VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

Cities need to reinvent themselves by reimagining their public places into vibrant nodes to attract private development that supports social equity, environmental sustainability, and livability, A livable city requires livable streets, particularly streets located in the downtown historic district that define the city’s identity. Calgary is developing a streetscape master plan for the reimagination of Stephen Avenue as a step towards redefining the identity of its downtown area. The distinctive character and heritage value of Stephen Avenue resides in sandstone and brick buildings of its late-nineteenth-century retail streetscape. The challenges posed by a slowing economy of the oil industry and the city’s energy sector since 2014 coupled with physical deterioration, social disorder, and very high street front vacancy rates in the earlier part of 2019 prompted the need to rescue Stephen Avenue and leverage it for downtown revitalization. From pedestrianizing the avenue in the early 1970s to the reintroduction of cars in the mid-90s, Stephen Avenue is currently being reinvented as a livable street by rolling out “the red carpet”, widening and extending it westwards to consolidate it as downtown connector for a complete public space network and change the perception of the street to a premier center for arts, culture and commerce. The paper revisits the reasons behind the decline of the livable street while examining the logic behind extending and branding the street to “the Avenue”. The paper argues that although such a strategy may position the street to success it effaces symbolic attachments of the city to its historical roots that relate back to processes of prairie urban development including orientation towards the railway, a gridiron plan, and spatial specialization. Rescuing a livable street by putting into the spotlight and rolling out the red-carpet risks reaping unfavorable effects of branding and aesthetization.