in terms of pedestrian safety, may cause street quality to be lessened and also may not achieve the desired effect as some pedestrians choose to continue to use the street anyway.28 In lieu of creating isolated infrastructures, Untermann instructs the reader on the use of crossing signals, curb cuts, raised or marked street crossings, pedestrian refuges, buffer strips between street and sidewalk, and other urban design devices that enhance pedestrian safety in the shared domain of the street. He mentions that the more the street is used by pedestrians, or as pedestrian densities increase, drivers naturally respond by slowing down and paying more attention, so busy sidewalks make for safe streets.29
Childs’s support for shared streets may beyond what Untermann had in mind. For instance, Childs envisions cul-de-sacs intentionally designed as play areas for children by placing man-hole covers in the form of a baseball diamond.30 Such a strategy sounds unreasonable for the busy commercial strip, but his suggestion to mingle on-street parking and sidewalk cafes in a shared zone along the side of the street does not.31 In fact this format has actually been used on Castro Figure 10: Parking behind buildings Street, which is analyzed as one of this document’s precedents. In using such a configuration, rather than between the building and the advice of Boothe et. al. in Transforming Suburban Business Districts to allow through traffic the street. in suburban business districts while controlling traffic speeds by keeping the number of lanes to a minimum, minimizing lane widths, and implementing on street parking becomes very relevant.32
The main points of the authors for urban design along the street realm have been covered. As for parking realm, all of the authors agree on at least a one point—whatever parking facilities are provided need to be as close as possible to the destination they serve. Untermann has a preference for structured parking, underground where possible, or at the second story with shops at ground level. He favors reducing parking lot sizes by using on-street angled or perpendicular parking, and what remaining surface lots must be used should be placed in the middle of a block of stores, with storefronts facing outward toward the street and sidewalk rather than inward toward the parking lot. Such a configuration matches what is recommended by the Federal Department of Transportation.33 Parking garages can also be used in the same manner. Such advice tells us how to plan the site for parking, but not much about how to design for pedestrians Figure 11: Pedestrian passthrough.
19 in parking areas. Untermann conveys the sense that parking facilities don’t need much pedestrian design because pedestrians want to get out of them as quickly as possible to get to proper pedestrian spaces.
Childs, on the other hand, has the same attitude about people in parking areas that he has about people in streets—that they should not only be welcomed but designed for. “Nearly every driver and passenger becomes a pedestrian in a parking lot,” he reminds us.34 It follows then that his recommendations for parking lots are similar in spirit those he espouses for streets. Some of the strategies Childs suggests are to conceive of pedestrian uses for the parking lot during times when the parking lot is usually vacant, to replace standard parking lot surfaces with more interesting materials and patterns, to use more aesthetically pleasing types of common devices, such as bollards instead of wheel chalks, and so on.35 Some of Childs’ suggestions such as the use of bollards seem to be nothing special at all, while others such as establishing an alternate use for parking lots during off-peak hours could prove impractical. Figure 12: Pedestrian friendly parking lots. From the recommendations of these texts with respect to automobile / pedestrian integration along streets, especially in “suburban business districts,” or what this thesis has so far referred to as the suburban commercial strip, the design principle can be established that streets should be designed for pedestrian use and comfort, using the methods outlined above. Parking facilities should be programmed onto the site and designed such that they do not degrade or interrupt the pedestrian connectivity of the site and also such that the human presence in the parking facility is acknowledged through design features such as ornamentation and even furnishings in appropriate places. On-street parking is almost universally acceptable, while it is widely held that surface parking lots should be used as sparingly as possible and as a shared Figure 13: This path appears to have been resource amongst multiple buildings. added
Context Two topics on which the texts demonstrated overlaps could be gathered under the category of context. One of those topics was environmental context that targeted the physical setting that any design project must become a part of. The other topic is that of social context, or community, which has become a very prominent topic in some circles, such as in New Urbanism. 20 Environmental Context: Both Rubenstein and Childs treat environmental context as another crucial design consideration for urban spaces. Almost unsurprisingly, the concept of environmental context for both of those authors is inspired by Kevin Lynch to varying degrees. Rubenstein’s discussion of context unwaveringly follows Lynch’s framework of paths, nodes, edges, districts, and landmarks.36 Rubenstein’s desire for pedestrian spaces is for them to strengthen the “image of the city,” constituted by the elements of Lynch’s framework, by either embellishing or excising elements on the project site that, respectively, lend to or detract from the city’s image.37 Childs also discusses some of Lynch’s typologies such as landmarks and districts, advocating the identification of important objects in the surrounding landscape to which views should be provided, and also urging designers to consider the civic spaces they create as centers for the districts that they are located in. Childs further refers to Lynch’s concept of the mental map of the city that people create for themselves. Both authors build on Lynch’s concepts and language, and the resulting “big picture” of context that is generated by each author—for Rubenstein it is a “city image” and for Childs it is a “mental map”—can be interpreted as approximately the same thing.
Unlike Rubenstein, Childs attempts to reach beyond Lynch by discussion of notions such as the “catchment,” “historical context,” and a “subsuming process.” The catchment is the area surrounding the site from which the majority of the site’s daily users will come, and Childs suggests that designers consider the character of the catchment, be it commercial, residential, retail, office, or other, when designing the space fed by it. He also suggests that historical events that have happened on the site or in its district be expressed in the design of the space. He credits the process of subsuming to William Hubbard, who adapted mechanisms used by the legal system to “present a coherent tradition and reflect and respond to current conditions.”38 Childs presents Hubbard’s six strategies for subsuming that include swerving, completion, focusing, self-limitation, refilling, and becoming the essence, while Childs adds two of his own, which are reflective counterpoint and flowering.39 While the reader should refer to Childs for further explanation of these, the name of each of these strategies does convey their approach to context sensitive design to some degree.
21 Social Context or Community: Expression of the local community is a common concern that has been rising in importance in recent decades—in Postmodern Urbanism, Nan Ellin discusses the growing emphasis on the formation and protection of community in the disciplines of architecture and planning as a response to homogenizing effects of globalization, and the notion is frequently raised by New Urbanists such as Douglas Kelbaugh. Rubenstein only gives tangential and passing mention of community in a section devoted to socio-economics. For Childs, designing for community, or “conviviality” as he prefers, is the concern that underpins his entire text, and so is difficult to encapsulate in just a few points. His most concise statements on designing for community refer to designing for community-oriented activities, and this review has already covered designing for activities. If anything from that discussion requires emphasis it Figure 14: Spaces should be designed to might be the idea of finding and giving prominent expression to activities or events that are host community activities. particular to the given community. Beyond activities, Childs suggests that artwork, perhaps sculptures, paintings, or graphic arts, that are expressive of the local community can adorn the space.40
In spite of the importance placed on designing for community, the covered literature provides no concrete material that can be converted to a design principle that stands on its own. Most of the discussion of community revolves around community activities. While establishing another design principle dealing with activity runs the risk of being repetitive, the importance presently placed on expressing community does justify doing so. Building primarily on Childs’s work, this design principle calls for the pedestrian project to have a space designed to support one or more community events. A community event, such as a festival or parade, is not an individual activity, but is a group activity that draws the community together.
