What does DTK need?

[danbrotherston]

Back to what the area needs: space that encourages a softening of the boundary between the generally private built environment and the public space around it.  Cafés and street architecture are nice in the warmer months, but the colder, darker, winter months don't make for ideal "spending casual time downtown" conditions.

How do countries with similar winter conditions for part of the year do it?

I don't actually agree with this.

Sure, we won't get people spending time outside in the middle of a blizzard, most of our winter days are only cold...and not even that cold. We have a plethora of sunny and ~0 days. Most people would be perfectly happy to come out and enjoy a day like that.

It's such a tiresome trope that people don't go outside in the winter.

In related news, this was an utterly wild news segment for me: (It's in Dutch, only through the magic of auto-generated captions and machine translation can I watch it...also...those things are amazing).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRTpG7X09jY

Leaving aside the absolutely shocking level of reasonableness that the interviewees express it is rather interesting that the expectation is that doors are left open on shops even during the winter, and that people feel unwelcome when doors are not open. It wouldn't strike me as weird to have to open a door to go into a business.

FWIW I have noticed that a few shops in my town do have doors open. It made sense in the summer, but I was surprised when this continued into winter. But it is definitely not as ubiquitous here as it seems in Eindhoven...I'd say maybe 50% of shops are doing this now. (And I am speaking of both the new shopping centre near me, and the city centre).

I know this is only tangentially related to the topic in this thread, but it is interesting how such very different things can be considered "welcoming" vs. "unwelcoming" in a downtown. As always, I think we should have a bold vision and build a good city, and not get too caught up in trying to guess what people want. If we build good interesting places, they'll succeed.