Consider Gehl Studio's Research in Your Efforts to Improve Lexington
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has awarded two Knight Cities Challenge grants to Lexington proposals. Knight offered only 37 awards from a pool of over 4,500 applications. These honors are yet another indicator of our community’s collective talent and bright future. If you are one of our engaged citizens brainstorming ways to improve Lexington, please consider the recent local Knight winners in the context of Gehl Studio’s research. Gehl Studio focuses on mutually beneficial relationships between people’s quality of life and their built environment. This framework can help you identify and strategically pursue opportunities for our city.
Phoenix Forward, one of the Knight award winners, will pilot new programming and space uses for Phoenix Park and the Central Library. This site has great potential for improvement because, according to the Gehl analysis, it has a high volume of citizens sticking around and low volume of citizens walking by. You will notice its outlier status regarding that ratio on pages 98-99 of this PDF Gehl Studio’s presentation. As a Gehl Studio representative discussed in a recent presentation to city leaders, the public space is predominantly occupied by one demographic—the homeless. He also emphasized that programming around a public space should not displace a demographic but instead should increase the diversity of users. A monopoly in a public space by any single group makes others feel unwelcome. I am hopeful that Phoenix Forward, in addition to recent successes by the Office of Homelessness Prevention and Intervention, will make this public space more inviting to all Lexingtonians.
The second project is the Parking Lot Diaries, which will test a series of engagement activities for LexTran riders at the Transit Center. Those experiments will be created with expert feedback from 8 80 Cites, a nonprofit that specializes in designing and analyzing engagement experiences. The Transit Center’s significance is also supported by Gehl Studio’s research. While Lexingtonians might consider Cheapside Park to be one of the most trafficked spaces downtown, Gehl Studio’s research reveals that the Transit Center also sees a high number of visitors (see pages 90 and 117 in the PDF). That space should improve its engagement of pedestrians and the standing of public transportation in our community. The Parking Lot Diaries intends to advance those goals, and I am hopeful the Transit Center will become a more vibrant public space because of that work.
These Knight-funded projects advance key opportunities highlighted by Gehl Studios’ research. I encourage our community’s policymakers, grassroots activists, nonprofit leaders, and the public to review this presentation. It includes Gehl Studio’s framework for thinking about urban design (pages 1-79) and insights for Lexington from the Public Space, Public Life survey (pages 80-123). I particularly encourage you to view pages 110-123 of the PDF. These slides discuss priority pilot ideas and opportunity areas. I hope you will review them, and I look forward to seeing more Lexington projects receive honors such as the Knight Cities Challenge awards.