Experience One of the primary motives behind this thesis is that a walk along the typical suburban commercial strip is not a pleasant experience. Design literature speaks frequently of experiential qualities, in terms of aspects of the environment that are sensed either physically or even psychologically, as crucial to a project’s success. Untermannn, for example, tells us that improving the experiential qualities of a pedestrian space will lead to its increased use.41 The
22 term “experiential qualities” is a potentially nebulous one, but if we classify experiential qualities into the categories of aesthetics, comfort, and safety then the task of interrogating texts regarding experiential design is made easier. The caveat to these categories is that almost no object utilized in design is contained neatly in any one category. A tree has an aesthetic component and a comfort component, while a light may have a component of all three categories.
Aesthetics: For Untermann, every object placed in pedestrian space has aesthetic importance. As an example, he talks more about the visual appearance of benches and chairs than he does their physical comfort. Even though this could be because benches and the like are already expected to be comfortable, his definition of furniture as “benches, planters, fountains, sculptures, detailed paving, etc.” seems to hold furnishings primarily as visual elements and 42 secondarily as objects to provide physical comfort and utility. He states that one of the primary Figure 15: A gateway element. purposes of furnishings is to “[enhance] the visual experience and [reduce] the apparent walk length” (The notion of reducing the apparent walking length will recur later in this literature review as an important design consideration).43 Incidentally, he warns that arranging furniture in geometric patterns, not an uncommon practice among architects, may be disliked as a seating facility by the occupant and so designers might instead consider movable seating. Generally, all of the texts advise that seating placement is a function of comfort and not aesthetics, while both comfort and aesthetic goals govern the design of the seat as an individual object. To summarize Untermannn’s aesthetic guidance, the designer should provide numerous objects—seats, plants and trees, lights, fountains, sculpture—all with a high degree of detail and moderate material quality, along with pavement textures and patterns and architecture—shelters, and covered walks, etc.—to break down pedestrian space into smaller, shorter, detailed, interesting, segments.
Childs takes a different approach to aesthetics by concentrating on the aesthetics of outdoor spatial containers. He talks about how to effect the visual sense of enclosure to the fullest in outdoor environs by using a vocabulary such as rooms, walls, floors, ceilings, and doors—these Figure 16: Ornamental texture are his operative spatial elements. Doorways or entryways are regarded as very important is a necessity.
23 elements, and he suggests that they should vary in presence and stature from being merely a subdued portal to being an iconic and grandiose gateway, and any opportunity should be taken to design the doorway such that it is evocative of the difference between what is on either side.44 Ceilings can be implied by canopies and cornices, and efforts should be made to admit daylight in intentional ways through the use of filtering and shading. Regarding the urban floor, he suggests games, patterns and textures, labyrinths, level changes, creative ornamentation of drainage and edges, and emphasis of spaces by the same techniques.45 All of these techniques and guidelines serve to create a sense of discrete spaces.
Rubenstein’s prescriptions for aesthetics are easy to summarize: use lots of texture, patterns, sculpture, lights, fountains, seats, and trees, compositionally employed to create an Figure 17 environment with a variety of form characteristics that include continuity, sequence, rhythm, proportion, hierarchy, dominance, direction, enclosure, and more. He helpfully treats each of these elements in turn, and repeatedly reminds us of the importance of detail and ornament each time. Rubenstein’s attention to the use of trees and plants is a distinguishing component of his text—he is much more detailed on this subject that the other authors. He explains that trees can be used for architectural purposes such as to define space, screen views, and even act as sculpture.46
The design principle arrived at from all of the authors’ guidance is that the designer of the pedestrian environment should seek to create distinguishable outdoor rooms and to generate visual interest throughout all pedestrian spaces by using lots of variety and detail. The variety is achieved by populating the spaces with a multitude of objects—benches, chairs, pots and planters, fixtures, sculpture, pavement, and so on. Detail is achieved at the scale of each individual object—don’t let objects be of one material and with no surface or joint articulation.
Comfort: The design literature identifies a social as well as a physical component to comfort. All of the authors agree that the occupants need to have control over their degree of social interaction with others. Brambillia and Longo state, “People need to be able to choose between sitting together with others or remaining separate, communicating or reflecting, participating or observing;”47 Childs asks, “Does the design allow individuals to move fluidly on Figure 18
24 and off stage,” referring to the individuals ability to choose whether or not to be a part of social interaction.48 Childs presents several strategies to design for social comfort that include movable seats, recognition of the “field” as more public and interactive and the “edges” as more private, the provision of multiple entry / exit points, and the routing of circulation such that it does not intersect activity zones or gathering spaces. Allowing chairs to be movable is a recommendation of all of the texts’ due to the fact that people like to configure their own seating, adjusting it for view, for sun exposure, to join with or separate from a social group; thus, movable chairs serve both physical and social comfort. Brambillia and Longo49 and Childs50 go on to address the sight of the homeless sleeping on benches and seating, which can cause social discomfort if others are left with no choice but to sit nearby. The suggested remedy is to oversupply the space with seating rather than reduce it. Figure 19: Movable furniture allows users to adapt the space The principal objects that provide physical comfort include seating, shelter, plants and trees, to their needs and comfort. and lights. Seating areas should be shaded or else chairs should be able to be moved into the shade so the discomfort of sitting in intense direct sunlight can be avoided. Brambillia and Longo list “sun, view, weather protection, dimension, and form” as the criteria for design and placement of seating, with view being emphasized as the most important factor.51 They also encourage plants and trees be used to buffer noise and wind, improve air quality, and provide shade.52
A social comfort design principle can be distilled from this section requiring that the urban design program include places where individuals may withdrawal from unwanted social interaction—likely at the edges of larger spaces—and where features such as movable seating that respect solitude can be placed. For physical comfort, seating areas should be dressed with shelter, trees, plants, and lighting, and the areas should be designed such that the occupants are provided with an interesting view.
