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Today most Americans live in suburbs, and most new jobs are created in suburbs. The industrial and economic restructuring that occurred in the decades after the war signaled the decline of rust belt industries located in older cities of the nation's industrial heartland. Meanwhile, a new breed of higher-tech businesses was growing up in garden office parks in edge cities located on the urban periphery, especially in Sunbelt cities where federal defense spending and hydroelectric power projects supported them. New Sunbelt cities of the South and West boomed with low-density sprawling growth, while older, industrial cities, landlocked by rings of suburbs, watched their wealth and populace drain outward into newer jurisdictions. The smart growth and livable communities movements have proposed using elements including density, mix of land uses, pedestrian- and transit-oriented design and a central focus to reform the destructive development patterns that have resulted from postwar trends. In the fragmented, post modern landscape that has taken the place of urban America, we can see thriving efforts to rebuild the heart of older cities, and to create vibrant city centers in newer cities. Meanwhile, in existing suburban enclaves across the country there are efforts to build walkable, neighborhood commercial centers that will provide a heart for the community and a locus for neighborhood services such as schools, stores, restaurants and transit hubs Downtowns Recent demographic and real estate market trends show that downtown city centers are making a comeback. While inner city neighborhoods might still suffer from concentrated poverty, and a lack of jobs, city centers are attracting residents who want to enjoy an urbane lifestyle, including access to jobs, culture and entertainment. And even though communications and transportation innovations have allowed businesses and workers to decentralize, many of the firms driving today's economy are clustering where they can interact, compete, collaborate and share infrastructure and amenities such as research universities, a highly-educated workforce, and access to various experts and services. Neighborhood Centers In his book The Next American Metropolis, architect Peter Calthorpe presents his vision of urban regions built of cohesive neighborhoods each with their own commercial core. These building-block neighborhoods are linked to one another through their cores by transit. While the metropolitan area would have a central downtown, the many neighborhood centers would provide a secondary service area that would be reached on foot from people's homes. The neighborhood centers in Calthorpe's vision are comprised of retail, offices, services, cinemas, health clubs, dense housing, and a transit hub. Many older communities, built along streetcar lines before World War II, follow this model. In contrast, the automobile-oriented development that occurred in the latter decades of the 20th Century placed retail, services, entertainment and some offices in strips along the arterials that carry cars between neighborhoods and schools and other destinations. Walking is unpleasant and even unsafe in this environment. Residents, including children too young to drive, depend on cars to reach routine destinations and miss out on the community-building and health benefits that derive from a walkable neighborhood core. But communities like Brea, in Southern California, have taken underused land in their midst and built, or rebuilt neighborhood centers accessible by foot and bicycle from surrounding neighborhoods. Some communities are converting old shopping malls into walkable urban centers, with apartments, retail, entertainment and other uses. In old cities and newer suburbs the movement to create walkable, urbane centers is reasserting itself as a key ingredient of efforts to create more livable communities and regions. LGC ProjectsThe LGC organizes workshops on downtown and neighborhood revitalization. With support from an EPA Sustainable Development Challenge Grant and in Collaboration with the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), we are helping five older suburban communities in the Los Angeles region revitalize strip commercial areas and adopt innovative planning policies that support downtown and neighborhood centers. A brief report on this project appeared in "Developing for the Future: Hometown USA'' published in September 2000 by the EPA and available online at http://www.epa.gov/livablecommunities/grants. At the conclusion of the project in July 2002, the LGC and CNU will publish a more detailed guidebook on revitalizing older suburban communities. ResourcesThe following LGC publications address some of the key issues related to creating vibrant downtown and neighborhood centers:
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