City space in Cork

In many ways, the city of Cork seems not dramatically different to the city of Kitchener-Waterloo.  It's a bit more lightly populated and it happens to have a giant deep-water harbour, second only to Sydney Harbour in Australia.  But just as my mid-sized city residence has a mix of older traditional industries and newer knowledge industries, so does Cork.  There's a major brewery, some pharmaceutical plants, and the European headquarters of Apple, for example.  Given these kinds of very basic similarities, I couldn't help but be jealous of the layout of the city, so typical of an older European urban centre and so different from what I find at home.  It's easy to point to the very different ways in which mid-sized cities have grown on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, and to argue that the huge difference in the ages of cities has had an impact on the plan of the streets and the scales of buildings.  Yet I still find it difficult to imagine that the average North American municipal government would be able to ram through a proposal for a pedestrian centre like this one:

Or put up with this kind of ratio of sidewalk to road space:

Or tolerate the inevitable road congestion that results for those who choose to try to cram their vehicles into the city:

The best option, if you try to drive at all, is to pitch your car into one of the giant (and expensive) city parking lots and then hoof it from there.  Even better, if you're a resident, would be to get into the city via public transit, which seemed ample to me.

I know there are some big oversimplifications in all of this.  I could even guess that there are lots of Corkonians who utterly HATE their pedestrian dominated city and would like nothing more than a system in which they could drive a car into the city, find a parking spot right outside the shops and save a lot of time.  I had the perspective of a tourist who had nothing more urgent on his mind than soaking up the feel of the city, grabbing a pint at an interesting pub, making sure he didn't miss any of the must-see tourist attractions (of which, truthfully, there aren't many in Cork.  It's just a lovely, bustling, pretty city filled with pedestrians).  Nevertheless, I can't imagine what would make me object to any kind of redesign of our core, no matter how dramatic, that would give us a little more of what you see in the pictures and a little less of what we have now.  This spoken not as a privileged latte sipping condo-dweller with only a toy dog and a seasonal sports car to take care of, but as a member of a family of eight with 4.5 jobs between us, a big dog and a lot of complicated interests and ailments.

There's something else about city plans like the one in Cork, perhaps hinted at by this picture:

I yak all the time about grid cities, deformed wheels, organicity in street layouts, blah blah blah, and though I have a sense of what I mean (and an even stronger sense of how little we know about the long-term psychological impacts of living among such different kinds of urban designs), there's nothing like being inside the issue to really understand it.  Thing is, there's something utterly magnetic about these wee little alleys and walkways that lead from one place to another -- in this case down to the edge of the River Lee which runs through (defines) the city.  When you live off the grid, so to speak, then wayfinding for an utter beginner to the city can be treacherous initially, but it's astonishing how quickly one learns one's way around by imbibing the character of these little nooks and crannies.  In a grid, every intersection is more or less the same other than the signage and whatever local landmarks might appear at the corners.  Off the grid, the size and shape of every intersection is unique, flavourful and unforgettable.  One's initial confusion seems to give way remarkably quickly to an easy comfort and familiarity.  

Sometime soon, perhaps on my next travel junket, I'm going to adopt a more scientific approach to measuring some of this both by monitoring some of my own reactions to what I see and by more careful measurements of the appearances of some of the gorgeous textures and surfaces that lead eye and foot to one interesting new vista after another.