Add coffee shops and restaurants nearby, help promote casual entertainment venues like mini golf, community theatre, and weekend markets.
Grow from there based on the type of demand that appears, keep business rates low for the area.
They say it can't be done, but when that last shop closes right now there will be no choice.
To combat the dereliction and anti social behaviour they would have to rebuild anyway, and it will cost them more later than gradual repurpose/ investment.
[–] fnordian_slip 3 days ago
[–] paganel 3 days ago
Which European cities would those be? And I'm not interested by the tourist-infested ones.
[–] boonzeet 3 days ago
La Panne / De Panne, Oostende, Knokke-Heist, etc, all have quite vibrant town centres, seasonal events, food markets, playgrounds, free-to-the-public pétanque/boules courts, you name it.
Then in France, Strasbourg has completely pedestrianised the town centre, which is similarly successful, although a little more touristy as you say - nice places attract tourists and shopping, it's unavoidable!
[–] fnordian_slip 2 days ago
[–] ahartmetz 1 day ago
Much of the city area, not many at all. Superblocks in Spanish cities come to mind.
Good public transport, common from 100k people or so. Universal in megacities.
[–] kleiba2 3 days ago
And one of the reasons is definitely that out of your list, city planners have very different ideas about the first point, free parking. They want the opposite: ideally, no cars in the city at all. So, parking fees have been raising to exorbitant ranges as they want to incentivize people to take public transport instead. Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.
[–] jen20 2 days ago
Largely because no-one wants to go shopping then carry potentially heavy items on a bus or bike.
I grew up near Bluewater shopping center in England, which had plentiful free parking, lots of good shops that were open late and a security team which moved people doing undesirable things along.
Compare this to the nearest towns (Chatham, Gillingham, Strood, Rochester), where the (often Conservative!) council members seemed perplexed that people didn't want to pay £6/hour to park in a decrepit garage that constantly smelled of piss and walk past myriad instances of low-level quality of life crime to get to shops that closed before most office workers could reasonably leave work.
I haven't been back in ~10 years but I imagine the situation now is even worse and all of those towns are in the same category of vape shops, charity shops and empty shops.
Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part, and tell me it isn't much nicer with fewer cars. Shopkeepers are usually opposed to it before, but see that the improvement in atmosphere attracts more customers than are lost through the lack of parking spaces.