Designing a New Downtown – Downtown Superior Case Study

Designing a New Downtown Webinar July 25 10am Downtown Superior

Designing a New Downtown Webinar July 25 10am Downtown Superior

Downtown Superior was the setting for an innovative new workshop Downtown Colorado, Inc. (DCI) hosted in partnership with member MIG, Inc. Economic Development directors and specialists, design professionals and developers enjoyed a tour of the new Superior Downtown development with an eye towards downtown placemaking, and assessing how the urban design and features of a downtown integrate with the local business needs.

 

Jill Mendoza, CEcD, Economic Development Manager for the Town of Superior kicked off the day with a brief history of the development project that was conceived of  nearly 10-years ago and that is finally coming to full fruition. After that, Mark De La Torre, Director of Denver Operations for MIG and Bill Shrum, Director of Operations for DCI introduced urban planning language and the methodology for the workshop, Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City and Guy Debord’s Dérive.

 

In his foundational work, Lynch describes how cities are comprised of five key elements; paths, nodes, edges, districts, and landmarks. Combinations of these features can describe nearly any urban setting and each comes together in unique ways to create memorable places. Debord and the Situationists used dérive, or drifting, to methodologically create a psychogeographic map of 1960’s Paris. This technique has participants drift through a space, allowing themselves to be drawn in directions based on how they feel, noting those feelings and connecting them to the five elements described above to sketch a map of their experience of the city.

 

After a brief guided tour of the intentional design features in Downtown Superior, participants were able to dérive themselves, documenting their feelings and observations as they were drawn throughout the Downtown Superior planned area. Reconvening for lunch, Mark De La Torre and Jay Renkens, AICP, Principal and Chief Practice Officer with MIG, led participants through key tenets and best practice examples of downtown placemaking and solicited key observations of the dérive through Downtown Superior. Key takeaways and analysis from this workshop included the relationship of new and locating businesses into the Downtown Superior setting, the integration of design features downtown to the commercial and residential experience, and suggestions for the Town of Superior to further leverage their local assets and improve placemaking elements to create a unique, thriving downtown setting.

 

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SUPERIOR

 

  • Focus on generating a stronger civic presence in the downtown.
  • Make it easy for businesses and residents to plug into events and marketing initiatives.
  • Coordinate messaging + wayfinding to drive people to the parking locations and the downtown garage.
  • Add pedestrian wayfinding in the garage to make it easier to find the right path quickly.
  • Coordinate activation, aggregating events into smaller areas, to help the area maintain a sense of activity despite outlying areas still under construction.
  • Add a public art program from the beginning of the downtown area to demonstrate the importance of the arts.
  • Consider lenient sign and facade codes for downtown to allow for a more creative feel with public art and more welcoming or signature pieces, or even landmarks.
  • Add flexibility for mixed use retail spaces to accommodate different business needs and sizes.
  • Consider the costs of sound attenuation and requirements that may have a chilling effect on new businesses.
  • Consider how to mitigate costs and restrictions on new businesses located on the first floor of residential buildings.
  • Present the retail opportunities and downtown space as an amenity that drives higher property values and desirability.
  • Market the downtown itself, Downtown Superior, as the destination rather than a particular business as the anchor. Make the whole district worth visiting and present it as such.

A valuable takeaway: Create spaces that capture people’s time and market that experience. When people spend their time in a public space, they will inevitably participate in retail, restaurants, and services nearby.

 

See the photos from the Downtown Superior Design Workshop!

 

Additional References:

 

Lynch’s elements from Image of the City:

 

Paths. Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves. They may be streets, walkways, transit lines, canals, railroads. 

Edges. Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer. They are the boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls.

Districts. Districts are the medium-to-large sections of the city, conceived of as having two-dimensional extent, which the observer mentally enters “inside of,” and which are recognizable as having some common, identifying character.

Nodes. Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling.

Landmarks. Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external. They are usually a rather simply defined physical object: building, sign, store, or mountain. 

 

Guy Debord’s concept of Dérive. 

“A playful technique for wandering through cities without the usual motives for movement (work or leisure activities), but instead the attractions of the terrain, with its “psycho-geographic” effects“(Mueller, 1958)

“The search for an encounter with otherness, spurred on in equal parts by the exploration of pockets of class, ethnic, and racial difference in the postwar city”

An attempt to find where “individual desire and architectural morphology might coincide” (McDonough, 2009)

 

To conduct a dérive in your community, consider the following prompts:

  • What individual desire caused you to interact with the architecture?
    • Ex. The shade on this side of the street made me want to cross and walk along that sidewalk.
  • What element of city image did you engage with?
    • Ex. We walked along a path towards a large building, a landmark.
  • Do you think there are any connections between the elements of the city and how you feel?
    • Ex. I noticed that several paths all end at the largest building in the area.

 

 

 

A big thanks to MIG, Inc. and Downtown Superior for making this workshop a success!