Safety: Design literature highlights different facets of safety. One is safety from crime and can be called security. Childs’s text, the most recent of the primary texts, suggests that there is Figure 20: Shade for seating during the no proven deterrent to crime within the designer’s toolset. “The relationship between the design warm season is critical. of places and crime is not clearly understood,” he says.53 He observes that even accepted design practices for discouraging crime are now being called into question. He mentions studies
25 executed as recently as 1997 that state that the effectiveness of lighting as a deterrent to crime could not be ascertained.54 While the other authors lean heavily on lighting for such a purpose, the revelation from Childs diminishes their weight in the forumulation of a design principle. Still, even Childs recommends enough lighting to eliminate blind spots in occupied areas. There is, however, a claim made by both Childs and Untermann that goes uncontested, which states that the most effective crime deterrent is an abundance of people, or in other words, potential witnesses.55 56 The more “watched” a space is by real people, the less frequent crime becomes. So the guidance for deterring crime is that all areas should have enough illumination so that an attacker cannot hide unseen, and the designer should refrain from creating spaces, or at least block public access to spaces that are visually isolated such that criminal activity might proceed unseen.
Another facet of safety pertains to physical hazards in the environment and can be called environmental safety. As far as environmental safety is concerned, the authors focus on different aspects. Brambillia and Longo emphasize the maintenance of the environment, both seasonal and long term. Untermann devotes entire sections to the review of design conventions for steps, handrails, ramps, and the like. Childs again differentiates himself by advancing the idea of “reasonable risk.” The general idea of reasonable risk is to allow people to choose how they interact with their surroundings and be responsible for their own decisions, so long as hazards that post the threat of serious injury or that do not allow the user to make an informed decision are removed. He give this example:
In the intervals between bursts of spray at the International Fountain in Seattle Center, children and adults repeatedly run to touch the fountain… Clearly, getting wet is a reasonable risk for those who venture into the realm of a fountain. The physical risk of slipping and falling in a fountain is also a reasonable risk so long as designers […] look to minimize the consequences of falling. Getting an infectious disease because the fountain’s water is untreated is not a reasonable risk. (page 77)
26 In pursuit of the idea of reasonable risk Childs urges good maintenance, that designers anticipate occupants’ inventive uses, and that common design conventions be followed. The act of maintenance is not a design consideration, but anticipating patterns of use and implementing common design conventions form the guiding principle of designing for environmental safety.
Scale That suburban development has been criticized for having a scale attuned to the automobile rather than the pedestrian has already been mentioned in the thesis background. There it was stated that automobile scale manifests as less detail on objects (buildings), and greater distances between objects. Guidelines for responding to the lack of detail have already been discussed in the section on aesthetics. Literature also speaks to the issue of distance.
The design literature places as much importance on the simple consideration of walking distances as is placed on architectural detail. Joel Garreau’s Edge City might be the most well known text that addresses the topic of walking distances. Through interviews with numerous developers Garreau found that there are rules of thumb regarding walking distances that they strictly adhere to. For example, “An American will not walk more than six hundred feet before getting into her car.”57 Garreau, however, also finds that certain strategies can be used to get an American to walk as far as fifteen hundred feet.58 These strategies amount to breaking up the total distance into smaller segments by using, for example, changes in direction. The purpose of this is to keep the pedestrian from ever actually perceiving just how long the total distance is. It should also be said that the context in which these rules arise is in regards to destination walkers rather that pleasure walkers. Untermann considers walking distances according to what percent of people are willing to walk a given distance: seventy percent of Americans will walk five hundred feet; forty percent will walk a thousand feet; the average distance that commuters walk between the car and the office is eight hundred feet.59
Untermannn unites the notions of distance and architectural detail by talking about the number of objects that a person distinguishes in a given distance. That number varies depending upon the mode of travel. A person driving will be able to distinguish three objects over a thirty-foot span when traveling twenty-five miles per hour; a bicyclist will distinguish six 27 objects in that same span; a person walking will distinguish twenty one objects.60 The value of these figures is debatable, since being able to distinguish an object does not mean that one is actually able to focus on it. Therefore the appropriate number of objects placed along the given thirty foot distance appears to be open to interpretation. It is also unclear just what constitutes a visual object, which could either be a freestanding potted plant, or a differentiated tile in a pavement pattern.
For this section a design principle can be devised stating that pedestrian routes should be broken into segments no greater that six hundred feet in length either by visual articulation or by changes in direction. Along these segments there should be a density of detail achieved by the use of textured pavements and by the placement of visually distinct objects according to the Figure 25 designer’s discretion.
Summary Activity, automobile integration, context, experience, and scale are, according to the design literature reviewed here, the aspects of pedestrian space that are absolutely vital for the designer to consider. The starting point for design should be the consideration of activities, and the goal is that the design should always be accommodating to desired activities and should never impede Figure 21 them. Automobiles should share the street with pedestrians so that streets remain lively, and parking lots should be shared amongst multiple buildings and should be designed with some degree of ornament in an effort to make them as pleasant as possible. Paths, nodes, edges, districts, and landmarks are contextual elements of the larger landscape in which the project resides and should therefore be recognized, while further overtures towards contextual recognition and expression are made possible through the subsuming process. Design for experiential qualities by giving attention to visual detail, physical comfort, social comfort, security, and environmental safety. Design for the pedestrian scale through choice of materials and articulation of surfaces and objects that defers to walking speeds rather than driving speeds, and give articulation to a pedestrian distance module such that the pedestrian get a sense of progress and intermittent destinations rather than a seemingly endless journey. Each of these principles should guide the design process and they will all need to integrate with each other in the final
28 result. These principles, along with inspiration from studying successful precedents, are tools with which the architect can work to design a good pedestrian space.
29 SHOPPING MALLS: PRIME SITES FOR INTERVENTION
An Ideal Scenario for Intervention: Shopping Mall Redevelopment This thesis stated at the beginning that it was targeting suburban commercial districts. In these districts thousands of people converge to shop, eat, obtain a service of some kind, attend community events, find entertainment, and do many other things. These environments provide potentially fertile ground for pedestrian oriented spaces. Within these districts there is usually located a particular type of development that is well suited for being converted into a pedestrian oriented environment – the shopping mall.
Shopping malls, whether of the enclosed or the strip mall type, sit on large plots of land that are easily large enough to accommodate a pedestrian district. If existing shopping malls were all raging successes then there would be little incentive for the property owners to consider redeveloping, but a great many malls have fallen on hard times. For the first couple of decades after its birth in the late 1950s, the shopping mall industry seemed bullet proof, but the last Figure 22: A lifestyle center development. couple of decades have shown that it is anything but. Changing suburban demographics, crime, a lack of upkeep, increased competition, and a falling out of favor of the enclosed shopping mall format are reasons given for the malls' falterings.61 The turn from the carefree malling days seemed to occur over the course of the 1980s, and studies published in the early 1990s clearly showed a decline had occurred: fewer people were shopping at enclosed malls and shopping trip durations for those that continued to shop at them had substantially decreased.62
Some real estate developers seemed ahead of the curve on realizing that people were ready for something different. In the same decade that New Urbanism was born, the developer Poag & McEwen latched onto some of the movements tenants and delivered what they called a “lifestyle center” – a shopping center designed to look more like a traditional urban environment. There was no enormous fully enclosed mall corridor through which people walked to get to their store of choice, rather the development was designed such that stores fronted directly onto streets. Instead of a giant sprawling parking lot there were parking spaces directly in front of the stores. Restaurants were also a part of the program mix. Although it could be considered nothing more
30 than a gussied-up strip mall, the quality and flair of its architecture – lots of brick construction, brick paver sidewalks, trees in raised planters, arcades with cast stone accents fronting the shops, curving lines, ornamental metal fences, ornamental water fountains, and other details – was attractive to a lot of people who have tired of the blandness of the traditional enclosed shopping mall.
