Last year, I wrote about how Salt Lake City wants to build a new linear park around its downtown. That post can be found, here.

Fast forward to today, and the city's Department of Economic Development has just published a new comprehensive 215-page study that supports turning Main Street into a pedestrian promenade.

Specifically, the area running from South Temple to 400 South, and including 100 South from Main to West Temple:

As part of the study, they highlight a number of successful case studies from around the world, including 16th Street Mall in Denver, Bourke Street Mall in Melbourne, and Queens Quay here in Toronto.

In the case of Denver, they cite the one-mile stretch as single-handedly generating over 40% of the city's total downtown tax revenue! And in the case of Toronto, they refer to Queens Quay as a global destination. (Toronto readers, do you agree?)

Like most city building initiatives, this vision is will take years to realize. But it's interesting to note that, of the eight design alternatives included in the study, there is already one clear preference within the local community -- option B.

Option B is a pedestrian/transit mall, but with multi-use trails. In other words, it is a no-cars-allowed alternative that would still allow bicycles and scooters. Here's the street section:

If you'd like to download a copy of the full Main Street Pedestrian Promenade Study, click here.

The Quay Quarter Tower in Sydney has been just been awarded the "best new tall building" of 2023 by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). Deigned by 3XN and BVN, it's a great adaptive reuse story.

The project is a renovation and expansion of an existing 1970s building. And the team managed to retain 65% of the original structure (slabs, columns, and beams) and 95% of the original core.

This results, according to their calculation, in 12,000 tons of embodied carbon savings. The equivalent of 35,000 flights between Sydney and Melbourne. At the same time, the team managed to add 45,000 m2 of new floor area to the site by grafting new slabs onto the existing ones.

But let's get back to these carbon savings.

According to this site, there are 37 direct fights between Sydney and Melbourne each day. That's about 13,505 flights per year, meaning that the carbon savings from not fully demolishing this building (and starting fresh) are equal to about 2.6 years of people not flying back and forth between these two cities.

If you consider how long buildings typically last (this one was relatively young at under 50 years), it kind of makes buildings seem less bad. Of course, we're only talking about and comparing embodied carbon. There's also the ongoing operation of the building.

In any event, a deserving project. Congrats to the team. For more on the project, click here.

Photo via Dezeen

It is an overwhelmingly positive thing for cities when you can somehow figure out how to turn a site like this (which looks to have been a single-family home):

Into 13 homes and new ground-floor retail that looks like this (non-Google street view images can be found here):

This particular example is at 752 High Street in Thornbury, which is an inner suburb of Melbourne. Designed by Gardiner Architects, the build has 4 floors of residential, a 5th floor rooftop amenity, and a single elevator with a single wraparound staircase. It was also constructed out of cross-laminated timber.

For more about that process, here's a short video:

If you watch the video, you'll hear the architect talk about how his firm had been working on this project for about 8 or 9 years. I have no idea the backstory and I'm not about to speculate, but clearly 8-9 years is far too long for only 13 new homes. And the reality is that we often don't make it easy to build this kind of infill housing.

Broadly speaking, if you're trying to encourage this scale of housing, I think at a minimum you want to look at 3 things: (1) the planning permissions need to be flexible and as-of-right, (2) you need to look at the local building codes to see if there are any obstacles in place that don't necessarily make sense for this typology, and (3) you want to look at the impact fees being levied.

It's hard not to imagine our cities being better off having more apartments like High Street.