Word: urbanism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Back in the 1960s, when spick-and-span, won't-the-future-be-fab urban schemes were still regarded with automatic enthusiasm by almost everyone, and when suburban malls were suddenly sucking shoppers away from central cities, the idea seemed perfect: build enclosed bridges -- skywalks! -- between the upper stories of downtown office buildings, stores and hotels, and nobody will ever have to go outdoors at all. Fortunately, most such future-a-go-go notions of the era -- moving sidewalks or 300-story apartment towers -- never came to much...
...century Egyptian Building, nearly obliterating a carved bas-relief frieze. But aesthetics is not the biggest problem. Skywalks are, in most places most of the time, pseudo-sensible amenities. They are artifacts of an earlier, 1964 World's Fair era, when convenience -- insulation from nature and from the urban hurly-burly -- was the great American goal, neurotically pursued. Skywalks pull pedestrians off the streets year round, rain or shine, hot or cold. Inside their hermetic world, urban dwellers are deprived of much of the richness of the city. "Cities are places where people are drawn together to experience one another...
...some fundamental ways skywalks are more perniciously anti-urban than the shopping malls they are intended to compete against. Good malls, like city streets, encourage lingering, serendipity; skywalks, however, are pedestrian freeways, streets distilled to the strictly utilitarian function of providing transit from Point X to Point Y, no detours allowed. In skywalks, there is none of the traditional city's invigorating mix of commerce and leisure, businesspeople and loiterers. "The street is the way of democracy," says Richard Maschal, architecture critic for the Charlotte Observer. "The Overstreet Mall system creates a biracial society." Sam Bass Warner Jr., a Boston...
...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. "It is the life and character of the city. No one goes to Europe," he adds, "to walk along skywalks." Indeed, the profound urban lessons Americans have recently learned, in part, from Europe -- the importance of preserving old buildings, the singular pleasures of the piazza -- are at odds with the skywalk epidemic...
...joke is no laughing matter for Australians, who find themselves alternately pleased and troubled by a $6.4 billion Japanese plunge into Australian real estate over the past three years, primarily in urban hotels and shoreline properties, and by a 48% upsurge, to 215,600, in Japanese visitors in 1987. Last February, for the first time, Japanese arriving in Australia outnumbered tourists from any other country. According to a report by Lloyds Bank, 70% of land earmarked for development on Queensland's Gold Coast, a 25-mile strip of sun and fun, is controlled by Japanese interests...