Saving Walkable Urban Places

How do we preserve crucial walkable urban places? Robert Steuteville seeks to answer this question in a piece for CNU Public Square, referencing a new report called Reiminaging Cities: Disrupting the Urban Doom Loop from Cushman & Wakefield with Christopher Leinberger and Places Platform.

The report outlines the importance of Walkable urban places (WalkUPs) as “efficient economic engines” that generate 57 percent of GDP while only taking up 3 percent of land in 15 major metro areas studied by the authors.

For decades, these urban centers focused on office buildings as the driving force. “Using portfolio theory to rebalance real estate toward less office space (work), more play (culture, entertainment, retail), and more residential (especially for-sale housing) would shift these urban centers back to the positive economic track they were on prior to COVID, the report concludes.”

Key recommendations include reducing the amount of office space and increasing residential units via conversion and new construction, increasing the diversity of businesses and services, and adding more amenities geared toward entertainment and recreation.

The report calls our current ‘doom loop’ an ‘episodic’ one that can be rectified through zoning and regulatory reform and a shift to accommodating more diverse uses and schedules.