A product of a public/private endeavor among Arthur Hill & Co., the city of Evanston, and Northwestern University, Church Street Plaza is a $181 million mixed-use development around transit with 174,000 gross leasable square feet (16,165 m2) of retail, restaurant, and entertainment space. Considered the catalyst for downtown Evanston’s decade-long resurgence, Church Street Plaza took advantage of a creative financing and partnership model to revitalize the urban core. The 7.2-acre (2.9-ha) project serves as a gateway between downtown Evanston and Northwestern University and also includes an 18-screen cinema, a 178-room hotel, a 204-unit condominium building, a 195,000-square-foot (59,436-m2) office building, and a 1,400-car parking garage.
The landmark destination in Warsaw’s newest high-rise district, Złote Tarasy is a state-of-the-art, 225,000-square-meter (2.4 million-sq. ft.) commercial complex on a 3.2-hectare (7.9-acre) infill site. Złote Tarasy’s trademark element is its one-hectare (2.5-acre) undulating glass roof, inspired by the tree canopies that shade Warsaw’s historic parks, enclosing its lively retail and entertainment plaza. Visited by more than 1.3 million people a month, the center consists of 45,000 square meters (484,376 sq. ft.) of office space, more than 200 shops, 30 restaurants, and an eight-screen cinema.
Cabot Circus is a 150,000-square-meter (1.6 million-sq. ft.) new urban quarter developed by the Bristol Alliance, a partnership between two of the United Kingdom’s largest developers, Land Securities and Hammerson. The mixed-use development was built in collaboration with the Bristol City Council, which was eager to revive a major district of the United Kingdom’s eighth-largest city. Cabot Circus was conceived as a new urban heart to the city and designed to provide Bristol’s affluent demographic with high-quality shopping, leisure, and entertainment, in hopes of moving the city up to a top shopping destination.
Detroiters and national observers alike have raved about Campus Martius since it opened in November 2004 at the city’s historic crossroads, a once gritty intersection where five major streets converge. The inaugural winner of the Amanda Burden Urban Open Space Award, the project is a 2.5-acre (1-ha) oasis of imaginative horticulture, green granite walls, and crushed limestone paths, returning vibrancy and spurring investment in the formerly downtrodden downtown. The $20 million urban park manages to serve as both a peaceful refuge and a popular destination that attracts more than 2 million visitors a year.
Allentown, Pennsylvania, went from a multimillion-dollar city budget deficit to a multimillion-dollar surplus. While other Pennsylvania cities were seeing real revitalization in recent decades, Allentown (the biggest city in the Lehigh Valley) saw lethargic economic growth after broad deindustrialization. The state designated a Neighborhood Improvement Plan in Allentown which, in conjunction with private developers, set forth a plan for economic vitality. It resulted in 4,000 new jobs in the urban core and a billion dollars of new development. Allentown is now the fastest-growing city in Pennsylvania with particularly promising job growth in its urban core.
Greenville, South Carolina, took an opportunity to dramatically enhance its downtown area by opening up and preserving its waterfalls, creating pedestrian-focused places in the heart of the central business district. Changes in the local economy and labor market resulted in downtown disinvestment in Greenville. Over the course of about 30 years, city and state governments worked with private businesses to create a new vision for downtown Greenville that would reestablish the city as an attractive place to be with a viable business center. Economic development and rising land values have allowed residents and workers to now use spaces that were once viewed as eyesores and unsafe.
The nighttime and weekend entertainment concentrated at Fourth Street Live! has reenergized Louisville’s downtown and helped jump-start a residential and tourism resurgence. The project turned a city-owned liability into a tax- and job-generating asset. How it came to be developed is an instructive story that involves the convergence of political will, developer savvy, and stakeholder cooperation around a civic need.
Riding the wave of urban regeneration in the late 1990s, downtown Louisville was making progress, but it was missing one critical element—an entertainment district. Downtown had scattered entertainment venues, a solid supply of hotel rooms, restaurants, a popular convention center, and even an aboutto-be waterfront park along its Ohio River frontage. And it had a not-so-old enclosed mall, the Louisville Galleria, that looked vacant—even if it was eking out a survival—and stood as a physical and psychological symbol of downtown’s hard times.
The product of a public/private partnership between Kansas City, the state of Missouri, and the Cordish Company, the Kansas City Power & Light District is a large-scale mixed-use development comprising 1 million square feet (92,902 m2) of office space and 600,000 square feet (55,742 m2) of commercial space, situated on nine city blocks in downtown Kansas City. The once-blighted downtown core, resistant to development for over four decades, now includes a diverse mix of civic, cultural, and commercial anchors: Kansas City Live!, a one-block open-air plaza ringed by entertainment venues; the Sprint Center, an arena seating 18,000; the world headquarters of H&R Block; Cosentino’s Downtown Gourmet, the first grocery store in downtown Kansas City in over 50 years; two renovations of historic theaters; and a 213-room rehabilitated hotel. The US$875 million mixed-use district—named after the 1930s-era art deco Power & Light Building, Kansas City’s landmark skyscraper—has transformed the south loop area, stoked resurgence in downtown activity and residential development, and become a source of community pride for city residents.
One of the most ambitious and transformational city center regeneration projects in the United Kingdom and one of the largest of its kind in Europe, Liverpool ONE is a £1 billion (USD $1.7 billion), 17-hectare (42-ac), mixed-use development in Liverpool, which for years had suffered from disinvestment and decline. Located on the site of the original “pool”—the historic shipping and trading area of the city—of Liverpool, the Liverpool ONE development now boasts six distinct districts, each with a different character and design. Liverpool ONE comprises 165 retail units with over 50 percent of brands new to Liverpool across 152,500 square meters (1.6 million sf) of retail and leisure space, 3,250 square meters (34,983 sf) of offices, more than 500 residential units, two hotels, a 14-screen cinema, a two-ha (five-ac) park, a new public transportation interchange, and 3,000 parking spaces.
The result of a partnership between nonprofit developer Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition and the Milpitas Redevelopment Agency, DeVries Place is a housing project for seniors that has become the cornerstone of the city’s downtown revitalization effort. Situated on a historic yet underused site in the town’s center, DeVries Place provides 103 affordable rental homes for low- to very-low-income seniors. Helping restore the character of the town’s Main Street by incorporating a historic home, the apartments are within walking distance of the newly renovated municipal library and a soon-to-be-completed modern medical center.
