Santa Monica Boulevard’s Redevelopment: A Nationally Recognized Effort to Rethink the Role of Streets

In a new edition of their book, “Urban Design for an Urban Century”, Lance Jay Brown and David Dixon explain how West Hollywood, a city with limited land, turned a major boulevard into a successful central park. The excerpt below is reprinted from “Urban Design for an Urban Century” by Lance Jay Brown and David Dixon with permission from Wiley. Copyright © 2014.

• Program: Transform a major Los Angeles thoroughfare into a multimodal boulevard that provides community-oriented public spaces, particularly in densely developed West Hollywood, while continuing to handle high volumes of vehicular traffic. Make the public process a model of efficiency and effectiveness. Pursue simple solutions that improve the everyday lives of visitors and residents.
• Area: 2.7 miles
• Design team: Zimmer Gunsul Frasca (ZGF) Partnership; Patricia Smith ASLA, AICP; Walkable Communities; and Santa Monica City Planning
• Developer: City of West Hollywood
• Award: AIA Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design (2001)

The plan for Santa Monica Boulevard reveals a tectonic shift in thinking about urban street design that began in the late 1990s. Previously, planning efforts assumed that major streets had only one function: moving the highest volume of traffic in the shortest period of time. Many grassroots groups and even some municipal governments had begun to question this assumption; they argued that streets should serve all users, including pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.

Densely built West Hollywood “is a relatively small city with limited open spaces,” the design team explained in its application to the AIA Honor Awards competition. “Residents and visitors depend on the boulevard for the social, recreational and cultural activities associated with daily life and major civic events.”

In famously car-dependent Los Angeles, many residents and business owners worried that shifting the boulevard’s focus even slightly would yield unbearable traffic congestion and hurt retail. To address these concerns, the city undertook unusually broad community outreach, establishing a 41-person steering committee and organizing a year of preliminary visioning workshops for residents and business operators. The final plan called for a striking rebalancing of the boulevard’s functions.

Gaining space by using an abandoned streetcar right-of-way, the implemented redesign introduced wider sidewalks, new street furniture, intersection bulb-outs, bike lanes, parking, dedicated bus-loading islands, heavily landscaped new medians, pocket parks and more than 1,100 new street trees.

The plan helped turn the boulevard, once an eyesore, into a high-profile and welcoming public face for West Hollywood.