Lifestyle Centers don’t appear to be just a trend – they’re evolving and accelerating. They are now occurring at a rate that is well over ten times the rate at which traditional enclosed shopping malls are being developed.63 Many traditional shopping malls are being renovated to include the features of lifestyle centers. They are also now providing for most of the aspects of living. Program elements typically include dwelling units, office space, retail space, dining space, and entertainment venues, all knit together by often elaborately designed outdoor pedestrian networks.64 This is of substantial relevance to a thesis that proposes that the suburbs are in need of pedestrian oriented environments, and it shows that shopping mall properties are ideal sites for pedestrian oriented design projects. They are big enough to host the project, they are ideally located and the fact that it is a reuse of already developed land means that more sprawl is not being created, and similar projects have already proven highly successful.
Finally, when choosing where to locate such projects, look for already existing retail properties that are past their prime and ripe for redevelopment. Redeveloping an existing property will not contribute to sprawl. It will also likely have a favorable location that is already in a commercial district that is frequently visited by area residents.
31 Endnotes
21 Brambilla, Roberto, and Gianni Longo. For Pedestrians Only. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977, 48. 22 Untermann, Richard K. Accommodating the Pedestrian : Adapting Towns and Neighborhoods for Walking and Bicycling. New York: Van Nostrand, 1984, 2. 23 Rubenstein, Harvey M. Pedestrian Malls, Streetscapes, and Urban Spaces. New York: Wiley, 1992, 36. 24 Brambillia and Longo, 47. 25 Brambillia and Longo, 48. 26 Childs, Mark C. Squares : a Public Place Design Guide for Urbanists. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2004, 50. 27 Childs, 43. 28 Untermann, 37. 29 Untermann, 32. 30 Childs, 170. 31 Childs, 173. 32 Boothe, Geoffrey, et. al. Transforming Suburban Business Districts. Washington D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 2001, 51. 33 DOT “Using Land-Use Regulations to Encourage Non-Motorized Travel.”
32 WORKING EXAMPLES OF PEDESTRIAN ORIENTED ENVIRONMENTS
Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to study built examples of pedestrian spaces in order to observe what was done in each example, what worked, and what didn’t. The included precedents vary in purpose, format, character, and location, with the intention that we will observe a wide range of solutions and also commonalities that occur throughout the different types. The first three precedents are all examples of streetscapes—typical street formats that admit both automobiles and cars—that have made an extra effort to shape the pedestrian experience. Then a street for pedestrians only and from which cars are excluded, also known as a pedestrian mall, is analyzed. Next, some examples of covered walks are examined. Finally, a precedent that represents the problem condition of the pedestrian-unfriendly suburban commercial strip is presented.
Streetscapes Figure 23 The Ramblas, in Barcelona, Spain, is a street that bisects the city’s gothic quarter. Starting at a statue of Columbus at the port to the Mediterranean Sea, it runs north-northeast one-point-two kilometers and ends at the Placa de Catalunya. This plaza sits on the boundary between the medieval city fabric through which the street runs and the newer nineteenth century city fabric to the north. The street functions as a recreational space and shopping / tourist space for the area through which it runs. Tenants that operate on or very near the street include a theater, a market, a museum, many merchants who set up stands, and performing entertainers. The Ramblas can be analyzed as two components: the overall street and then just the central promenade itself. The overall street includes the buildings that front on it, the sidewalks, traffic lanes, and the central pedestrian promenade. The overall street width ranges between approximately ninety to one hundred fifteen feet. It is made up of straight segments that meet Figure 24 at slight angles; that and its width stand in stark contrast to the narrow and winding medieval
33 streets around it. It is configured such that the promenade is the central and dominant feature. Traffic spits around it to one-way lanes at either side. On the other side of these lanes runs a thin strip of sidewalk along the fronts of the buildings. The buildings are five to seven stories tall; most are faced with stone, some with stucco, but brick is either not used on the fronts of the buildings or it is used so sparingly as to not be noticeable. Water tables, cornices, deep reveals, and sculptural reliefs are used in some combination on all of the facades. Doors are frequent at street level and are often tucked behind an arcade or under an awning. Each façade is rhythmically punctured with windows; wrought iron balconies that dress the windows or span the whole width of the façade are common, though not typical. The buildings are a crucial component of the streetscape and render the Ramblas as a highly ornate corridor with building facades acting as lively sidewalls. From the central promenade, the buildings provide a sense of enclosure. From the buildings, either from an upper story window or from the street level sidewalk, the central promenade and all of its occupants and their activities provide a truly urban feel where human activity is always reassuringly present. Author Allan B. Jacobs states, “It is an uncomplicated design and it is amazingly effective.”65 The pedestrian promenade is clearly the dominant feature of the Ramblas. Simply described, it is a wide strip of pavement raised one step from the level of traffic; trees and street lights marching down each side; various furnishings are installed throughout; variously patterned pavers form the walking surface. The promenade is typically sixty feet wide, though it varies from thirty six to eighty feet. The trees are indispensable; they line either side of the promenade Figure 25: Movable furniture on the Ramblas about two feet from the road, spaced approximately twenty feet apart, with trunks that extend fifteen to twenty feet upward before the canopy begins. The trees quite effectively form a second corridor within the corridor created by the building facades. Being deciduous, the trees provide shade in the summer and admit sunlight during the winter. The paving varies, from wavy strips to patterns to designs. The street lights are ornate, with fluted posts, lamps held by an ornamented metal armature, and ornamented bases. Fixed benches and moveable chairs are plentiful. Booths set up by street vendor offer various trinkets, portrait painting, or concessions. There is constantly something else to look at, some detail to consider, some activity to take part in, some other person’s activity to observe.
34 The place is not entirely without criticism, as Jacobs has commented on the unsuitability of some of the newer objects on the street.66 He is uncomfortable with the failure of these newer objects to fit within the context and character of the existing street. He does not like that some of the buildings do not adhere to the building line set up by the other buildings, and that trees have been omitted in front of those same buildings; apparently these buildings are more recent than the other buildings on the street, though they could still be a hundred or more years old. He is also bothered by some street lights that are different from the typical and use “strange reflectors.” He may just be reaching for something critical to say though, since the street is enormously successful, being visited by hundreds of people daily. They come to stroll, to eat, to purchase souvenirs, to watch street performers, to socialize, or just to sit and relax.
