It ‘s a tired cliche, but it’s true.  If you build it they will come.  Please forgive me for my singular focus this weekend; our brand new Creekwalk through Syracuse.  You may have read my latest column in the Syracuse Post-Standard about what a nut I am for this new community asset.  I was on Creekwalk again on this magnificent 62 degree, cloudless day.  Everything about my afternoon defied it was Syracuse in November.

My friend Carrie Lazarus and I began in Armory Square, where parking at the meters is free on Sundays.  The streets were filled with parked cars which proves downtown is no ghost town when the workers are home.

I could not believe how many people were on the Creekwalk.  In fact, it was comical because there was a steady parade of people of all ages following the yellow stripe through downtown, and absolutely no one walking anywhere else.  Viewed from above, we probably looked like a line of ants leading from a crumb of food on the ground to the nest.   I wondered where these pedestrians were from, and next time I will ask them instead of simply saying hello as I pass.

Of the many aspects I love about Creekwalk is how varied it is.  It never gets boring because it turns and really changes along the way.  The downtown portion is very much like a walk through a city, but then you go down a small hill and pick up the Creek, away from all the cars and buildings and into a world you’ve never seen. The “before” photos on Syracuse.com show how uninviting was this stretch and it’s one of the reasons Carrie and I decided we like it best of all.

This part of Creekwalk takes you beside the creek, which today had a little stench to it that it did not have the other day, and high, high above, are the highways that splice our city into sections.  It’s louder beneath the highways but it has a kind of urban beauty too.  It is here that you feel Syracuse is bigger and more important. Carrie said it could be Boston or Providence because those cities have made the most of the water that runs through them and people respond by going there.  In this gritty span we saw someone being pushed in a wheelchair and we adore the whole thing is handicap-accessible.

As usual, when Carrie and I get together and start talking, the 2.6 mile span was over in a wink.  We admired the view of Onondaga Lake, hoped Creekwalk would grow to encircle the lake, especially on the southern end next to the train tracks where no one ever gets to go.  When those tracks were laid water was abundant and planners thought nothing of taking huge lengths of it in New York State for railroads and roadways.

Today, while the population keeps growing the waterfront does not.  We need to reclaim this incredible resource by extending Creekwalk between the water and the tracks.  Carrie hopes some enterprising business person will offer public boat rides between Onondaga Lake and the Inner Harbor where we should have some restaurants waiting with food and drink.

Carrie and I did the whole walk in 2 hours, 15 minutes, which convinces me more than ever that the two-hour limit at the downtown parking meters prevents people from departing to nearby coffee houses or restaurants.  But what a magnificent start we have.

Sociologist Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon University says people don’t go where the jobs are, the jobs go where the people are, and a community with an attractive lifestyle will get the people first.  Creekwalk is an awesome asset for Syracuse that too often has sold out to companies that take our tax breaks and then leave again in a few years. That is not where the money should go.  It should go to things like Creekwalk.

You should have seen all the people there today, and it’s only just the beginning.

When I hear of urban planning, my mind automatically pictures urban renewal, that widespread failure of the 1960s intended to reinvent cities that were losing population to the suburbs.  I’m a city dweller but nearly every urban renewal project I’ve ever seen or heard about makes me want to head for the hills; the hills of the suburbs.

Fifty years ago the answer to urban blight was to knock down historic homes and commercial buildings in a city center and replace them with open space, but not just any open space, concrete open space.  Uninspired block structures of cement and pre-cast stone were stacked into planters and fountains with a tree or two plunked down in the middle of it all.  Planners believed once the buildings were out of the way, we would all congregate in the sunny open spaces.  They failed to consider a couple of important things.

First, few places are more uncomfortable in the summer than fields of asphalt in the sun.  All that tar and stone and brick absorb the heat and send it right back onto the people walking around on it.   It didn’t take long for citizens to feel they were roasting out there so they stayed inside their air conditioned spaces or sat on the shady porch or front stoop. The sparse vegetation in the plazas struggled for the same reason.   A tulip here and there and the trees surrounded by water-repellent inorganic surface material kept municipal grounds crews busy with constant replacement.

Winter then brought a new problem. The open landscapes were pummeled by winds which picked up speed in the canyons of the taller buildings ringing the open spaces.  The surface was icy and unforgiving, lacking guardrails or even walls to lean against.  Ambitious pedestrians who ventured forth provided a spectacle of entertainment as they slipped and slid across the tundra.

In Syracuse, the open plazas leave me cold.  The Federal Building and Plaza remind me of former communist eastern block projects I saw in East Germany shortly after the Berlin Wall came down.  The Everson Museum is a thrilling and important work of I.M. Pei, however the stone nothing of a space upon which it rests is useless to all but skateboarders.  Not even the addition of berms and plantings a few years ago makes it attractive.  And Hanover Square, our oldest downtown business district, is better now that the clunky and inappropriate paver fountain thing has been removed.  I would still like to see it returned the way it was way back when.

There is an urban planning experiment being studied in other American cities that I would love to see explored in Syracuse, and our one-two punch of city county leaders Mayor Stephanie Miner and County Executive Joannie Mahoney are just the visionaries who could do it.

It’s called GIS, or Geographic Information System.  Using satellite imagery and software called intelligent mapping, a University of California professor named Nicholas de Monchaux and his students are looking at dead urban spaces such as unused roads, alleys and paved areas near industrial parks and highways in San Fransisco, New York, New Orleans and Minneapolis.  Unlike the gigantic and centralized Big Dig project in Boston which relocated the central arterial beneath the ground and opened up a green space where the multiple-lane highway once stood, de Monchaux advocates taking back tiny slivers of unused space and turning it into parks and other green spaces.  He calls it “urban acupuncture” for the thousands of little areas that can be improved with the needs of the neighborhood in mind.

In Syracuse this wouldn’t mean turning the Federal Plaza into a park, as much as I’d love to see that happen, but it could reclaim all the dead zones in our challenged neighborhoods around the city and make them healthier and friendlier places to be.  Developers would follow with new homes and small decentralized neighborhood businesses much like the original settlers of our great American cities, according to the de Monchaux plan.  The idea is not to turn an entire city into rural fields again, but to replace unused concrete and asphalt tracts with space that is used, healthy and admired.

On a fundamental level, this sounds like little more than a community garden project, however it signals a 21st century approach to human settlement.  With rampant foreclosures and adjustments in long established migratory patterns created by this Great Recession, we have an opportunity to pause and merge vision with computer software, creativity with pragmatism, and most hopeful of all, we have the chance to be better urban planners than our predecessors of fifty years ago.