Posted Feb 12, 2021, 8:43 PM
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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.
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