I’ve been reading a book by James Howard Kunstler called “The Geography of Nowhere.” Great book — you should pick it up. It was written in 1993, so I looked online for some more recent talks he’s given, and found this one (warning: contains some strong language). In that talk, he made a great observation that should be obvious to all of us: people like to inhabit great places. He shows this graphic as an example:

He explains:

It’s a good public space. It’s a place worth caring about. It’s well-defined. It is emphatically an outdoor public room. It has something that is terribly important. It has what’s called an active and permeable membrane around the edge. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s got shops, bars, bistros, destinations. Things go in and out of it — it’s permeable. The beer goes in and out, the waitresses go in and out. And that activates the center of this place and makes it a place that people want to hang out in. You know, in these places in other cultures, people just go there voluntarily because they like them. We don’t have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here. You know, you don’t have to have a Kwanzaa festival. People just go because it’s pleasurable to be there.

This should be common sense, but we’ve become so accustomed to poor public spaces that we don’t even notice them anymore. We have been conditioned to expect and accept mediocrity.

Consider some of Peoria’s public spaces: Riverfront Village, Festival Park, the area around the Civic Center. These are not places where people want to hang out. It’s not pleasurable to be in these spaces. The best the city can do is have the Park District “program” the space with festivals, carnivals, and other things that entice people to come down and visit. But go down there when there’s no program, and the space is vacant. There’s a reason for that: nobody wants to be there.

And that’s what’s wrong with this proposed public space, too:

To borrow a line from Kunstler, there’s not enough Prozac in the world to make a person feel good about being in this space. Ask yourself, honestly, if this is a place you would want to hang out with your friends. Yet, as you can see from the bird’s-eye view picture, the designers have provided ample open space for you to (theoretically) congregate. But the sad truth is that nobody wants to drive downtown (too bad they can’t live here) with their sack lunch (because there are no cafes) and stand around on a big concrete slab (because there’s no shade or bench) between two collections of blank metal walls (that have no retail draw). Museum backers tacitly admit that no one will want to come to this space, because their plan to attract people revolves totally around programming, just like Festival Park and the rest of the riverfront. There is no “active and permeable membrane around the edge” of this proposed development. And so, if it’s built, it will look just like this artist’s rendering: empty, stark, colorless, vacant, and depressing.

This would be a travesty if it were built at all, but the prospect of it being built with public funds is unconscionable. Peoria doesn’t need another tax-subsidized dead space downtown. We have enough of them. Peoria needs great places. And if taxpayers are going to contribute to a project, they deserve to get a great place for their money. If the museum folks want our tax money, they are obligated to provide something a whole lot better than what they’ve proposed. Peoria residents should demand it.