Princess Street is a busy street in the city of Edinburg, Scotland. Only about a mile long, it transitions at each end into other streets. It only has buildings on one side—the north side—and so it is referred to as a “one-sided street.” The south side of the street is of particular interest for us because it is a pedestrian promenade. To the south of the promenade a hill slopes Figure 26 down to Princess Street Gardens. The gardens occupy a valley that has been planted with grass and trees, and there is a facility in the gardens where concerts often take place. Various merchants and hotels who all cater to the well-heeled occupy the buildings along the street. Still, not all pedestrian visitors need be shoppers or hotel guests—the street is part of a main bus route, and many surely walk its length just for exercise, for the views into the park, and for seeing some significant examples of architecture in the area, which would include a few churches, monuments, and the Edinburg Castle. Spatially, a wide rift is created between the north and south sides of the street by a six lane road. This rift is accentuated by the very different “feel” that is to be had from one side of the road to the other. The buildings at the north are a shear mass, and even with twenty feet of sidewalk fronting them, the buildings still loom above. At times they vary dramatically in height from one to the next. They are mostly gothic in appearance and provide ample visual variation and interest. The sidewalk that fronts them is lively with the activity of shoppers and hotel Figure 27 guests, business folk, and others.
35 The south side of the street couldn’t be more different from the north. From the edge of the road to the crest of the hill that drops off to the gardens is about one hundred feet. This swath is devoted to foot traffic. Two rows of trees divide the swath into three spatial zones. From the road to the first row of trees, people wait for busses or wait for a gap in traffic so they can scurry to the north side of the road. Bus stop occur every couple hundred feet and they are merely benches or shelters. Between the two rows of trees spaced about sixty feet apart is a lawn with flower beds here and there. Beyond the second row of trees perched at the crest of the hill is the walking path. The pavement is simple pavers in some places and in other places is just asphalt. Simple yet sturdy wooden benches along the path; there is no moveable seating. Garden landscaping climbs the hill and envelops the path at some points; at other points a monument and its apron of pavement will just out over the hill side. So the path is at times distinct from the gardens while at other times a part of them. The endpoints of the street are Figure 28 marked either by hillside monuments or a church tower and provide visual focal points Princess Street is for movement. It is much more conducive to walking than it is to idling or lingering and so functions more as a path than a place. Views of Edinburg architecture to the north and landscaped gardens to the south of the promenade give it an obvious pedestrian allure. The intense urban district in which it sits and the presence of the bus route (which is enthusiastically embraced in contrast to bus travel in the U.S.) ensures an ample number of pedestrians will always be present. The street is especially interesting for the purposes of this thesis because its one-sided configuration could be effective alongside the broad avenues of the suburban strip.
Castro Street, in Mountain View, California, is the literal and figurative center of the city. The street is about a mile in length and runs in the north / south direction. The three northern-most blocks of the street have been classified as a historic retail district, and this precedent study is limited to that area. Just to the north side of the district is a Caltrain station that feeds the city daily with pedestrians. The city takes pride in the pedestrian oriented nature of Castro Street by using it to host civic functions and cultural events, and by touting its historic
36 retail district. The city has had a development plan in place since the late 1980s that recognizes the importance of Castro Street and seeks to protect and maintain it. The spatial configuration of Castro Street is the normative one where sidewalks and buildings line both sides of a road. Parking is available on street and also behind the buildings that line the street. The road is thirty four feet wide, the parking lanes are thirteen feet wide, and the sidewalks ten feet wide, so the width of the street from face of building to face of building is about eight feet. In cross section, three levels are apparent: the road is at the lowest level, the parking lanes are raise a few inches above it, and the sidewalks are raised approximately one foot above the parking lanes. The change in level between the parking lane and the sidewalk is mitigated by two steps that run continuously along the street, interrupted only when the parking lane and sidewalk are separated by a raised planting bed. The street-side parking merits our closer observation. The spaces are intended for parallel parking, but instead of defining each space with a painted line there are trees located at thirty foot intervals to separate one space from the next. Drivers actually parallel park their cars between the trees. Interestingly, alternative usage of these street-side parking stalls is permitted. Stores along the street have the option of using some of the spaces in front of them for pedestrian purposes. The city’s code refers to this as flexible space. Merchants are to signify that they are reserving these spaces for pedestrian use by placing planters or wrought iron fences as a boundary. Dining tables can then be set out along with umbrellas and chairs while leaving enough sidewalk space for passing pedestrians. The materials and furnishings used along the street should be familiar to us by now. The sidewalks are surfaced with square pavers. Planter beds are found in a couple of places and their two feet high cast stone walls serve as sitting walls. Gas-light-styled lamp posts twelve feet in height are placed approximately thirty feet apart. Buildings are faced in brick or stucco, are one or two stories tall, and all stand in line together to create a strong corridor. Visual interest and variety is created by the different storefront shops, by the building facades that are different yet all “marching to the same beat,” by the unique use of trees to facilitate car parking, by pedestrian activity both along the sidewalk and occasionally spilling into the parking lane.
37 The design of Castro Street invites loitering and leisure activity. It’s design not only supports commercial activity, but human activity as well. Many people may go there to shop or to eat, but others may go just to stroll along the sidewalks. This sort of environment would be encouraging to see in suburban business or shopping districts, but one can imagine few people that would walk through those environments just for a leisurely stroll.
