In looking at the decline of the urban center I plan to look specifically at the effects suburban sprawl has had on the downtown proper. Most states are full of towns where the downtown is a virtual ghost town when the city and county offices close. I see suburban areas that are being built to invoke a feeling of the downtown center, mixing commercial and residential uses to attract the people who most likely would not think of going downtown to shop.
Some of the areas that I plan to look and hopefully answer are these:
Have the suburbs pulled the desirable businesses out of the downtown or were they already on the way out? If they left for the suburbs do they succeed?
Do downtown areas do enough to keep businesses from leaving and of attracting new business?
Why do shoppers ignore the downtown areas? Is it purely based on what stores are there or is it a feeling of safety?
What can be done to save these areas from total decline?
Are there viable options available to existing businesses that encourage them to stay in the downtown?
Would residential uses help reinvigorate the downtown area?
I think that the biggest question and maybe one I won't be able to fully answer is whether the downtown centers have become obsolete.
I'm sure that as I continus to research these questions, many more will come up. Hopefully the answers can provide some insight into saving the downtowns of old from complete elimination.
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3 comments:
Tim
This sounds very interesting. One item you might investigate is the condo markets. This was a hot market up till the mortgage issues hit (maybe it still is). If this market is hot and people return to live in the downtown areas, I guarantee the retail will follow. The safety will be up because these people demand it. Maybe this will save an ailing downtown?
Tim, this is a topic that I think will require ecological rather than mechanistic approaches. You could approach this in a cause and effect mode, looking for the origins of the decline. Or you could treat it as something akin to global climate change, in which industrialism and consumerism worked together to produce something that no one expected. Now that the process has begun, the temperature has released CO2 from the soil and water so that the process speeds up, glaciers and ice caps break up so that cold currents have less cold and sea levels rise. If you can describe the "ecosystem" of human settlements, in which every change drives five or six other changes, I think you'll have a better handle on the phenomenon. This isn't engineering; it's social analysis. And that will require ALL of us to think differently about both the conditions and the solutions.
Tim, I was a little confused when you said the shoppers ignore the downtown areas. Do they really? I would think the downtown areas attract shoppers.
I think I remember you telling me about this huge shopping mall that looked a lot like the one we went to the first night we were in Boston. Then people eventually stopped shopping there and is pretty much abandoned now. Are you basing this statement on this event?
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