Would You Downgrade Vehicles’ Dominance On Downtown Streets?

Has the shopping mall taken over from Main Street as the “public realm” in America?

Seattle Architect Doug Kelbaugh isn’t ready to deny it, but it’s clear he doesn’t relish the idea. Unlike public streets, he noted Friday at a symposium on neighborhood revitalization, shopping malls are private places where you “check your constitutional rights at the door.”

Kelbaugh, an author and professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Washington, was one of the speakers at Eastern Washington University’s Summer Symposium, this year titled “A Sense of Place.”

Much of Friday’s discussion advanced a variety of urban planning and traffic engineering strategies that lead to higher-density housing patterns and discourage suburban sprawl, that cluster people rather than spread them out.

To Kelbaugh and others, a community needs a public realm - a commons, some would say - where citizens can meet and mingle. Those activities offer a defense against the kind of social isolation that leads to conflicts and makes solving conflicts difficult.

Rubbing shoulders with people of different walks of life doesn’t necessarily make you like or appreciate everyone, but it helps you understand others and it “makes people aware of the full spectrum of the human condition,” Kelbaugh said.

For such reasons, the volume and intensity of life on the sidewalk is a good way to gauge community health.

How does life on Spokane’s sidewalks look? Not so good, it seems.

“What Spokane has going against it,” said former Seattle mayor Charles Royer, another of the symposium speakers, “is the lack of a healthy looking downtown.”

In Portland, a city commonly credited with a vibrant urban core, officials started with a vision that valued pedestrians first, public transit second and automobiles only third.

The result, Royer said, is a walkable, pedestrian-friendly city with lots of street-level vitality and a strengthened sense of community - not to mention a positive national reputation.

If Spokane’s pedestrian activity is sparse, is that a concern to the people who live here? And if it is, are we willing to put cars third in order to put walking first?