^ Well I would rather have the people first, but then without park space we are back to reactive planning.
The key, as always, is to find the right balance between park space and competing land uses and to ensure that those park spaces created are of the highest quality. Clearly, park space in downtown is so lightly used currently, that some degree of programing improvements should help draw people into the existing spaces. As it stands now, those 90,000 downtown employees and 8,000 residents clearly don't use what exists.
That said, it is hard to envision downtown ever being so densely populated day or night that it will ever make use of all the land currently set aside as park space. Downtown, simply put, has way to much park space to use either today or in the future. Even the most cockeyed optimists would be hard pressed to imagine a downtown St. Louis in the next 20 years that demands all the parkland that currently exists.
So the question: Is it good proactive planning to spend money improving and creating downtown parkland when downtown is so swamped with parkland that it will likely never make use of what exists, let alone what is proposed (lid of I-70, OPO Square, BPV Plaza, riverfront park).
Consider the opportunity cost of improving the gateway mall:
The land under the mall could be use for development; the monies could be used for streetscaping, creation of the lid over I-70, new parking management technologies.
The land, not the space, is already there. To think about proactive planning you have to move beyond what the land use currently is and see what, in the grand scheme, would be the best use of the land.
If your goal Gatechie is to draw people into downtown, which is makes more sense, improving land currently earmarked as parkland that will likely never be used as such or developing some of the parkland to add more people downtown to ensure that the initial outlays to improve the quality of downtown parks were not a waste?
The key, as always, is to find the right balance between park space and competing land uses and to ensure that those park spaces created are of the highest quality. Clearly, park space in downtown is so lightly used currently, that some degree of programing improvements should help draw people into the existing spaces. As it stands now, those 90,000 downtown employees and 8,000 residents clearly don't use what exists.
That said, it is hard to envision downtown ever being so densely populated day or night that it will ever make use of all the land currently set aside as park space. Downtown, simply put, has way to much park space to use either today or in the future. Even the most cockeyed optimists would be hard pressed to imagine a downtown St. Louis in the next 20 years that demands all the parkland that currently exists.
So the question: Is it good proactive planning to spend money improving and creating downtown parkland when downtown is so swamped with parkland that it will likely never make use of what exists, let alone what is proposed (lid of I-70, OPO Square, BPV Plaza, riverfront park).
Consider the opportunity cost of improving the gateway mall:
The land under the mall could be use for development; the monies could be used for streetscaping, creation of the lid over I-70, new parking management technologies.
I'll argue the space is already there, we might as well make it a draw for people to come and the already resident population rather than wishing for more population before we can ever do anything.
The land, not the space, is already there. To think about proactive planning you have to move beyond what the land use currently is and see what, in the grand scheme, would be the best use of the land.
If your goal Gatechie is to draw people into downtown, which is makes more sense, improving land currently earmarked as parkland that will likely never be used as such or developing some of the parkland to add more people downtown to ensure that the initial outlays to improve the quality of downtown parks were not a waste?
)
