[bunderbunder]

Madison, WI, USA has a section where cars are mostly not allowed. When I was a kid, it was a major retail destination, and people would make weekend trips from an hour or more away (by car) to go there.

There was recently a huge wave of shops closing. They've since been replaced by restaurants and cafes, and they seem to be doing well, but nobody's going to go into ten restaurants in a single afternoon, so the area still feels less alive than it used to.

To me, though, this particular phenomenon feels like an extension of the death of the American shopping mall, and not evidence that a city with an outdoor environment designed to accommodate its own residents (and not just their cars) wouldn't be nice. If it's just a business district that's designed for pedestrians, well, that's really nothing more than a public version of the outdoor shopping mall.

I'm most definitely not looking for a shopping mall. I'm looking for my kids (and me) to be able to go outside and ride a bike or kick a ball or organize a neighborhood game of tag, without being dependent on me to drive them by car to the nearest city park in order to do it. And I'm looking for a culture where neighbors collectively spend time outside, together, as a community, rather than being cooped up indoors or walled up inside their own back yards because the neighborhood's public space is a fundamentally uncomfortable place to be.