space devoted to the car will be reduced and turned over to more productive uses, such as gardens or playing areas. People will spend more time at home and spend more of their 'leisure' time' on activities such as maintenance, gardening, and improvements. People will band together in cooperative projects involving the use of common space, such as a sauna, or a home cannery, or a basketball court, on what was once street. More people, representing more diverse age grouping and income mix will be living there in a greater variety of living accomodations. The Strip The strip consists of generally one-story establishments lining each side of four- to six-lane arterials filled with constaJ;ltly flowing traffic. The buildings typically cover only a small portion of their site, with perhaps 80 percent of the area reserved for parking in front, on the sides, and in back. The strip is totally designed to cater to auto access. In addition to easy parking, strip buildings use large signs, bright lighting, and large display windows for maximum visual attention from passing automobiles. The strip is the purveyor of goods and service to the mass automobile culture. Auto supplies, sales, and repair are well represented, 1 along with fast food, gas stations, one-stop shopping stations, leisure, and recreational supplies, and often neighborhood convenience shopping. Older strips often evolved from their earlier function as neighborhood shopping streets, and often still contain a large proportion of local small busi- . ness, while newer strips present use with a complete catalogue of standardized nationally franchised services and sales operations. ' The opportunities for redesign of the strip arise from Summer 1986 RAIN Page 35 its. low density, its relatively high turnover of businesses · (particularly in the older, more marginal locations), and its inherent structure as a channel for movement. The redesign of the strip is closely linked to the redesign of residential neighborhoods previously discussed. One Strategy is to make it possible for people to walk to neighborhood shopping, rather than getting into .a car and cruising the strip for a number of miles, stopping here and there. This can be accomplished by concentrating housing density in the blocks directly behind the arterial, and turning what is now 'the back door' of strip-oriented facilities into a front door that is reached by foot or bicycle from the residential neighborhood behind it. We have previously discussed closing and interi:upti~g residential through streets. This begins to provide the space to create pedestrian access to shopping and .additional housing sites. As neighborhood shopping becomes more .oriented to the neighborhood behind it, buildings ·can begin to cluster together into nodes rather than ·as isolated elements on a linear auto access route. As activities shift more ·toward pedestrian, bicycle, or neighborhood mini-vehicle access, need for devoting so much space to parking is severely reduced; - A second strategy involves the gradual restructuring of the single-purpose sparsely-covered strip into a dense linear mixed-use zone that integrates light industry, offices, places of employment, community facilities, housing, neighborhood shopping, and possibly energy and food production. This cqncept was explored in the redesign of the Sunnyvale El Camino strip into a multi-layered linear mall. The typical width of the strip (600 feet.in the Sunnyvale case) provides plenty of room for different configurations. In the redesign, activities are gradually separated from the street, points of auto. access are concentrated, and redundant streets are · closed. Thus, the arterial becomes ~exclusively' a traffic I , ,(VJ- ! It
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