Tacoma Urbanist
Jan. 14, 2008 at 12:33am
University Place to Make The Decision Whether to Become a Functioning City
University Place is now holding public meetings to determine whether they will go through with constructing a Town Center or not.
Our friend Erik Emery, and Tacoma Theater extraodinaire put the matter so poinently:Now that University Place has scrapped it's third town center developer, I read that they are holding a Town Hall (but where will they hold it? ... just kidding) to talk about it.
Naming a number of series of suburban housing developments and a few strip malls a city does not make it function as one.
In unusually frank terms the TNT suggests "failure is not an option":
The City of University Place is struggling – emphasis on struggling – to create a genuine downtown of its own with the $250 million Town Center project. It dropped the project’s developer earlier this month after a series of disagreements. Now it must find another. Failure is not an option: Town Center remains a visionary initiative that would be of immense benefit to University Place.
Here's a map of University Place:
sWhat percentage of the populace can easily walk to a majority of the things they need everyday?
What is the walkability score for UP? (Take the test for where you live)
Answer: even City Hall of University Place only has a walkability score of 68/100. As a comparison, Tacoma City Hall has a walkability score of 100.
It comes down to: what does University Place want for its future. Do they want life to be more than travelling by automobile for utilitarian anonymous shopping encounters at the nearest strip mall? As much as Tacomans enjoy the public commenters from University Place who travel to Tacoma City Council each week, perhaps some sort of city center to UP could increase the interest in civic issue sufficient for them to attend UP council meetings.
So the choice comes down to:
1) Start doing the hard work of creating some sort of common urban areas for civic life to arise; or
2) Forever relegate University Place to the status of an Edge City:
They're called suburban business districts, major diversified centers, suburban cores, minicities, suburban activity centers, cities of realms, galactic cities, urban subcenters, pepperoni-pizza cities, superburbia, technoburbs, nucleations, disurbs, service cities, perimeter cities, peripheral centers, urban villages, and suburban downtowns but the name that's now most commonly used for places that the foregoing terms describe is "edge cities."
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A ongoing conversation to make Tacoma a better to live and work through better urban design.
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-Erik B.
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