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Figure 6.1
Public space in downtown Charlotte, NC.
A controversial street exhibition promoting
vegetarianism took over the center city sidewalk at
lunchtime in the summer of 2003, mingling with 
hot-dog stands. Many people were upset by these
images, but the demonstrators were exercising their
democratic rights in public space.
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Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol
using public–private partnerships to revitalize, and in
some cases rebuild inner city areas (see Figure 6.2).
These redevelopment efforts utilize the same formula
of high-density mixed-use projects, often with a
major emphasis on housing, set out on traditional
urban block patterns. Sometimes the projects involve
the demolition or major restructuring of 1960s era
urban highways to return lost civic space to
pedestrian use.
The second progressive trend in America concerns
the sites of old and out-of-date shopping malls and
commercial areas that are reinventing themselves as
new mixed-use districts, even town centers in minia-
ture (see Figure 6.3). As this process continues, the
emphasis will still be on shops and offices, but these
new centers will include a wider range of uses includ-
ing civic buildings like libraries and police stations,
plus a lot of residential units. A recent book
published by the Urban Land Institute (ULI),
Transforming Suburban Business Districts
, sets out the
parameters and opportunities for this suburban
restructuring (Booth et al., 2002). Similar issues are
examined in 
Grayfields into Goldfields
published
by the Congress for the New Urbanism (2002).
The Lindberg Center in Atlanta illustrated in
Figure 2.15 is one good example of this increasingly
common trend.
Third, and the most extensive trend of the four in
America, will be the creation of new centers in the
so-called ‘edge-burbs,’ the newest frontiers of subur-
ban expansion (McIlwain, 2002: p. 41). A report by
the Brookings Institution illustrated how the pop-
ulation of edge-burbs grew at more than 21 percent
during the 1990s. In comparison, existing suburbs
enlarged their populations by about 14 percent, and
center cities by about 7 percent (Lucy and Phillips,
2001, in McIlwain: p. 43). The trend for retrofitting
older suburban centers to meet the lifestyle expecta-
tions of residents is extending to the design of new
centers around the periphery. Examples can be found
around the edges of most large cities, and our pre-
vious example of Birkdale Village in Huntersville,
North Carolina, 15 miles north of Charlotte is a case
in point (see Plate 5). Even in Portland, Oregon,
where an urban growth boundary was established to
direct growth to infill and city center sites, most
development is occurring at the urban periphery.
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES