Our recent New Year’s Eve celebration in downtown Sarasota was a demonstration of what community is all about. This year’s events started at noon and included lots of activities for families and children. There were rides and amusements for young and old and there was lots of food being sold from street stands. In addition, nearly all of downtown’s restaurants and bars seemed to be open and were being heavily patronized. A number of retail stores were also open and were doing a brisk business. Downtown streets were seas of smiling faces.
These activities reminded me of the genius of successful cities and their characteristics. Henry and Suzanne Lennard have recently published a book called Genius of the European Square. It describes the characteristics of squares in large and small cities and what makes them function well for their citizens. I think Sarasota could do well to emulate these models.
A city needs a place for people to gather; where there are markets and shops to serve them; where people can sit and pause with focal points about which they can cluster; where there are eyes on the street to make people comfortable; which is a catalyst for civic engagement and which can generate social engagement; and allowing for festivity and dialogue. It should be human scaled, allow for mixed use, and pedestrianization.
Our Lemon Avenue Mall comes close to doing all of these things as was demonstrated on New Years Eve, but we can do better. Sadly, our culture has idealized suburbanization and isolated us from much of our community and its activities. We have created open space where few people dare go and have idealized it as “green space” which doesn’t really benefit our environment significantly and further contributes to our isolation even in the midst of clusters of people. There are much more beneficial ways of protecting our environment like reducing our denpendency on automobiles and using compact development to prevent urban sprawl. That will really protect our rural lands and our wildlife habitat.
But, let’s make our city as successful as it can be. The City of Sarasota has a heck of a start on being a place for people. Let’s work hard to make it even more attractive to our citizens and visitors by recognizing that it is people interacting with people that makes successful cities. So let’s make space for people in our lives – literally!
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