Consuming an Urban Experience –Contemporary Applications of Pedestrianization and Public Space

Pedestrianization as a concept has evolved from the mid-twentieth century, when it was prescribed to address traffic congestion and suburban decentralization and revitalize urban retail districts across Europe, North America, and beyond. More contemporary iterations apply pedestrianization to a diverse array of planning goals. These include: public space and transportation; cultural and entertainment; tourism and placemaking; climate change and greening the city; emergency response and public health during the Covid-19 pandemic; and of course retail, which remains perennially present and is often intertwined with the aforementioned goals. In the mid-twentieth century, the pedestrian mall became a specific type of pedestrianization that retrofitted auto-centric retail streets by fully excluding automobile traffic and transforming the roadway into a pedestrian-oriented public space. Broadly, pedestrian malls were envisioned as the urban companion to the carefully curated pedestrian experience in suburban shopping centres, especially in North America. However, they were broadly considered a failure in North America and most have been redesigned to allow automobile traffic. In Europe, however, pedestrian shopping streets have persisted and many have expanded to encompass entire districts. The success of European pedestrianization schemes is often cited as justification for contemporary implementation, while simultaneously ignoring the underperforming North American examples. Contemporary applications of the pedestrianization concept also represent a more diverse array of goals and design interventions. Where mid-twentieth-century pedestrian malls were strongly associated with fully eliminating automobile traffic on primary retail streets in urban cores, today pedestrian street design interventions are applied to a broader cross-section of street types, including local residential and commercial streets. Another shift is in the scale of influence; mid-century conceptions of pedestrianization focused primarily on competition between the urban core and the often rapidly growing suburbs, contemporary proposals are focused on global competition between cities. The following chapter will first briefly outline contemporary ideas and debates on public space, then engage the twentieth-century history of pedestrianization, shift to examine the diverse array of contemporary implementation and describe it through three example cases from: Brooklyn, New York; Antwerp, Belgium; and Montréal, Canada, and conclude by synthesizing some of the variation and diversity among contemporary pedestrian street interventions, and looking towards the future.