Pedestrian Streets Pearl Street Mall, in Boulder, Colorado, exemplifies the practice of closing streets to automobiles and redesigning them for pedestrians only. This trend started in the 1960s and was popular into the very early 1980s. Not only was the trend relatively short-lived, but only some thirty of the two hundred projects that were implemented in the United States remain today.67 Pearl Street Mall is one of the projects that has survived; more than that, the mall has flourished. It’s twenty-fifth anniversary was marked by celebration rather than malaise, and a subsequent facelift was ushered by public support rather than contempt; its success and longevity have other cities reconsidering the concept of pedestrian streets and trying to derive a formula for success from the Peal Street Mall.68 The mall is located in downtown Boulder where four blocks of Pearl Street have been Figure 29 closed to vehicular traffic and given over entirely to pedestrian usage. Pearl Street runs east- west (the street grid in that part of the city is rotated about ten degrees counterclockwise from true north-south / east-west alignment). The north-south streets are allowed to run through, so the pedestrian space is not continuous. The mall is the same general width as the city’s streets, except for one of the two central blocks—the eastern one, which is at the south side of the Boulder County Court House—that has been widened into a plaza. The intersections of Pearl Street with the north-south through-streets provide ideal locations for transit stops—bus stops in this case. For those who arrive by private rather than public transit, parking is amply provided by three parking garages and five surface parking lots, all of various sizes, as well as on-street parking spaces which are of the diagonal type, thereby increasing parking space count over what can be achieved with parallel parking spaces. An important note about the parking facilities that
38 are counted here is that they are all within one block of the mall, so the walk from the car to the mall is a brief one. Once one enters the mall there are a variety of activities awaiting. Cafes, book stores, clothing stores, novelty stores, etc. entice the passer by with window displays and pleasant aromas. Besides mere shopping, there are often performers of various sorts that will make a balloon animal for a child or please a crowd by juggling while riding a unicycle; or perhaps there is a contortionist performing on the next block; and there is commonly a musician to be found playing somewhere along the mall’s length. There are also options for those looking for a more interactive experience: there is a “garden” of sculptures upon which climbing is not discouraged; a cluster of boulders have become a popular background for picture-taking; and during the heat of the summer children delight in an area of the street where perhaps two dozen pavers are Figure 30 enlarged to two foot squares, and the faces cast into them each spit a jet of water from their mouths. Those who are just interested in people watching or idle conversation will find ample seating either in the sunny plaza or in the shade of one of the mall’s many trees. The variety of activities found at the Pearl Street Mall provides something for everyone. The design of the space that has successfully housed these activities for almost thirty years now is a fairly simple one: a strip pedestrian space flanked by shops for its entire length. The buildings housing the shops are two and three stories tall, and faced with brick. Many of the buildings have awnings that extend out approximately six feet. As expected, the storefronts are mostly glass, either filling in between columns or as part of a storefront window system. Often the first story of a façade is crowned with a water table that might project out a foot. The upper story windows of the buildings sit in punched openings rather than strip windows or curtain walls. In other words, the look of the buildings is that of a pre-modernist time frame. Meanwhile the streetscape itself is populated by an assortment of basic pedestrian amenities: pavement, lighting, furnishings, sculpture, and landscaping. The pavement, done entirely in red brick pavers except for at special features such as the sculpture garden or the fountain, is surely the most unremarkable of the list. The most excitement the pavement offers is when it changes pattern from a standard grid to a chevron pattern. The pavement is only a canvas, a background element, over which the rest of the elements are applied. The lighting is
39 only slightly less mundane. The light poles are metal tubes painted black, topped by five light globes, with one globe elevated above the other four. Furnishings begin to add interest and variety. The conventional seat is the wooden bench that is deployed liberally throughout the space, usually at the periphery of walking routes. However, café owners usually have their own seating areas in front of their stores where they have placed seats of their own choosing. Additionally, some of the planter walls are tall enough to act as benches. The sculpture adds the element of interactivity to the space and doesn’t have any pretense of being there for beauty. In one section there are statues of animals about thirty inches tall, so they are just the right height for kids to climb on an have there picture taken. The ground around these statues is gravel, which, while not comfortable, is still probably more forgiving that a brick paver should one fall from atop a statue. Already mentioned are the tall boulders that could be construed as either landscaping, or a form of sculpture. The most effective design element along the Pearl Street Mall is the landscaping. The trees and plants, and the planter beds and boxes in which they are rooted, make the environment a wonderful experience of urbanity softened by nature. Flowers crowd the planter beds during the spring and create a beautiful environment for walking. During the summer, leaves overhead rustle in the breeze while providing you a shady relief from the hot sun. At night the undersides of the canopy are lit by the streetlights and a ceiling effect is created. Lights adorn the bare branches during the winter and sustain a festive ambience despite the cold. The trees march down both sides of the mall’s central axis. There is a ground treatment at the base of each tree that is either a simple tree grate or else a more elaborate planter box. In the latter case, the planter boxes are constructed out of brick which is, by appearance, the same that is used for the mall’s pavement. Most of the planters are low to the ground, perhaps six or eight inches tall, while at times they are closer to sixteen inches tall and so are at a comfortable sitting height. They are typically about ten feet by ten feet square and topped over with ordinary mulch. The plaza at the courthouse has grassy lawns and flower beds also, and then there are small potted plants that are dispersed throughout the mall either by design or by choice of individual shop owners.
40 Taken as a whole, the Pearl Street Mall offers its visitors a lot of variety of experience, in terms of dining choices, shopping choices, various activities, and various aesthetic components. These are all provided in a safe and well maintained environment. The pedestrian street is easily accessed by motorists and those who use public transportation. In fact, allowing roads to pass through the space gives it a feeling of always being active. Most important, perhaps, is the sense that the venue is not just another amenity in the city, but that it is in fact vital to the city’s identity.
Covered walks Burlington Arcade, in Westminster, London, is the most economically successful shopping arcade in Britain according to Margaret MacKeith.69 She explains the usage of the term “arcade” well when she discusses it in both its simplest form as merely a passageway roofed over by a series of arches, and also its more typological form as a shopping environment.70 The Burlington Arcade is nearly at the center of London, just a quarter mile northwest of Saint James Figure 31 Park. It fronts on Piccadilly at its south end and on a much smaller street, Burlington Gardens, at its north end. Most of its patrons are likely to have arrived on foot or by bus since street-side parking is limited to some of the nearby smaller streets, none is available at all on Piccadilly, and there are no parking garages or lots in close proximity. Piccadilly is on a bus route though.
The arcade runs through a building that, judging from photographs, is some seven- hundred fifty feet long. The building appears to be either three or four stories treated as two very tall ones, and it is three bays wide. The Piccadilly building entrance façade is grandiose and extensively ornamented. Three deeply recessed second story windows indicate the three bay layout of the building. At the first story an arched entrance stretches clear across the façade. The street presence is at once imposing and inviting. It is doubtful that one could walk past without having their gaze drawn by the weight of the ornament, the contrast between the bright exterior and the shadowy depth of the interior passage, made more dramatic by piercing light Figure 32 from the skylights in the arcade ceiling. MacKeith goes so far as to suggest that the “flamboyant” façade is at least partly responsible for the arcade’s commercial success.71
41 The arcade passage takes up the two bottom stories of the center bay and the shops use the side bays. The bays all have roughly the same width, which from pictures appears to be fifteen feet. Once inside, one is covered by a ceiling whose peak is approximately thrity feet above. Arches march down the length of the corridor. Each bay created by the arches is segmented three times by the articulation of the shop fronts along the sidewalls and by the placement of three skylights in the ceiling above. Every bay has a door centered on each sidewall. The display windows to each side of the doorway are raised at least one foot from the wall surface, and uplighting is perched atop each of the raised bays. The second story is treated much the same as the first, however, there is a center window to each bay rather than a center door, the side bays still project from the wall though less so than at the first story, and the white color scheme of the window bays’ mullions contrasts with the black color scheme used along the first story. What little sidewall surface remains between so much mullions and glass is red brick. Figure 33 This scheme is identically repeated at each bay all the way down the arcade. Lastly, the corridors floor surface consists of gray tiles set at forty five degrees, with a strip of dull white tiles at each archway that inscribes the bay module on the floor surface.
