Boris, I must disagree. As an employee of an architecture firm that designs all new branches for a certain bank, I know that the suburban form of big bow stores and other buildings is not decided by local regulations, but is in fact generally what the store owner wants. The owner wants the lowest-common denominator, and the owner wants a very ordinary store.

Much more likely is that the Home Depot in Manhattan is a response to strong local regulations and very high land cost, and that Home Depot made an exception for the sake of having a store in Manhattan. But you won’t magically have better form by removing regulations. You may have smaller parking lots and less landscaping, but otherwise you’ll still have buildings, floating in parking lots, in shopping centers. The market has decided the form, and the form has bowed to commercial demands for big signs, easy auto access, and low overhead.

Why not? Any claims that suburban superstores can’t change are negated by my personal experience. I live in Manhattan, a 10-minute walk from a Home Depot which has none of the usual suburban amenities- standalone building, enormous parking lot. It is built inside a large building and looks nothing like your typical suburban Home Depot. Superstores can, and do, evolve, according to conditions. The problem is, outside of Manhattan the typical dumb parking requirements and other zoning laws force conformity and car-dependence.

I see Mathieu’s point about “place” intuitively and don’t understand what there is to disagree about. To see some recent conversions from a “dead zone” to “place” take a look at some new projects done by the NYC Dept. of Transportation.

I think that before developers began developing, places were created by the people that built them as they needed them. Now, developers create generic places that will appeal to a safe (as in guaranteed) population.

The reason that sprawl is so unappealing is not due to the lack of space, or even place. The issue with sprawl is that spaces are well defined and meant to be permanent. The affluence of sprawl demands this high level of definition. There are no vacant lots or unkept yards.

Yet the affluence is an illusion. Though the spaces are clean, maintained and landscaped, they are (with many exceptions) standardized. One landscape firms tends to a whole neighborhood of lawns. The traffic engineering handbook defines every road and parking lot in the country. Sprawl doesn’t lack canvass, it’s just all been painted with the same picture.

Sprawl is terrible because it shuns creativity in favor of conformity. Better to have something that looks nice than have something different.

This, of course, brings us back to the problem of the suburban Target. It can never become a place because Target will never let it. Places are special and Target has a brand to manage.

The way that corporate structures are set up, it would mean that a non-user of a space (the Target overlords) would have the final say over the space around it. The employees of that particular Target–even the management–couldn’t decide to paint a mural, or allow for public art displays.

Our built and social environments are indeed intertwined.

I can’t speak for Ethiopia because I have never been there, however from your description it sounds as if place is overcrowded, implying that there is not enough of it. It is the very opposite of the luxurious open spaces in the pictures I showed. That is not a problem with any of our modern sprawl cities. In fact crowds are what most place-oriented enterprises like shopping malls attempt to create.

Of course there will not be a lot of pedestrians moving through Target place in Cupertino right away because, as you understand, there are not many networks that have been created based on this possibility. It took time for La Défense to form its internal networks as well. But any city that begins its growth has very little traffic despite the fact that the network structures are already in place, and how are pedestrian networks to form if there is no pedestrian space? Place has to come before people, and people fill up a place with their creativity. This is how all traditional cities were built.

Of course, the reason I don’t believe such places will ever be activated enough to be safe is that most people will continue to drive around in their cars. And even if we were to convert the entire public right-of-way to free-form place, most people would continue to drive in cars. If you want an example of this, consider Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where there are far, far more pedestrians than cars, far fewer instances of any sort of traffic engineering, and almost no traffic laws. However, pedestrian life is utterly miserable, because the presence of cars is overwhelming.

There are many places in the world without traffic engineering. Consider the quality of pedestrian life they have.

If the whole street were safe, I would probably still walk on the sidewalk because they are safe, comfortable, wide enough to walk two abreast, and free from the occasional oncoming car. I like sidewalks, and I find them useful to urban life.

This doesn’t exist in a parking lot, where the ground is marked and sliced up into pre-defined parking spaces, and the lot is separated from the rest of the city by a grass berm with only a few small entrances. And for walking in the street, would you really prefer to walk single-file on a sidewalk if the whole street was safe?

Place is much bigger than what’s around the Target store. It has to exist from anything to anything in the city, connecting them so it is possible to move around freely. The place I designed in my example is not “around” the Target store. It is between the different buildings and it connects them.

Before traffic engineering no one thought of enticing people to stroll around or play in the street. It was just understood that you could do that there, and people used the space to do it amongst the many different things they could do.

If you approach urbanism from the perspective of creating certain behaviors or certain patterns, you are no different than the dogmatic planners who followed Le Corbusier’s prescriptions. You only want to engineer a different style of controlled behavior. The result of this for an increasing number of New Urbanist developments is that the neighborhoods are deserted of people.

“You do not need to remove cars to make a good place, you only need to remove the exclusivity for cars.” I would argue that parking lots fit this definition very well. They are for both cars and people. I learned how to ride a bike in a parking lot. I used to play roller hockey in parking lots. But that doesn’t make them places. In fact, the existence and uniform badness of parking lots seems to disprove your point entirely.

I am sympathetic to your idea that places are better when people are allowed to act freely in building and moving. But I disagree with your description of “place,” and I certainly disagree with your diatribe against sidewalks. I, for one, have no desire to walk down the middle of the street.