ABSTRACT
By the time the phone rang in Ric Richardson's office, he knew that the planning and urban design recommendations for improving Albuquerque's North Fourth Street Corridor were in trouble. Now it seemed that report was seriously stalled, if not dead in the water. Moving beyond impasse and the local conflicts that produced it took much more than scoping out representatives of the conflicting groups. It also meant figuring out who would have a willingness to listen, to learn, and to do more, too: to be able to think outside of the box of what people did yesterday, to be able to create new solutions, financially, aesthetically, and culturally. This is a street that opens up to three lanes in each direction with a median and a 35 mile-per-hour speed limit, which means, in an area like this, depending on the time of day, that people go 40 or even faster.