The Burlington Arcade is the perfect window shopping environment. The architecture is lavish. The segmentation of the passage into bays by the archways give the occupant a sense of the overall scale of the passage, and a sense of motion as one passes through each successive archway. The light let in by the skylights is plenty enough to illuminate the space, yet not enough to produce any glare. The repetition of the architecture is muted by the differentiation found in the shops’ displays.
This space is a strong example of only two of the principles discussed in the literature review: the pedestrian scaled walking module as found in the bays, and an environment full of detail and visual interest. The arcade displays further shortcomings when judged against the principles laid out in the literature review. There is little variety in the activities that the place Figure 34 can support; activities are limited to walking and shopping. The arcade’s constricted space leaves no room for any form of seating, so a group or even a couple cannot gather anywhere for
42 a chat. Though the space’s design was almost certainly given such limitations intentionally, one could argue that such provisions would be an improvement.
Improving pedestrian conditions along the suburban commercial strip may mean that some retail strip centers embrace the shopping arcade and also that pedestrian paths in open terrain may be adorned with an arcade simply for protection and comfort. The Burlington Arcade provides a successful model of a shopping arcade that recognizes the pedestrians’ needs for suitable scale and detail. It also shows how minimal, in terms of function, a shopping arcade can be.
43 End Notes
65 Allan B Jacobs, Great Streets, page 66 ibid 67 Matt Branaugh, “More Pedestrian Malls Fail Than Succeed,” The Daily Camera, 2002. 68 ibid 69 MacKeith, page 73 70 MacKeith, page 1-2 71 MacKeith, page 73
44 BACKGROUND SUMMARY
This thesis started by acknowledging what an awful environment the suburbs usually are for walking, even though there are continuing needs for us to walk that were outlined in the Introduction. As shown in the Background, the suburban environment has been tailored to suit the automobile at the expense of the practicability of walking from one place to another, often even when those places are in close proximity as shown by the precedent study of the Northgate Mall “neighborhood.” This all leads to the use of urban design projects—pedestrian spaces—in certain parts of sprawling suburbia, and the question for this paper then becomes how to design good pedestrian spaces. The answer distilled from design literature and precedent analyses is an incorporation of strategies and techniques—design principles—aimed at providing safety, comfort, and pleasure for the pedestrian.
Design literature covered a range of design concerns broad enough to fall under five categories—activity, automobile integration, context, experience, and scale—with some of those even having subcategories. From each of these areas of focus a design principle was drawn. Start the design process by considering the activities that it will support, and diagram those activities on the site. Allow the automobile and the pedestrian to mingle by designing streets and parking lots with features for both. The design should recognize the area’s physical and social contexts. The experiential qualities of aesthetics, comfort, and safety should be designed for. In terms of aesthetics, a high level of detail is important at the pedestrian scale, so buildings, pavement, and objects should have as much ornament, and surface pattern as possible. Comfort has both a physical and a social aspect. Design for physical comfort by providing shade, shelter, and furnishings; design for social comfort by using moveable seating and designing areas of a project that are intended to be either a stage or an edge. Design a safe space by not creating blind areas in which crimes can go on unseen. The design must use a pedestrian scaled module as outlined in the Literature Review in order to avoid deterring people from walking because they think the distance looks too great.
45 Urban designs reviewed in the Precedent Analysis verified the recommendations of the design literature. It became apparent that no one thing in the precedents ensured success, but that each precedent used a mixture of effects. Some design aspects seemed to rise to prominence. The precedents showed the importance of furnishings and of detailing the environment with ornament, and surface pattern and texture. Landscaping played a vital role in most of the precedents, with trees often being used for spatial definition. Another thing that the reviewed pedestrian spaces have in common is that they huddled up close to buildings and to the road. The precedents also varied widely in format showing the flexibility of pedestrian space, and of pedestrians themselves.
In summary, designing a good pedestrian space is not a simplistic affair, rather it involves a mixture of design ingredients. Those ingredients have been presented here as design guidelines. The precedents found herein provide good examples of these guidelines put into practice. This paper offers a starting point for the designer of pedestrian spaces and a general direction in which to proceed with design. For the author, the intent has been to put this knowledge to use in the suburbs in a commercial or retail district or edge city environment, but the principles outlined here can really be used anywhere there is an interest in or a need for a pedestrian space.
46 PART II: RE-INTEGRATING THE PEDESTRIAN IN SUBURBAN CINCINNATI
Colerain Township, in Hamilton County, Ohio, is a suburbanized area outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, that provides the ideal suburban conditions in which to implement a pedestrian oriented redevelopment. In Colerain Township, on Colerain Avenue is Northgate Mall, which until just recently was a four-anchor regional shopping mall. The mall is approximately 11 miles north of downtown Cincinnati, and only ½ mile south of a major highway. Commercial development extends along Colerain Avenue in both directions from the mall for about 4 miles to the south and 1 mile to the north. Beyond the commercial development on Colerain Avenue, the surrounding land is primarily residential development.
Figure 35: Hamilton County, Ohio, with Colerain Township highlighted.
47
Colerain History
Colerain Township was created in 1794 and is the largest and one of the oldest townships in the state of Ohio.72 Years earlier, in 1790, John Dunlap, who was from Coleraine, Ireland, established Ft. Coleraine, for which the township was named.73 Various villages and neighborhoods were established through the first half of the 19th Century. The roads then were all dirt, and the land was all farm land, and any commercial development was limited to just a couple of buildings at prominent intersections such as at Colerain Avenue (then Colerain Pike) and Galbraith Road. The earliest known post office was in 1835, the earliest doctor in 1869.74
Figure 37: Early 1900s
Figure 36: Fort Coleraine, the first settlement in Colerain Township.
Figure 38: Early 1900s The vary earliest “roads” were just trails established by markings placed on trees and the only practical way to travel them was on horseback. Around the 1830s, the state began establishing turnpikes, and established the Colerain, Oxford, and Brookville Turnpike which is 48 now known as Colerain Avenue.75 Another road that existed very early on is Galbraith road. The rest of the roads in the township were added one at a time in the townships early period, and then during the period of heavy growth developers would build roads for their residential neighborhoods.
