Word: skywalks
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...northern cities like Calgary, where the average winter temperature is 26.2 degrees F, the original, climate-mitigating rationale for skywalks was not unreasonable. What's wrong with being able to wander unbundled from office to store to parking garage in the middle of north-country January? "To be out of the weather," says Pat Huntington, general manager of the Saks Fifth Avenue store that is plugged into Cincinnati's 23-odd skywalk system, "is a tremendous feeling of security...
...very early on in the skywalk boom, weather was superseded by boosterism economics: elevated bridges came to be seen as prods for real estate development, quick fixes for tapped-out downtowns. Here and there they seemed to do the trick. The growth of the publicly owned Des Moines Skywalk System, which began in 1982, has indeed coincided with an economic revival of the city's downtown. Skywalks are not cheap: construction can run as much as $3,000 per linear foot. But developers can charge 5% to 10% rent premiums to tenants in towers plugged into the systems...
...shops are on the second story, and on the streets below there are long stretches of shopless, blank walls. Calgary has gone out of its way to retain street life (roving musicians and soapbox speechmaking are encouraged), yet even there, says James McKellar, a former Calgary planning commissioner, the skywalk system "kills and sterilizes ground-level activity." For a city to lure pedestrians off the streets, whatever the reason, may be suicidal in the long run. "The retail shop on the street is the key to a multi-use downtown," explains Jaquelin Robertson, former New York City planning commissioner...
...Central cities are now paying increasing attention to the pedestrian and his comforts. Spokane, continuing a development started for its Expo '74, is building a system of second-story walkways so that people can stroll among six city blocks without ever going outside; Minneapolis already has a similar skywalk. New York is chipping at its concrete canyons with vest-pocket parks, small oases of greenery and water amid the granite, glass and asphalt. Most U.S. cities have become aware of the humanizing influence of gardens, fountains, plazas and intimate shopping arcades-all a recovered legacy from Europe...