Wayne Belka is retired. He was an architect and planner for 35 years.

The way people will interact with the new downtown Salt Lake City reconstruction, and the city itself, will be a result of how they access the project when they travel downtown.

The majority of users will come by car, with (we hope) a good number arriving downtown via TRAX. It is the movement of people from their point of arrival into the development that will ultimately determine the success or failure of this endeavor being a street interactive project or not.

TRAX, by it's nature, deposits people onto the streetscape requiring that first interaction with the city to be from the outside in. However, people arriving by car to parking lots that are buried in the heart of the malls, will then disperse radially to the shops available in an inside-out manner. Depending on how this circulation pattern is configured, they may never make their way to the outside, or streetscape, of the mall.

This roughly reflects the existing condition, whereby people spend all their time inside the existing malls, never to venture out to experience all that is offered in an urban environment. As far as mall developers are concerned, this is a positive, not a negative, as it keeps their patrons as a "captive audience."

Conversely, if people were to exit the parking directly to a street-connected node, where they had options -- directly to the street, or to shops -- this pedestrian circulation "radiation" could take an entirely different pattern. This is roughly the way Gateway works, with people exiting the underground parking onto the "street" and proceeding to the majority of shops along the street corridor.

Certainly, a hybrid is called for in the downtown design, but it definitely should include a circulation pattern that more intimately embraces the city outside of the mall. My personal opinion is that South Temple is going to replace Main Street as the city's new "main stree," with Main Street becoming a secondary feeder.

Given that both of the existing malls, as well as Temple Square, the LDS Church office complex, Abravanel Hall and the Lion House, all abut South Temple, it seems logical that this could happen. South Temple also presents the possibility of a retail/entertainment/lodging access corridor down to Gateway with future linkages limited only by one's imagination.

The old downtown paradigm, with Main Street being anchored by ZCMI on one end and Auerbach's on the other, has shifted. It now appears that "main street" could run east and west, and be anchored on one end by the Gateway, and at the other by the LDS Church complex.

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Wayne Belka is retired. He was an architect and planner for 35 years.