Photo by Bill Rieter, CSU Senior Photographer

By Dr. Edward "Ned" Hill and Fran Stewart

President Barack Obama has signaled a new emphasis on the nation’s urban core, going so far as to create a Cabinet-level Office of Urban Policy. Armond Budish, the first Cleveland-area Ohio House Speaker since the 1930s, also seems determined to make urban revitalization a top priority. Given that Ohio is the sole state in which two of its major cities – Cleveland and Cincinnati – repeatedly appear among the nation’s 10 poorest, a serious effort to transform the state’s urban landscape is welcomed news.

However, in their push to tackle the ugly urban issues of poverty, unemployment, crime and foreclosure, political leaders shouldn’t overlook the beauty. What we need today is a New City Beautiful – a model of development that emphasizes urban design and the importance of public spaces as a way of creating and holding value in private places. At Cleveland State University, we have been exploring the important intersection of business, art and culture, particularly as an attraction and neighborhood-building strategy. With this new monthly column, we hope to highlight a broad range of CSU research and activities, as well as draw on the extensive expertise of faculty members at the Levin College of Urban Affairs to frame some of the major issues that the state and region must face. Our first column is dedicated to the vital but too long neglected task of rebuilding downtown.

As fuel prices resume their upward push at the end of this nasty recession and concerns over global warming increasingly influence location choices, people will become more and more open to returning to urban areas. The cities that will emerge as winners will be those that offer a rich, diverse environment in which to work, live, play, and build community. People are poised to accept the New City Beautiful.

The New City Beautiful has to be less elitist than its century-old predecessor. The New City Beautiful has to be less about grand buildings in grand settings and more about public spaces that work for people. The New City Beautiful should be about building neighborhoods, especially every region’s most important neighborhood – its downtown. Downtowns need to be revitalized as premier live-work neighborhoods of regions. The development community today is focused on the role of anchor institutions in securing the future of cities. In Cleveland, we are stumbling on a different formula: blending anchor institutions, mainly employers, with anchor amenities to create neighborhoods of distinction. University Circle is more than a cluster of employers and cultural institutions; it is also Wade Oval and the green of Case Western Reserve University’s campus, coupled with the museums. Cleveland’s downtown can revolve around its anchor amenities as well – the lake, river, Playhouse Square and, most importantly, a revitalized streetscape that integrates these amenities with existing anchor institutions to produce a neighborhood that moves from the current population of 10,000 to Mayor Frank Jackson’s goal of 25,000 to an eventual population of nearly 40,000 residents.

The New City Beautiful embraces the power of competition, choice and individual decision-making. In other words, the success of neighborhoods is about the value proposition that they and their cities offer to both potential residents and businesses.

Building dense, walkable neighborhoods is all about weaving many small but essential details into a rich urban fabric. What holds the campuses of the University of Cincinnati and Youngstown State University together? What makes Georgetown, Beacon Hill or the new waterfront of Malmo, Sweden, work? In all cases, it is the quality of urban design and, surprisingly, the use of green space as an anchor amenity. UC has its football stadium, which is open to all; Georgetown has its canal; and Beacon Hill has the Charles River and the Esplanade. Malmo attempted to replace its failed shipyard with an auto plant, which also failed. The city then found success in transfiguring industrial rubble into the striking Turning Torso, a sculpture-like skyscraper that integrates with a magnificent waterfront. Malmo exhibits the elements of the New City Beautiful: anchoring green space, a striking signature building that integrates with the street at a human scale, enticing urban design, and varying land uses – mainly residential, mixed with offices and retail.

The New City Beautiful recognizes the power of green space for both passive and active recreation as a way of increasing property values and decreasing risk. The New City Beautiful emphasizes quality, well-integrated public space. The New City Beautiful underscores the importance of function and how streets and buildings relate to a greener future. The New City Beautiful understands the importance of beauty in its overarching design. Art and culture play a direct role in building urban neighborhoods that work. They serve as magnets to attract and hold in place the individuals needed to sustain businesses and the businesses that employ and serve individuals. The urban experience is increasingly amenity-driven, not retail-driven.

The experience of shopping is now spread along a continuum from armchair convenience at one end (where the Internet and clicks are winning over cars and bricks) and entertainment at the other, with the traditional view of shopping landing somewhere in the middle. The notion that destination retail will rebuild neighborhoods is laughable and certainly not bankable. To be a destination, a neighborhood – even a commercial neighborhood – has to be authentic and offer unique value. Unique urban neighborhoods cannot be built around national chain stores and restaurants. Cleveland should have learned this lesson with the failure of the Galleria.

