Every city and town are formed by its neighborhoods, districts, corridors, and its downtown. Each of these place types range from a more urban extreme, such as downtown, towards its more suburban, rural, or natural boundaries. And, each of these include a broad spectrum of public and private functions and places.
Looking in more detail, each neighborhood has its own set of more urban centers, general areas, suburban, and rural edges. For example, in my San Diego neighborhood, our center is the 100% shopping corner with coffee shops, boutiques, bars, mixed-use buildings and bus stops. And, my neighborhood boundary is formed by canyons and Balboa Park. In between are a variety of housing types ranging from garden apartments, bungalow courts, and small lot homes nearer the center to large lot homes along the canyon edges.
Single-use districts are places of industry, education, and regional institutions. These include airports, hospitals, and military bases. I tend to put suburban sprawl in these single-use districts with their ubiquitous pods of housing and strip centers, and nary shall the twain meet.
A city’s corridors are either natural, such as rivers, beaches and protected habitats, or urbanized, such as railways and thoroughfares. Thoroughfares may link one side of the city to the other, or one side of a neighborhood to another, and often change character as they transition from downtown, through older streetcar neighborhoods, and finally to a city’s suburban edge.
These thoroughfare corridors are made up of two main elements: centers at key intersections and those segments in between. Thoroughfares may range from well-connected primary streets to less-connected secondary streets. Their centers may range from more intense vertical mixed-use, on at primary cross streets, to less intense horizontal mixed-use at secondary street intersections. A corridor’s intensities and patterns depend upon if they have service alleys and lanes or not, and/or if they have rigid gridiron pattern, a curvilinear network, or are auto collecting arterials in a dendritic hierarchy of streets from freeways to cul-de-sacs.
All of which means that context matters.
Using place type elements begins a context-sensitive approach to place-making allows for both understanding the existing conditions, such as discerning if the site is on a primary avenue in a downtown neighborhood or on a secondary street in a suburban residential district, as well as being able to plan for the most appropriate design intervention if it is located in an older streetcar neighborhood with rear alley access. And with that said, a well-connected street will change its character over many miles.
In short, general thoroughfare types range from Highways (connecting regions), to Boulevards (connecting cities), to Avenues (connecting neighborhoods), to Streets (connecting blocks), and then to Alleys (connecting lots). Each of these support a variety of transit, bicycle, pedestrian, car facilities. By understanding a corridor via its place and street type proponents can use this context-sensitive approach to retrofitting our auto-dominated streetscapes, as well as to explaining changes to local stakeholders and decision-makers (I hope…).