A Plan to Create Dense Urban Centers Along the Light Rail
Posted on 12. Aug, 2010 by Taz in Featured, News
Taz Loomans is one of several guests bloggers being featured this week on LRB. Taz is everywhere these days. Maybe you’ve read her blog about sustainable building practices and community-oriented design in Phoenix, or maybe you’ve seen pictures of her fabulous Places, Spaces and Faces community dinners on Facebook. Either way, we love what Taz is doing to help make Phoenix a better place to live.
Have you heard about the Station Area Plan that the City of Phoenix, along with the Stardust Center and the Arizona State University School of Sustainability are working on for the Light Rail Corridor? They’re applying for a $3 Million grant from the Federal Housing and Urban Development Department to develop these Station Areas all along the light rail.
The Station Areas are planned to be these dense urban centers, neighborhoods unto themselves. The plan is to provide housing, shopping and other amenities to support thousands of people living within a quarter mile of a light rail station.
According to Kevin Kellogg, the Urban Laureate with the Stardust Center, it will “really (be) like chakras, there’s a vibratory center, which sounds like vibrant urban centers. They’re connected by energy paths and that’s the train.” The first of these ‘chakras’ is planned to be developed at the Osborn Station, (Tony’s adopted station).
What a wonderful way to define our urban core, finally a way to make place in Phoenix! I’m visualizing each ‘Station Neighborhood’ having it’s own character, it’s own feel, depending on the types of businesses, the types of buildings and scale and so forth very much like other dense cities that are made up of distinct but connected neighborhoods.
Instead of saying ‘meet me on the corner of Osborn and Central’ we’ll more likely be saying, meet me two blocks west and one block south of the Osborn Station. Our city will no longer be defined by the grid like it has been in the past. It may finally have a third dimension to it, some depth, an additional defining characteristic besides the easy-to-drive-on grid.
I am very much hoping that the City, Stardust and School of Sustainability collaborative receives the HUD grant to develop these Station Areas. Phoenix is so ready for this kind of transformation and a shift in thinking. Instead of endlessly adding onto our simple and impersonal grid, we can now concentrate on giving a soul to our urban core.
Paddington Station in London (Photo credit: Taz Loomans)
5 Responses to “A Plan to Create Dense Urban Centers Along the Light Rail”
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Derek Neighbors
15. Aug, 2010
The plan sounds interesting and building community along transportation lines is desperately needed, but your assessment of the grid is simply wrong.
One of the most “urban” areas in the world Manhattan is a giant grid. One could argue that much of its effectiveness has been it’s simple layout on a grid.
To try to draw the conclusion is that because Phoenix is laid out as a grid is why there is no urban density or character is patently false.
ropyro
16. Aug, 2010
@Derek — I don’t see that anyone was directly faulting the grid layout of Phoenix as the reason for a lack of density. What I gathered was that the writer was saying that more dimension is a good step toward adding more character/identity which will be a step in continuing to build an urban core. Building areas that can be referred to by more than just cross-streets will remove the daily consciousness of the grid itself and will be a great step toward emphasizing the spaces contained in the grid — thus developing a more personal, character-filled way of viewing the city. While your point about Manhattan is well-made, there are plenty of cities with metro systems that don’t refer to all there stops by street name. The DC Metro, The Paris Metro, The London Metro — none of them refer to their stops as cross-streets. Any only some of the NYC Metro stations use street names.
sean horan
16. Aug, 2010
Derek, the problem is not that we are laid out in a grid–it’s that the grid dominates. Unlike major cities, Phoenix is where people say they live on an intersection, not in an actual neighborhood.
Kelly
16. Aug, 2010
Which is more evocative: Latitude：48.85822111955489 Longitude：2.294340133666992 — or, “The Eiffel Tower” ?
lare clark
19. Sep, 2010
Taz, I like the way you think. Integrated and differentiated design for living will make the central core a delightful, livable place where people can meet and do the things they need and desire. Having the community at the center of the design process is essential for this to develop properly. .