What drove this point home to me was a rootless night I spent in Virginia Beach’s new downtown after giving a speech. It is also a lesson I relearn every time I spend a night in Columbus’ Easton Town Center. Both are retail-driven malls that are prospering simply by killing off their predecessor malls. Both of these developments will do well as long as their retail mix is unique in the region, but their growth will slow when the stores are knocked off in competing properties. Although both of these include hotels, what is missing in these developments is a neighborhood; a unique, local experience; and a local anchor amenity. You can have the same experience at any exit ramp in any major metropolitan area. These so-called distinctive “upscale lifestyle centers” all have American Eagle, P.F. Chang’s and California Pizza Kitchen. Give me Boo Long in Cleveland, Tony Packo’s in Toledo, or Old Forge Pizza in Scranton, Pennsylvania. For retail, I’ll take Geiger’s in Lakewood, the Banyan Tree in Tremont, or the localness of Austin.

Every city serves four distinct populations: a work population, a residential population, a regional population that consumes available entertainment options – think of them as day-tourists ¬– and a tourist population that rents hotel rooms. Thriving, inviting urban centers are those that manage to serve the needs of all four of those populations well. Good urban centers have distinctive recreation amenities: Chicago has its shoreline bike path; Reno, Nevada, has its downtown whitewater park and kayak slalom. Cities are now driven by muscle-powered sports. Thinking “green” should go beyond efforts such as the City of Cleveland’s new green building codes. Cities need to be setting aside green space for the active and passive enjoyment of the different populations they serve. Safe, well-maintained city parks add to the attractiveness – and the attraction strategy – of cities.

Good urban centers also have unique cultural amenities. Chicago has the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Art Museum in terms of formal culture. But what is most impressive is how many successful downtown neighborhoods have active green space. I mentioned Reno’s active green space earlier, but Portland, Oregon, provides a “deconstructive” example of remaking its cityscape with its move to tear down a highway to free up its riverfront. St. Louis and University City share an anchor institution in Washington University, but the area also has an anchor amenity in Forest Park. What works in New Orleans is not the French Quarter, but the Riverwalk on the Mississippi and Uptown, where the river, local retail and the zoo come together on the fringes of Tulane. Included among cultural amenities are distinct, street-level retail options. In addition to serving the needs of residents and providing the connective tissue among urban neighborhoods, these retail establishments must be unique enough to attract shoppers from throughout the region. It’s not enough to plop suburban mall shopping options in an urban retail setting. The goal must be to entice shoppers, diners and culture consumers to a true urban experience. As mall retail collapses across the state, downtowns must seize the opportunity to turn migration patterns back inward. Street-level urban activities, enhanced by art-driven displays and experiences, are a starting point.

The consequence of failing to truly transform the state’s urban landscape is clear: People tend to start businesses where they live. If no one lives downtown, no one will start new businesses there. Businesses also spring up near unique talent pools. Until cities begin to focus more on the kinds of experiences and opportunities that attract these pools of talent, other business attraction efforts will likely fail. If downtown Cleveland isn’t resuscitated as the fundamental core for the surrounding neighborhoods and communities, the entire region is doomed to collapse upon itself.

CSU anchors the eastern end of downtown Cleveland, making engaged learning accessible to students and area businesses, providing thousands of jobs and maintaining the physical infrastructure of an 85-acre metropolitan campus. CSU can contribute even more to neighborhood development by focusing on improving access to art, art education and display of art on campus. Economic development opportunities also exist in partnering with neighboring Playhouse Square, the nation’s second-largest theater complex.

CSU has already begun a partnership with Playhouse Square and the Cleveland Institute of Art to develop the District of Design. The goal of the collaboration is to draw on Northeast Ohio’s deep talent and rich history in product design to create a one-of-a-kind street-level presence to improve the work experience for wholesale buyers. The District of Design would provide a street-level showplace for some of the area’s top manufacturers to display and develop their new products for commercial buyers and casual shoppers. This envisioned commercial center would be flanked by consumer product enterprises attracted to an exciting, new downtown residential neighborhood, and it would link to the city’s existing cultural and dining options nearby.

We’ll go into greater detail on the vision for and progress of the District of Design in a later column. And we will develop the principles that underpin the New City Beautiful in future columns. Look for another installment of Urban Developments next month as part of CSU’s weekly roundup of Ohio Economic News.

As this column makes clear, government, university and business leaders will need to work together toward artfully designing a New City Beautiful, a new urban landscape that is green, diverse – in terms of race, income, age, activity – and is authentic. Let’s discover it together.

Hill is Vice President for Economic Development and Interim Dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

Stewart is a Fellow of CSU’s Urban Center.