Finding the Center

If you asked someone from Albuquerque what the center of the city was, you’d find that the answer varies by the person. Some people spend their entire lives – living, shopping, working, relaxing – in the Heights, and for them the center of their lives is the pleasant houses and scenic trails in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains or the shopping centers of Uptown. Many people work at Kirtland or the labs, and for them that heavily guarded base is a logical center of city life. Some are farmers and ranchers of the South Valley, living by the fields, maintaining the ditches and relaxing in local cafes and bars (Note that all three of these are generalizations, merely examples to grasp a sense of the diversity of the people who live in Albuquerque). As in any other city, to each individual is their own – their own place to live, their own place of work, their own place to reflect.

For many years now, a well-meaning group of people have attempted to establish Downtown Albuquerque as the primary center of the city; the place that, if anyone asked, there would be no doubt that this is the heart. Their reasons are numerous and sometimes difficult to translate into words; their motives are based on a comparative analysis with other cities who have big, impressive Downtowns and have gone through similar soul-searching efforts, as well as a historical context which tells them that Downtown was the center of things until an invention called the automobile grew too popular.

When the railroad came to town, they knew that the place where they put the train station would become the center of a new city. The Old Town Plaza was where the settlement of Alburquerque was born, but the intersection of Central Avenue and First Street was where the modern city of Albuquerque was created. The area surrounding the train station remained as the central business district of the city until the middle of the century. However, there is a problem with using this historical context to create the Downtown Albuquerque of the future: until the construction of the Interstate Freeway System, Downtown was literally the crossroads of the city. Not only that, but Downtown was the center of a much smaller city – few lived west of the river, the fairgrounds were at the edge of the city, and as of 1940 the population of Albuquerque was only about 35,000 people. Even connected to the rest of the country by railroad, Albuquerque was a small city – there is little history of industry here and there have never been any major corporate investments in Downtown (how many large corporations can you name with headquarters in Albuquerque?). How does one take this context to make a place that will serve as the center of a region of - what is it, 800,000 people? - and where jobs, housing, services, and recreation have become increasingly scattered?

My answer is that you can’t. To attempt to do so is to make Downtown Albuquerque into something that it isn’t, that it never has been and most likely never will. Rather than looking at the city as one big mass which is missing a center, perhaps it would be of more use to break down the city into individual components, and find where the center(s) are. The center doesn’t have to be a formal space; it could be something quite simple – a little park, a major intersection, a certain street, even a strip mall – just a place where people gather for some particular reason – to relax, to shop, to work, or a combination of these.

So, in the pursuit of a center, let me share with you my center. Obviously, as a UNM student who lives in the UNM area, the campus is going to be a major center of my life. It also has components that enable it to act as a major city center, namely a whole lot of people working (if you think about it, there is little that separates the office worker from the college student in the eyes of a city planner – we both have to commute, congregate in these large buildings, and work), but also large social spaces which also act as places to recreate, spaces to be entertained, and plenty of shops and restaurants nearby which generate their business thanks to the presence of the university. It is a dynamic area with a culture and a lot of users, so where is the center of this city center?

For me, it’s the corner of Central and Cornell. No other intersection in the city (or for that matter, any city) comes close to this one in what it means in my personal life; not only does the intersection act as an entry point into the campus, but each corner contains some important function in my student life – bookstore on one corner, George Pearl Hall (where most of my classes are) on another corner, the Frontier on another, and on the last corner and just a little down the way is Saggio’s and the post office on one side and Satellite Coffee on another. Here (at least for me, which is the whole point I'm driving at) is the beating heart of Albuquerque, pumping cars and buses along Central Avenue and pedestrians and bicyclists in and out of the campus.

The way I see it, one cannot necessarily create their own center. One has to be pushed into that center. One has to find their center. And this is where the task of creating centers becomes so darn complex, because so much of it is about the individual. Take the urban renewal efforts of the 1960s, which gave us Downtown’s Civic Plaza. It would seem an ideal center point – important functions surround the space, there is plenty of room for large groups to gather, and plenty of decorative elements – yet Civic Plaza has a very dead feel for the majority of time. Save for the occasional large event, few seem to want to spend much time here. Rather, it is Central Avenue that delivers the goods; people will take time to explore the businesses along Central Avenue.

So what does this all mean in the pragmatic sense? What can planning do? How do we give people that center? Here’s some ideas:

1) Find a place of importance. No matter what neighborhood it is, there will be something of importance that's already there. As I said above, it can be virtually anything; it just has to be a place where people already gather.

2) Improve the place of importance. Allow people to walk comfortably through the space. Install the missing components that prevent the space from inviting people in. Give people the chance to explore the place of importance, and it will become a center.

3) Once you have established the place of importance as a center, then fill in the missing pieces and connect it to other centers. Raise densities and add services not yet in the area. Connect it to other centers via mass transit. The key isn't necessarily to create a city center, but a neighborhood center, where one can transition from the private life of their home and their neighborhood to the public life of the outer world, of the other centers of the city.