A Historical Inquiry into the Failure of Downtown Eugene's Pedestrian Mall Strategy to Revitalize the Retail Core, 1971-2002
Loading...
Date
2021-09-13
Authors
Shrestha, Subik
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
“Downtown” and its revitalization have been among the most prominent issues for post-war American urbanism scholars. Of importance to this research are the federal government’s institution of urban renewal in 1954 to revitalize the declining parts of the central city areas and the local governments’ incorporation of the “pedestrian mall” strategy in the 1960s and 1970s. The downtown pedestrian malls successfully facilitated the downtown core revitalization in these two decades. However, several of them began to fail in the 1980s, continuing in the following decades. This research examines two questions through a historical study of downtown Eugene, Oregon. First, why did the retail center facilitated by the pedestrian mall begin to decline in the 1980s and eventually fail by the early-2000s? Second, in addition to demolition and reconstruction, what other design and planning-related processes did the urban renewal project experience?
The four major fields of inquiry comprising the literature research framework are urban history, urban morphology (Conzenian approach), space syntax, and urban economic/urban retail theories. The research incorporates a Mixed-methods Research Design, including archival research, interviews, space syntax analysis, mapping/spatial analysis, and statistical analysis. These literary and methodological frameworks examine the following urban morphological components: (1) building morphology, (2) retail business structure, (3) relationship between the mall and the built form, and (4) influential historical/socio-political forces.
Among the many reasons associated with the Eugene mall, the prominent ones are related to the drastic and sudden alteration to the existing built fabric, mall’s design and planning, spatial configuration, small business dislocations, the project’s planned and inflexible nature, disregard to downtown housing, failure of parking garages, and growth of outer-city areas. However, positive stories like the renewal agency’s efforts to facilitate the small businesses or the involvement of downtown merchants and the local community in the process are also central to the mall’s story. Additionally, in the later phase of the mall’s existence, the retail core experienced a shift in approach by the city and the renewal agency from a retail-centric approach to preserving the existing fabric and attracting diverse residential and commercial projects.
Description
Keywords
architectural morphology, post-war American urbanism, space syntax, urban history, urban morphology, urbanism