The ADRR

My oh my, how quickly fads can shift.

For nearly a generation, the idea of closing a Downtown shopping street to automobile traffic and turning it into a pedestrian mall had been strictly off the table, viewed as an unqualified failure in (American) city building that one would only revisit at the risk of professional ostracization.

Now, at the tail end of a pandemic in which the public right-of-way was repurposed so as to provide more room for social distancing and outdoor dining, it is once again in vogue (along with other long-maligned concepts like the superblock), with calls in some quarters for making such “experiments” permanent.

On one hand, this frustrates me, as it underscores the faddishness, dogmatism and groupthink that pervades the planning and urban design community. On the other, I am exhilarated by some of the opportunities that it presents, for I had never quite agreed with the received wisdom on the subject to begin with.