| Description |
Downtown Salt Lake City is home to some of the largest city blocks and widest streets in the nation. One must walk the length of over two football fields to get from one block to the next. For comparison, it takes the average person less than half that time to get from one block to the other in Portland, Oregon. Nine Portland blocks could easily fit within one Salt Lake City block. Such basic elements of Salt Lake City's built environment have made it one of the least connective, and unwalkable grid-based cities in the nation. Designed a century before the rise of the automobile, Salt Lake City was unwittingly built to be auto-centric. Today, it can be a hostile environment for people to walk, ride a bike, or use public transit. The modern city is all about connections. Underutilized midblock secondary circulation areas - better known as alleys, back streets, and midblock paths can be reimagined and redesigned as places for people. By reactivating these overlooked, neglected paths, they transform into valuable community assets - connecting people to places, and connecting people to each other. These streets are a public good - a stage where life unfolds. For the social, physical, and economic health of the city, these downtown midblock paths can be reimagined and reactivated as a vibrant social place, rather than simply a channel for automobile traffic. This project explores the benefits that pedestrianizing our midblock pathways offer to our communities, environment, economy, resiliency, and overall health and social well-being. An overview of the history, theory, local context, and arguments for reactivating these corridors as public spaces are presented. A literature review, followed by five local case studies, and assessments forms the intellectual framework on how to think about pedestrianizing midblock pathways to better set geographical precedents. Reactivating these spaces as public spaces will significantly increase our access to public green space, and support third place-level social cohesion and community-building. From this overarching investigation, a series of recommendations, best practices, and findings are proposed to help pedestrianization succeed in our underutilized midblock secondary circulation areas, such as the alleys, back streets, and midblock corridors of downtown Salt Lake City. |
