The rents get even more expensive when the streets are pedestrianised, meaning you end up with expensive boutiques that are of no use to ordinary people.
Decent public space became an economic necessity.Ken Livingstone, London's first mayor, partially pedestrianised Trafalgar Square.
More inner-city flats, houses and pedestrianised shopping areas are being built.
At the same time, Reading council has smartened up and pedestrianised the adjacent shopping streets.
Even in France, whose citizens are more devoted to their cars than most, the right bank of the Seine in Paris, a virtual urban motorway, was pedestrianised (and turned into a beach) for a month last summer by the city's socialist mayor.Italian cities such as Siena and Florence have banned cars from their oldest and narrowest streets.
This is a big draw for nervous foreign middle-managers, who also maintain that there is very little official corruption.And unlike other Mexican cities, Querétaro chose not to tear down its colonial centre (now a World Heritage Site), some of which is pedestrianised.
Now Gamarra is pedestrianised and patrolled by municipal police.
In Reading, the newly pedestrianised Broad Street is doing very well, but the neighbouring, unmodernised streets look even dowdier and more neglected than they did a decade ago.Will the new town-centre developments win the struggle for the nation's wallets against the out-of-town malls?
A symphony hall was built for the city's crowd-pulling conductor; public spaces and squares were pedestrianised and old industrial canals smartened up and lined with cafés.
Malaga is a city renewed: façades have been cleaned up, streets pedestrianised and its latest cultural big-hitter, the Thyssen Museum (00 34 902 303 131; carmenthyssenmalaga. com; 10am-8pm daily except Monday), is celebrating its first birthday with a great exhibition of landscape art.
The building, an art nouveau masterpiece that stands at one end of Moscow's pedestrianised Arbat Street, has a legendary place in the city's history.
