ASU Research E-Magazine: Urban Renewal Redux

Ask the merchants on Seventh Avenue in downtown Phoenix when they first began to notice a downturn in business, and they’re likely to point to the year 1964. That is when the city took out the street trees, bus-stop benches, and most of the sidewalk in front of their stores to widen the street. Already struggling against a growing suburban competition, the merchants lamented that the expanded thoroughfare only made it easier for motorists to speed past their shop windows on their way to the tidy neighborhoods and shiny-new strip malls that were cropping up all around the urban fringe.

Like so many other downtown neighborhoods across the United States, Seventh Avenue seemed destined for the urban dustbin. But Darren Petrucci believes that design can help reverse the fortunes of this embattled commercial strip.

Petrucci is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Arizona State University. In November 2002, supported by more than $1 million in combined federal and municipal grants, the City of Phoenix broke ground on a pilot project designed by Petrucci to breathe new life into a one-mile section of Seventh Avenue.

The goals of the project were set by a group of grassroots businesspeople known as the Seventh Avenue Merchant’s Association. They were straightforward. The group asked that a redesign plan help create a distinctive identity for their commercial strip, provide guidelines for streetscape and building renovations, and make pedestrian connections to the surrounding neighborhood.

Their wish list would have sent a less intrepid and imaginative designer fleeing to his studio for cover. Seventh Avenue offered no historic waterfronts, no shabby-chic warehouses, and no quaint neighborhood parks to salvage. Instead, Petrucci encountered a sea of asphalt and concrete dotted with charmless, single-story bunkers that housed mom-and-pop dry cleaners, barber shops, liquor stores, restaurants, antique shops, and used furniture stores. The nondescript buildings were all but lost in a confusing thicket of store signs and billboard advertising.

In the past, urban renewal architects would have called out the bulldozers on sites like Seventh Avenue and then implemented a grand design scheme that often bore no resemblance to what came before. Petrucci’s research specialty focuses on commercial corridors and public infrastructure. Instead of turning his back on the messiness of the Seventh Avenue strip, he actually looked to it for inspiration.

For years, the ASU scholar has prowled the corners of America’s forgotten urban landscapes. He looks for the ingenious everyday solutions that ordinary people have improvised in order to humanize the harsh, anonymous landscapes in which they work and live. What Petrucci finds is not always pretty, but he values its honesty.

“Designing houses for rich people is not what interests me,” Petrucci says. “I’m just really interested in the disenfranchised areas of the city because of the way they practice the city, the way they use it. It’s not MTV telling them how to use it—it’s more pure, more raw.”

Petrucci sought to codify this authenticity using a design strategy that he calls iMenity Infrastructure (amenity infrastructure + identity infrastructure). iMenity Infrastructure, he explains, is essentially a site-specific “kit of parts.” It is a collection of simple design tools and concepts that could be used by the Seventh Avenue merchants as well as the city to tame the street’s urban unruliness.

Petrucci’s iMenity package for Seventh Avenue, for example, includes a palette developed by urban colorist Cecelia Conover. She analyzed the harsh light of the desert sun in the district’s paved environment and developed a set of compatible colors. The lettering style used in the district’s signage was drawn from a typeface that recurred in many existing commercial signs.

Inexpensive multipurpose canopies of steel and translucent polycarbonate panels, what Petrucci calls urban Lampshades, have been designed to mimic the simple, no-nonsense profiles of the district’s commercial buildings. They can be used to shade a bus stop or for carving an outdoor “room” out of the leftover space of an unoccupied street corner. The Lampshades’ lighted roofs also double as spaces for public art, advertising, or store signs.

Petrucci says the Seventh Avenue project does more than supply a practical design lexicon for enhancing the visual connectivity and coherence of the street. It provokes a rethinking of the larger urban landscape.

For example, it examines opportunities for reconfiguring rights-of-way such as parking lots and service alleys to accommodate a greater range of human uses. In the process, such changes challenge existing ordinances that keep these and other large segments of the landscape in a drab and lifeless condition.

The ASU professor’s iMenity Infrastructure has begun to attract the attention of other cities that are struggling to reinvent their own aging commercial strips. In 2000, neighboring Scottsdale invited Petrucci to study a sagging 2.5-mile commercial strip at the city’s heart. Two years later, the Scottsdale project, known as GLUE (Generic Landscapes/Urban Environments), won a prestigious Progressive Architecture Award from Architecture magazine.

Gregg Pasquarelli was a juror the PA Award. Such projects, he says, will begin “reclaiming the urban wasteland, the strip mall parking lot. This is something that has to be done. There are huge voids in our cities and we have to come up with ways of reattaching these things.”—Adelheid Fischer