It took five long years for one hundred feet of Linden Street to be reborn as the Linden Living Alley in San Francisco, a city widely recognized for its innovative and cutting-edge urban design practices. Local planners and designers overcame a variety of bureaucratic hurdles over the course of five years to transform a small strip of the street into a space that attempts to reconcile the needs of automobiles with those of pedestrians and cyclists.
John King of the San Francisco Chronicle sees the setbacks faced by the Linden project as a quintessential example of the disconnect between creative visions of ideal urban settings and what actually manifests itself in the form of the built environment at the conclusion of construction.
"That's because when you look past the new trees and grasses, Linden Alley shows how difficult it is to transfer planning theory to real life," writes King.
