The Medium Is The City: Can An Arizona Community Become The New Times Square?

Clear Channel Spectacolor is building a giant complex of outdoor advertising into the new "City Center" of Westgate, Arizona--or rather, the advertising appears to be the City Center of Westgate, a planned community dominating the southwestern suburbs of Glendale, Arizona.

To be built and operated by Clear Channel Spectacolor, a high-tech division of Clear Channel Outdoor specializing in electronic signage, Westgate's planned "downtown" will include 30 signs of various sizes, including some that are 100 feet tall--as tall as an eight-story building. Animated and electronic signage are to be heavily featured.

The city council members of Glendale (itself a "satellite city" of northwest Phoenix) hope the Westgate development will settle Glendale's sparsely populated Yucca district, and the massive Clear Channel display is an integral part of the new commercial hub. Altogether, it will be the country's largest collection of signs in an urban area outside New York's Times Square--where Clear Channel Outdoor manages more than half the outdoor property. According to Michael Forte, president and CEO of Clear Channel Spectacolor, "our Branded Cities business unit will be responsible for the sales and development" of all properties in this mountain of outdoor media.

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With an overall estimated cost of $850 million, developers hope the Westgate City Center will eventually attract up to 22 million visitors a year with 6.5 million square feet of retail space, as well as an 18,000-seat sports arena, movie theaters, dining, offices, hotels, and residential space. The central hub--consisting of the sports arena, the Clear Channel signs, and about 500,000 square feet of retail and loft space--is scheduled for completion this fall.

The size of the signs suggests that pedestrian visitors to Westgate's City Center may not be the primary audience, said Eric Kelly, a professor of urban planning at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, who has written outdoor ordinances for signs on the Las Vegas strip: "The first thing that comes to mind is that there seems to be a lack of proportion between an eight-story sign and the pedestrian mall. It sounds to me that what they're really doing is putting it around a pedestrian mall, but maybe trying to reach an audience that's further away--like drivers on a nearby highway."

Indeed, at night the lights from Clear Channel's City Center signs should be visible from two major U.S. interstate highways, 10 and 17, as they approach their junction in south Phoenix--not to mention Arizona Routes 60 and 101, which pass even closer by. In 2004, in the Phoenix area, Interstate 17 had a daily traffic of about 200,000 vehicles--and its junction with Interstate 10 is one of the most congested in the country, leading to traffic jams and long commutes.

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