Downtown Barriers

I hope to get around to re-reading Death and Life by Jane Jacobs, but one of its key points--and one that really changed how I view cities--is the concept of barriers that prevent the flow of people and commerce.

Barriers can be literal, physical barriers, like a building, a highway, a wall, or a river, or they can be other spacial effects that just prevent people from going somewhere. For example, super-blocks without any sidewalk-facing businesses will kill pedestrian traffic going through, even if there are wide, well-maintained sidewalks and appealing areas on both sides of the super-block.

I've noticed in many small- and medium-sized cities, the downtowns are islands cut off from the rest of the city by barriers. Some of these barriers are left-overs from the industrial era, when many cities had an industrial ring around the commercial core. Some are natural geography like rivers. And, still others are limited-access highways or other results of poor urban planning since the demise of the industrial rings.

As an example, I threw together a map of the barriers around downtown Scranton. Institutional barriers are orange, a housing project is yellow, and industrial areas are red. There are also rivers/bridges and railroad tracks.

I also made a rough map of the central commercial districts, including downtown and the mixed-use residential/commercial corridors in the surrounding neighborhoods. If you overlay the two maps, you see that the barriers cut off all the nearby mixed-use corridors from downtown.

A few points about this:

1. Both downtown and the nearby commercial districts suffer for this. People don't flow from one to the other, as they don't view them as connected. They probably don't even really how close they are.
2. This divide between downtown and the neighborhoods can cause a political backlash, where downtown is seen as not for the citizens but for the businesses. In some cities, the downtown vs. neighborhood tension is high, and money spent improving downtown is viewed as a waste (even when it's not a white elephant project.)
3. Efforts to introduce mixed-use areas downtown (e.g. in the SAPA plan), while maybe a nice idea, would be better met by bridging the gap between downtown and the existing mixed-use areas nearby. Those areas already have residential amenities like groceries, laundromats, etc., which will take a long time to sprout around 1 or 2 apartment buildings. It's a more evolutionary approach, and allows for more varied densities than just apartments right downtown.

In a fairly stagnant city like Scranton, while the commercial corridors are very close to downtown, there probably still isn't nearly enough commercial or residential demand to simply rezone the areas in between and watch it fill in. Maybe if you just picked one to focus on.


So, how to economically break these barriers? If I have any readers, and they have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.