Could supermarket parking lots become public squares? or be re-designed as great public places in other ways?
From Vancouver’s Wendy Waters’ terrific blog All About Cities. She links to a piece on Citiwire.net by Neal Pierce who takes a fresh look at supermarket parking lots, conceived in the post WWII expansion period but now find themselves in a very different world. Take a fresh look at the Port Place Mall redevelopment from this perspective.
– Frank Murphy
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“Could supermarket parking lots become public squares?” What possible other answer could there be other than YES and NO!
YES, if we implement some pretty hefty political changes and pay attention. There are movements afoot: green fields, brown fields and gray fields. Gray fields ostensibly resurrect disused mall parking lots to better use. They are rare!
NO, because land use is everything: public land-use always ends up at the back of the queue.
“Time is money” goes the old saying. Well, so is land!
For years a vast Safeway and parking lot languished empty on the corner of Kingsway @ Knight, Vancouver. Then about three or four years ago it was redeveloped. Unfortunately it was done so in a brutalist manner not unique to Vancouver’.
The empty parking lot could have become, in part, an introspective pedestrian focus shielded from Kingsway, Vancouver’s busiest, noisiest street.
Instead a tower looms over a VPL branch opening onto, arguably, one of the most dangerous pedestrian corners in the city and the rest of the space is, well, developed.
There is an obtuse reason, unlikely to attract the public’s, or indeed, its elected decision-makers for this!
Way back, I dunno, a couple of hundred years ago ordinary folk would keep a few sheep and cattle and grow a few veggies to “keep the wolf from the door.” In those days common folk had the run of common land.
Then the price of wool skyrocketed: not unlike the oil mania today.
Needless to say this was not lost on the moguls! The outcome was common folk were branded lazy and ignorant giving excuses for the ruling “elite” to unilaterally close off traditional pasture lands: THE CLOSURE LAWS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
No one pays attention to the “closures” today yet they impinge on our lives significantly.
The Mexico revolution, at the beginning of the last century, brought about an unusual change in the opposite direction: the ejido commons were created. It is not beside the point that NAFTA puts the ejido system under severe threat now.
Our Nanaimo assembly wharfs present a magnificent waterfront opportunity, here.
But if a multiplex is approved to erupt on the site we can only chalk it up yet another grossly obscene low an ignorant, mistake to which a degenerate Nanaimo mayor and council will sink.
They are congenitally incapable of vision or leadership!
Degenerate, adj : “inferior: in a condition that is worse than an original or previous state”