The classic American main street ‒ walkable, well-serviced and supportive of mom and pop stores ‒ has been struggling for decades. This paper attempts to quantify the degree to which the American main street, or some aspects of it, still hangs on. It presents an exploratory, large sample look at the degree to which the blocks of one US city, Chicago, actually conform to idealized main street principles. The paper offers both an empirical and a methodological contribution: what metrics might be used to capture main street principles, and how does a large city like Chicago stack up to these stated norms? Eight variables are operationalized at the block level. While the metrics here do not reflect absolute consensus about what is important in an urban neighbourhood’s commercial core, they do cover three dominant narratives: servicing, opportunity and quality. The paper finds that the overlap in these three dimensions is weak.

Storefront retail is highly valued because of its contribution to street life, its pedestrian-oriented urban design quality, and its ability to foster social connection. Despite this valuation, in many areas, main street retail struggles and storefront vacancies are common. To better understand retail vacancy causes, effects, and mitigation, we conducted 18 in-depth (in-person or phone) interviews of the leaders of business organizations in Chicago. From the literature, common explanations for retail vacancy include structural transformation of the retail industry, demographic change, and the increased cost of being a retailer. Responses from our interviewees cited demographic change, urban context, and property owner behavior as the main reasons for retail vacancy. While there was significant overlap with the literature concerning the role of demographic change, our respondents put particular emphasis on contexts and behaviors witnessed at the “street level,” such as property owner behavior.

The planned neighbourhood has long struggled to find its legitimate position within social science, as scholars have been uncomfortable articulating the connection between its ‘social’ and ‘physical’ dimensions. This paper analyses this disconnect, first summarising how planners initially overstated neighbourhood social effects and how social scientists reacted to those claims. It then traces two responses that emerged, one focused on prioritising the concept of neighbourhood as service provider rather than social enabler, and one focused on legitimising neighbourhood social effects through increasingly scientific methodologies. The disjuncture between the social-science view of neighbourhood and the physical, planning view of neighbourhood remains an unresolved issue in neighbourhood discourse.

This paper is a methodological and empirical contribution that reports on the results of an innovative on-line survey of streetscape preference. The ratings of experts and non-experts were compared to gauge the reliability of preference for views about streetscape quality. The goal was to evaluate the degree to which a set of streetscape design characteristics were similar among experts and non-experts and what dimensions of streetscape quality had the most agreement. Results show relatively high correlation between measures of streetscape quality and respondent preference, although there were some differences as well. Interestingly, among the six streetscape qualities studied, the quality of ‘walkability’ showed the least agreement among respondents.