Downtown Development: Rethinking and Restructuring U.S. Downtowns

1 Course Unit

The events of 2020-2021, the pandemic and mandated shutdowns of workplaces, visitor destinations and retail and entertainment zones prompted more than a traditional cyclical downturn. Trends toward remote, hybrid work and on-line shopping dramatically accelerated, emptying office buildings and retail premises. Attitudes towards policing were also altered by a series of high-profile incidents. Five years after the initial shutdowns, few American downtowns have restored the number of workers who were present in 2019. Most cities are focused on converting vacant office inventory to other uses. In the last decades of the 20th century America's cities had rebounded from decades of de-industrialization, disinvestment and suburbanization. By 2000, city centers were diversifying land-use, evolving from 9-5 office districts to 24- hour, mixed-use business, hospitality, retail, institutional and residential places with well-managed parks and plazas. Many cities added sports venues in or adjacent to downtown. Housing demand pushed prices beyond the range of many residents. Then, the events of 2020 challenged the fundamentals around which most of these places were built: public transit, the benefits of density, walkability, and face-to-face interaction in the workplace, at conventions, in hotels, restaurants, cafes and public spaces. City Planning 6420 will start with a focus on how downtowns are responding to challenges that linger from the events of 2020: the impact of remote and hybrid work, the expansion of quality-of-life challenges, the emptying out of older office buildings, the need to provide more affordable housing We will briefly look back at the origins of American “downtowns,” and at previous pandemics to explore how cities responded, review redevelopment trends that reshaped cities beginning in the 1980s and then focus on current realities and challenges, including those around public safety strategies. Some cities are capitalizing on this crisis to restructure and make substantial changes; others are mired in unresolved local policy and political differences. The course approach is pragmatic, recognizing the significant pull-back of the federal government from urban oriented programs, while focusing on what can be done by local governments, private developers, and private-sector led organizations like business improvement districts (BIDs). We will use Philadelphia's Center City and several other cities as laboratories to explore strategies that work, contrasting it with trends cities in Europe and Asia, seeking to highlight what may be uniquely North American cultural and metropolitan development patterns and lessons that might be drawn from other global cities. Fall 1 Course Unit