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Placemaking
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Placemaking is one of the four central themes of the recently unveiled Milwaukee Downtown Plan. We took a look at where one can find place in downtown Milwaukee currently on an average summer day.
“First life, then spaces, then buildings—the other way around never works.” – Urban Architect Jan Gehl
Placemaking is NOT: Imposed from above; design-driven; overly accommodating of the car; homogenous; static; gentrification; privatization; a cost-benefit analysis; monolithic development
Source: http://streetswiki.wikispaces.com/Placemaking
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You’ve left out arguably Milwaukee’s best street and best place – Brady Street. I’m not sure the city has another true pedestrian place quite like it… active all hours, alive with shops, restaurants, bars, and cafes. There’s many lessons to be learned here – a well defined street edge, a robust and ever-changing physical public realm, an authentic historical building stock alongside fairly nice new construction (though a little faux-historic in my opinion, no need for that stuff), etc…
Overall I think it’s the intensely human scale that animates the street. None of that could be possible without the fine-grained building texture, slow traffic, narrow streets, and generous sidewalks. Now imagine if you didn’t have the mono-lithic, terribly destructive development at the East end (the street-killing strip mall)? Our best street could be even better for another block or two.
Great topic to discuss, and very heartening to see the MKE plan taking on this subject. It’s high time we start healing our battered infrastructure, and while doing so, create a physical environment capable of producing real ‘place.’
@Chris Yes, Brady St. is clearly one of Milwaukee best ‘places’ if not the best (I like the Cathedral Square area as much), but we were kind of (for the most part) trying to focus on the area that the downtown plan focuses on.
Placemaking would appear to involve lots of umbrellas…
I kid. I love that Milwaukee, on the whole, is paying more and more attention to creating places that people want be see and be seen in, linger in, and perhaps live and work in. Couldn’t agree more with the Jan Gehl quote.
@Joe True. Capturing the essence of ‘place’ is somewhat difficult to do. And Jan Gehl is so on point.
Place is a difficult thing to define. To me Uhle’s is a place trapped in a world of non-places. Another place that comes to mind is the old Benjy’s II, Buckleys? It’s not hip in the sense that scensters are there, but it feels real. Yuppies live there, work there, and relax there. It’s kind of the other side of Cathederal Square. Can one bar on one block constitute a “place”?
D’nardo
@Colucci I too wondered about Buckley’s. You know I always see people sitting at that corner, and although it isn’t the most pedestrian friendly street (hopefully soon), people do seem to like it.