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Tampa Has Designed A Neighborhood That Mimics Barcelona’s Las Ramblas

Why One City In Car-obsessed Florida Is Prioritizing Pedestrians

02-12-21

By Nate Berg

Read More: https://www.fastcompany.com/90603909...ng-pedestrians

Quote:

When Jeff Vinik bought the Tampa Bay Lightning and its NHL arena in 2010, he got a couple of extra pieces of land as part of the deal. Like the arena, which is surrounded by parking lots and cut off from the rest of the city’s downtown by an expressway, the other lots were similarly isolated in a part of town that had seen better days. It was something of a dead zone. But it was also a blank slate. Vinik began acquiring more lots in the area, and after years of planning and construction, a transformation is nearing completion.

- More than 5 million square feet of development is underway across 56 acres, with 10 new buildings rising, including housing, offices, and retail. They’re all connected by a new central corridor that prioritizes pedestrians. Developed by a partnership between Vinik and Cascade Investment, the investment fund owned by Bill Gates, the project is named after that central spine, Water Street, with the hope of making it a new urban center in the car-oriented city. --- “The goals were ambitious from the beginning, to see this project as a catalyst to redefine urban life in Tampa and also to use the property as a way to stitch together what had been very disconnected portions of downtown,” says Brad Cooke, a vice president at Strategic Property Partners, the project’s developer. “It was a unique opportunity because we didn’t really have to displace anything or anybody.”

- In a way, the project is taking the area back to its early 20th-century roots, according to architect David Manfredi of the design firm Elkus Manfredi, which led the project’s planning. “[Back then], it was a residential neighborhood. It had a fine grid of streets and alleys, like you would expect, but it all disappeared,” Manfredi says. “It was really the introduction of the interstate highway system that cut it off from the rest of the city, and all that grid disappeared. Except for a few important streets.” --- Part of the planning process was a complete redesign of the street grid to make it the area’s central corridor leading to a waterfront park and connecting to the hockey arena, a history center, and the convention center. The plan also involved breaking apart the superblocks that had formed in the area since the 1950s.

- Elkus Manfredi, along with the landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand, reconfigured the grid to be more easily accessible on foot, with smaller blocks and generous space for pedestrians. The centerpiece of this effort is the 45-foot-wide section on Water Street based on the Dutch planning concept of the woonerf. --- This central spine will feature many of the project’s new buildings and ground-floor retail, including a grocery store that’s opening at the bottom of the first residential buildings, a two-tower, 420-unit project designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The pedestrian-focused space includes rows of live oak trees, outdoor seating, and shade structures on a winding promenade inspired by spaces such as Las Ramblas in Barcelona. As one of the most famous urban corridors in the world, that’s a high bar, and Manfredi says pulling off something similar is far from guaranteed.

.....

https://i.imgur.com/xIBiowy.png

https://i.imgur.com/sCcHkZf.png

https://i.imgur.com/wUQRfHQ.png

That comparison is offensive.

Hah haha

Still , urbanistic design efforts are a good thing

The comparison isn't off if it's just that half a road is pedestrianized.

The district overall appears to be a good addition to Tampa's urban core and has some nice aspects. Obviously it's not similar to central Barcelona in any way.

Quote:

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K (Post 9189441)

Why One City In Car-obsessed Florida Is Prioritizing Pedestrians

02-12-21

By Nate Berg

Read More: https://www.fastcompany.com/90603909...ng-pedestrians

https://i.imgur.com/xIBiowy.png

https://i.imgur.com/sCcHkZf.png

https://i.imgur.com/wUQRfHQ.png

If future posters would read the entire article before virtue signalling indignation at comparing this development to Las Ramblas, I bet the conversation would be more productive. I was just in Tampa (well, pre-covid) and found it's core downtown to be moderately successful in the old downtown, stayed at the renovated Floridian Hotel. Was actually surprised at how well the pedestrian street scape held up after years of urban planning abuse.
But, as other posters noted, Las Ramblas is a poor reference comparative Fast Company. Water St is not really a connector street with the historic core (although it does offer views of a lovely shipping channel). And with that butt-ugly area around the expressway, I think the developer will have a hard road with ancillary developments.

