Promenade 3.0; Kunlé Adeyemi

·30 min·2 clips

Alan Loomis explains why movies, dining, and shopping no longer work as the formula for public spaces in the internet age.

The walk begins on Third Street. Frances Anderton presents Santa Monica's three-block promenade as a public place whose old retail magic no longer solves its current problems. For a while, it looked easy. After opening in 1989, it became one of the world's most popular shopping destinations, with stores, movie theaters, restaurants, and street performers keeping the street alive. Then the economics changed. Stephen Welliver of Downtown Santa Monica Inc. talks about vacancies and property owners trying to find tenants willing to make serious investments. Promenade 3.0 treats the slump as a design problem. What should a coastal, cosmopolitan public space feel like if it gets rethought every thirty years? The answer here is civic as much as commercial. Seating, pop-up projects, local belonging, and shared gathering all get tied to social polarization in internet-shaped public life. Anderton keeps the conversation honest by naming what is actually in front of her: Instagram posing, people sitting in the chairs, a homeless man, and tech people having a meeting. That makes the follow-up awkward in the right way. If success means many kinds of users, the promenade cannot make order depend on hiding unsheltered people. The guests push back on that narrow idea. Design that discourages homeless people also tends to discourage the customers and locals it wants back. That is where the episode gets sharp. Retail recovery, civic generosity, and everyday management have to share the same three blocks near the shore. The opening also moves past Santa Monica. With coastal cities facing rising seas, Lagos becomes another way to ask whether future cities can live with water instead of only fighting it.

As heard by us

A coastal promenade, a vacancy problem, and a larger question about who public space is for.

Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade serves as a useful test of how a coastal public space adjusts as retail habits change and vacancies grow.

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Why you'd press play

You want a design story with real civic stakes, not abstract theory.

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