Context Is King

Austin Avenue in Waco, TX. (Source: Flickr/Andy Thrasher.)

Lined with trees, a historic movie theater, and a handful of small businesses, Austin Avenue is one of the prettiest streets in downtown Waco. Unfortunately, it’s also jammed-packed with cars. Parked automobiles regularly line both sides of the street and a steady flow of through traffic fills both lanes at a steady pace daily. Even on weekends when a huge parking lot downtown is transformed into a farmer’s market and customers regularly migrate across Austin Avenue to patronize nearby coffee shops, they must first negotiate with cars (including many large pickups) to cross Austin Avenue.

Historically, Austin Avenue was a major commercial and cultural hub for the city. An old photo of the avenue shows thriving businesses of all sizes: hotels, cafés, restaurants, theaters, and drug stores. With vintage fire escape ladders lining buildings, extended awning covers over business entryways, and streetcar tracks carved into the asphalt, it almost looks like a scene out of old coastal cities, especially when considering the volume of pedestrians and a night-time scene with all the glowing neon lights. 

As I’m sure many Strong Towns readers do, I often find myself daydreaming about ways to improve the city. Driving around downtown, at the sight of huge parking lots sitting empty downtown, I fantasize about that land going to more productive uses. Watching pedestrians cross dangerous streets, I make a quick mental list of design interventions that could make the intersection safer for them. And, of course, when I first moved to Waco and discovered Austin Avenue, I immediately saw it as an ideal location for a pedestrian-only mall, especially given the historic significance of the avenue.  

Great Ideas Are Great, but Not Enough

On their own, all of these ideas are interesting at the very least, transformative at best. We know that dedicating downtown land to parking is extremely counter-productive. It has been well-established that traffic calming measures like raised pedestrian walkways, rumble strips, and fewer lanes can make it safer to traverse the city outside of a car. And research shows that limiting cars on business-heavy streets downtown can attract more patronage to local shops, despite anxieties that taking away car access will mean fewer customers. 

As I began to get more involved in conversations about the city, I would occasionally float my idea about Austin Avenue becoming pedestrian only. Repeatedly, I heard hints that not only had something like this been tried before, but that it had failed so miserably that similar ideas would have a hard time gaining traction. 

A little history-digging told more of the story. As part of an urban “renewal” initiative that swept through dozens of American cities in the 1950s, the pedestrianization of Austin Avenue was a top-down effort to revitalize the tornado-pummeled commercial core by making it attractive to customers on foot. The project cost $850,000 (paid for by a federal grant) and featured a variety of pedestrian-friendly amenities like planters, water fountains, and a free trolley. 

But despite an initial upsurge in sales, the mall ultimately failed. Reports tell of youth vandalizing the plants, sales plummeting, and homeless people bathing in the tubs. The allure of new suburban shopping malls combined with a general aversion to cement-centric design, poor parking, and insufficient weather accommodations kept shoppers away. In 1985, the city hired the same group who had won the pedestrianization bid to change it back to a two-way street for cars.  

The Importance of Context

Despite my personal interest and enthusiasm for pedestrian malls, learning this aspect of Waco’s history was instructive in teaching me the importance of understanding local context. It’s so easy for an enthusiastic outsider like me to get amped up about good ideas, but to forget the extent to which the specific local context will determine if and how those ideas can thrive in the local ecosystem. Here are three kinds of context we should always take the time to understand before thinking we can “change” our cities.

• Historical Context: As demonstrated in the story about Waco’s Austin Avenue, taking time to understand your neighborhood or city’s historical context is simply invaluable. Let’s not overcomplicate it: knowing the stories and decisions, both private and public, that shape how your city became what it is and also what’s possible for its future. Knowing your city’s history can help you discover its pain points but also its sources of pride and hope, not to mention entertaining local folklore.

• Cultural Context: Cities are home to a wide variety of groups of people with divergent norms, values, and practices. This can be both an asset and a liability—diversity adds to a city's vibrancy, but diversity can also make it difficult to unify around common practices, norms, and goals. Still, as tricky or as messy as it might be, doing your best to understand your city’s cultural context will help you go much further in identifying meaningful goals and position you to communicate them more effectively to different groups of people.

• Political Context: By political context I don’t mean figuring out if your city is more red- or blue-leaning. I mean taking time to understand the people, processes, and policies that shape what’s possible in your city. Who’s in charge at various levels of local government? Who is serving on your city council, on various boards and commissions? What are the processes that govern change? What are the policies that dictate what kind of change can even happen?

Conclusion

This importance of understanding context became even more clear to me during a recent podcast interview with LeVette Fuller (listen here). She’s a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, and the co-founder of ReForm Shreveport. I’ve never been to her city, but after hearing her stories and insights, I finished our conversation with a much more nuanced, street-level idea of what her town is like and a little bit of what it is like advocating for meaningful change.

This is because Fuller understands the power of context. She knows the stories, quirks, values, and practices that shape her city and she’s able to draw insights and connections between those details and its present-day struggles and opportunities. For example, as once a hub for car manufacturing, cars are a source of pride for the city, making it perhaps trickier than normal to advocate for walking and biking.

But Fuller also emphasized the need for balance: some folks just won’t be able to see the value of certain ideas or potential changes like more active transit or incremental development and while you might be able to understand the contextual reasons why they feel that way, you can’t let that stop you. You have to keep beating the drum, even when the city’s history, culture, or political systems push back. In other words, context shouldn’t be what stops us from advocating for change; rather, context is what will give us the kind of local insight that can help us advocate more strategically. 

Perhaps this is the lesson of the failed pedestrian malls of the 1970s. Perhaps the Austin Avenue project failed, not because of walkability itself, but partly because local leaders didn’t take the time to read the signs of the times. They didn’t understand the cultural context they were living in. Cars were popular, going to the mall was the cool cultural activity of the day. People had moved to the suburbs and expected ample parking at their destinations, air conditioner, and shelter from the rain. In times like these, trying to compel people to visit a mostly-cement pedestrian plaza devoid of popular stores (they had all left for the suburbs) exposed to undesirable weather and without clear parking amenities was a formula for failure.

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