The townships population surged during the 1950s and 1960s, going from under 8,000 in 1950 to over 28,000 in 1960 to just under 51,000 in 1970. After 1970 population growth dropped off precipitously, and as of the 2000 Census it is just over 60,000.76 One can speculate that the abrupt halt of population growth is largely due to the fact that a good portion of the township – close to half of it - is terrain in excess of 30% slope that is difficult to build upon. The 2000 census predictions suggest that population growth may surge again and that by 2030 there could be 55,000 more people in the township – almost double what it is now.77
The township has a comprehensive plan that it adopted in 2005 that it has made available on its website.78 The general message conveyed by the plan is that the township wants to maintain / improve its existing development pattern, that largely being single family detached homes, some multi-family structures, and commercial retail development along the Colerain Avenue “corridor”. Large office developments weren’t seen as a compatible use. Interestingly enough for this thesis, the comprehensive plan mentioned the desire for a town center type of development that would perhaps be representative of the township as a whole.79
Northgate Mall
Northgate Mall was built in 1972, at the tail end of the township’s strongest years of growth. It is typical of malls of its time – an enclosed pedestrian corridor with shops on either side and anchor stores at strategic points, all huddled together in the center of a very large parking lot. The mall property is 75 acres in size. Most of the mall is a single story structure, estimated to be 25 feet tall. The structures for the anchor tenants are two or more stories. There were four anchor tenants but recently one of those – JC Penny - moved to a more contemporary “lifestyle center” type development not even a mile away. The vacancy is expected to be filled by a major movie theater tenant.
49 There are several “outlots” on the site that are mostly occupied by restaurants, although there is also a bookstore, and there is an old movie cinema building that is presently being torn down.
Northgate Mall’s sales are right around $300 per square foot.80 This is poor when compared to the region’s most successful mall – Kenwood Mall – whose sales are around $500 per square foot.81
The shopping mall has undergone four “face lifts”. All of these were limited to the interior of the mall and were little more than cosmetic. The first renovation was in 1992 during which one of the mall corridor’s features – sunken seating areas – were removed. The most recent renovation occurred during 2006-2007 during which some contemporary light fixtures were installed, some areas of flooring were updated, and some architectural elements were added at certain locations in the mall corridor. Most importantly (in my opinion), a play area for children was added and has proven to be extremely popular. It is quite small, perhaps 25 feet wide and 60 feet long; it is often filled to capacity with children.
An extensive renovation of the mall to the tune of $40-50 million has been planned but has so far been delayed due to disagreements with the township trustees over financial matters.82 The mall still intends to put the plan into action but will do so only with its own funds.83 The consequence of this is that certain parts of the plan that the township desired may no longer happen. The main feature of the planned renovation is to add an outdoor “lifestyle center” component.84
Demographics
According for Feldman Properties, owner of Northgate Mall, in the 5, 10, and 15 minute drive ranges there are 152,210, 230,136, and 414,847 people, respectively, and the median household income is $52,122, $43,432, and $47,395, respectively.85 The population as of the 2000 census is 60,144, split nearly evenly between males and females.86 The population is 88% White, 9% Black, 1% Asian, and 0.01% other.87 Similar to trends at larger scales, the population is aging and the household population is decreasing.88
50 Northgate Mall competes with a couple of other regional shopping malls, as well as the newly opened lifestyle center development only a half mile to the north. The other malls include Cincinnati Mills and Tri-County Mall. Cincinnati Mills is only about 5 miles to the northeast, and it has always struggled, undergoing several changes in ownership. Another few miles to the east of Cincinnati Mills is Tri-County Mall, which is at a major intersection of interstate highways – I-75 and I-275.
At the county level, Hamilton County appears to be losing some residents to its neighboring counties – Butler County to the north, Warren County to the northeast, and Clermont County to the east. In the 2000-2006 period, Hamilton county lost 2.7% of its population while Butler gained 6.7%, Warren gained an impressive 26.8%, and Clermont gained 8.6%.89 Hamilton County can proudly and easily claim to have the most diverse population, with “only” 71% being White, while for Butler, Warren, and Clermont the figures are 90%, 92.5%, and 97% respectively.90 Hamilton County also has the lowest median income out of the four counties.91 Figure 39: Surrounding counties. 72 Colerain Township Revisited, page 2 73 Ibid, page 2 74 Ibid, 54, 55 75 Ibid, 56 76 http://www.coleraintwp.org/demographics.cfm 6/6/2008 77 http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html 6/6/2008 78 http://www.egovlink.com/colerain/docs/menu/home.asp 79 Ibid, 40. 80 http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/stories/2008/02/04/story11.html 81 ibid 82 ibid 83 ibid 84 ibid 85 http://www.feldmanmall.com/property-Northgate.html 86 http://www.coleraintwp.org/demographics.cfm 87 ibid 88 Comp plan page 2 89 quickfacts.census.gov 90 ibid 91 ibid
51 THE REDEVELOPMENT OF NORTHGATE MALL
This section will show the process of redeveloping the site from an automobile oriented state to a pedestrian oriented state.
Figure 40: The existing site conditions show a completely Figure 41: A diagram of important connections that automobile oriented environment. should be made between the site and the surrounding environment.
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Figure 42: A diagram showing the desired land use. An Figure 43: This jumble of lines shows the process of existing single family residential neighborhood to the resolving a new street grid that tries to preserve some of south is met by new, denser single family attached the existing buildings and make connections at housing on the site. A greenspace buffer zone sits important points at the edge of the site. between the new housing and the renovated mall. North of the renovated mall will be new mixed use (commercial and residential) buildings.
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Figure 44: The fully resolved street grid meets all of the Figure 45: The existing buildings to remain situated on important connection points, saves a good deal of the new street grid. existing building, and provides a convenient new route between Springdale Road and Colerain Avenue. The block size respects pedestrian distances by staying as close to 300’ x 300’ as possible.
54
Figure 47: The proposed site plan. A town square sits at the heart Figure 46: New buildings added to the site. of the renovated shopping mall. A pedestrian, bike, and recreation trail winds through the site, weaving a common thread through the diverse spaces. Parking is provided in a mix of structures, surface lots, and street side. Trees are an important part of the composition and are used to enhance or provide spatial definition.
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Figure 48: A rendering looking northward into the town Figure 49: A rendering looking west from Colerain Avenue. In square. Pedestrian furnishings, pavement patterns, gateway the distance to the left the single fammily attached dwellings elements, and plantings work together to define and can be seen, and in the distance to the right the renovated ornament the space. mall can be seen. As in Figure 48, furnishings, plantings, and pavement are vital to the pedestrian quality of the environment.
56 BIBLIOGRAPHY
"A Street for All Seasons." Architecture 89 (2000): 65. "AIA Communities by Design's 10 Principles for Livable Communities." American Institute of Architects. 21 Apr. 2008
57 Schmits, Adrienne. Creating Walkable Places : Compact Mixed-Use Solutions. Washington, D.C.: ULI-the Urban Land Institute, 2006. Southworth, Michael. "Reinventing Main Street: From Mall to Townscape Mall." Journal of Urban Design 10 (2005): 151-170. Taylor, Melissa, and James Carroll. The Changing Population in the U.S. The Council of State Governments. The Council of State Governments, 2002. 1-26. 21 Apr. 2008
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