If this street matches the core vibrancy of Des Moines, I'll be floored.

Tampa is about as sprawly, centerless, and non-sense-of-place as it gets. Downtown is horrible.

While I agree that Tampa is the last place I think of when I hear ''Vibrant Downtown'', I find it strange that people are rooting against urban development in this case. It's almost like if a place is making the transition between poor and better urban design, people want it to fail and only the mature, 200 year old urban centers are worthy of boosterism.

I for one and glad to see Tampa grow up and hope it does well.

I spent a day touring Tampa's Downtown. The part I visited seemed very vibrant to me and I was actually taken aback by the hustle and bustle of it. The waterfront looks great. It's the interior of downtown that's still plagued by a lot of empty parking lots. But I have nothing but good things to say about my time there and Ybor City is a gem.

My itinerary was this: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Tamp...m0!1m0!1m0!3e2

Looks like a quality development, and I hope it gets built, but I fail to see the resemblance between it and Las Ramblas.

Quote:

Originally Posted by biguc (Post 9189994)

That comparison is offensive.

This.

I’d be shocked if LA or even SF could replicate central Barcelona, let alone Tampa.

The renderings look nice but it doesn't look like La Rambla to me. I could see some similarities to other areas of Barcelona, like Eixample: https://goo.gl/maps/Gg4kqW3FWaxgezU98

I was profoundly disappointed by downtown Tampa the one and only time I visited. Practically bereft of pedestrians, but filled with parking garages. It was hard to believe I was in the centre of a metro with nearly 3 million people. It felt (way) smaller than downtown Winnipeg, which is about a quarter the metro size.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bossabreezes (Post 9190498)

This.

What's being developed is pretty damn impressive so far.

By American standards, its impressive. Doesn't hold a candle to some top European district but it tries. For American standards, its not bad.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bossabreezes (Post 9190498)

I think the issue is the vast overselling by the title of this post (the sub-headline of the article). Having a largely pedestrianized street (what Las Ramblas is, basically) is great and should be celebrated as you said. But it's not a concept that is unique to Barcelona and these drawings don't look muh like Las Ramblas. A claim that the end product will mimic the pedestrian and commercial intensity of the areas of Barcelona that Las Ramblas runs through really is pretty bold. To be fair, this might have been the fault of the journalist rather than the developer. I thought it was more interesting that they explicitly modeled a part of this after a Dutch-shared street, aka a "woonerf". Really cool!

MACGA

Whatever it takes.

But really, I just street viewed downtown and the surrounding area. There looks to be tons of development produced in the last 20 years. It's also right across the river from the university. There is a lot of hope for Tampa. University-downtown-Ybor is a relatively large area that appears to be densifying at a good clip, good news, Florida needs more real urban cores.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bossabreezes (Post 9190498)

I think it's more that people have seen so many faux urban designs over the decades that we know by now that there's always a catch. I highly doubt the finished product will look like those renders and if they do what will exist behind them? Likely nothing but parking.

Changes in policy and city zoning codes would be more promising.

I think there's a lot of stuff to be hopeful about here IMO. Tampa's got the fast growth rates to really do an urban transformation in a big way if they want to; developments like this show that the planning is trending in a good direction. Miami's been an urbanist success story for years, but it's always had a different culture from the rest of Florida, and the success there didn't seem to be spreading elsewhere.

I was in downtown Tampa last December while this was under construction - absolutely massive, the scale of construction dwarfed anything in Chicago with at least 7 or 8 buildings underway at the same time (obviously Chicago has more in the aggregate but nothing this concentrated). Streets and public space too.

There's also the arrival of Brightline on the horizon, which promises to be another large mixed-use development like MiamiCentral but possibly even bigger. That project includes redevelopment of the crappy urban-renewal era Tampa Park Apartments, which will link downtown/Channelside to Ybor. Currently they feel pretty disconnected from each other.

I heard Barcelona has designed a neighborhood that mimics Tampa's Town 'n Country district.