The One Thing About Cities
They Can’t Be About One Thing
There’s one thing you should know about cities—but I’ve got to tell a tale of two cities first.
In its heyday, the strip of downtown Austin once known as East Pecan Street had become, by the late 1800s, the city’s “second Main Street.” Vibrant and bustling, it was lined with “grocery stores, apparel shops, dry good spots, liquor stores, barber shops, furniture stores and movie theaters as well as saloons, restaurants and inns,” and some residences, too.
Today, this district is known mostly for cheap shots and occasional shootings, earning the nickname “Dirty Sixth.”
Dirty Sixth is packed at night with frat boys, bachelorettes, and other midnight cowboys out to seize the mechanical bull by the horns, holding on until the last Jäger Bomb throws the whole evening off the rails. Dawn breaks at happy hour on Dirty Sixth, so the morning sun shines a harsh light on a nearly deserted district. In daylight, it’s hard to tell which businesses are only closed until beer o’clock, and which are gone for good.
On the west side of downtown Austin, the 2nd Street District couldn’t be more different—in fact, at street level, it seems a lot like the Pecan Street of yore. You can wake up in your apartment at AMLI, grab a coffee at Jo’s, stroll to your office at Silicon Labs, get lunch at Local Foods, work out at Barry’s Bootcamp, and complain to your Council Member at City Hall—all before dinner, followed by a show at Austin City Limits Live. This tree-lined, jam-packed, three-block stretch of sidewalks is busy from sun-up until well past sun-down.
Unlike Dirty Sixth, 2nd Street provides, rather compactly, a full range of necessities and possibilities for a certain kind of downtown life. Its intricate mix of uses and options keeps it full of life all day long, giving visitors and residents alike many reasons to spend time on its sidewalks.
In The Death & Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs referred to this “intricacy of sidewalk use” as the “sidewalk ballet”:
This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.
If the 2nd Street District is an intricate ballet, East Sixth is dirty dancing (or the walk of shame). One is a place for all aspects of living—home, work, and recreation—while the other is only about one thing.
In the mid-Twentieth Century, we bulldozed and rebuilt many of our downtowns around only one thing: the office, replacing the ballet with the rat race. Highways ran over historic districts and emptied many downtowns of full-time residents, leaving downtowns entirely dependent on tourists, shoppers, and commuters—visitors all. When the pandemic hit, most of those visitors disappeared, and now, four years out, most cities still haven’t fully recovered. While people are returning to downtowns for entertainment, a lot of people are no longer returning to work, leaving many office-heavy downtowns more like ghost towns.
Some cities are now hoping to resurrect their downtowns and their moribund municipal finances with more fun—another entertainment district, another stadium, another music venue to attract more visitors. They want to put the days of dreary downtown office work in the dustbin of history.
But to make downtown only about one thing, even if it’s a different thing, would be to repeat the mistakes of the past.
When city leaders think about rebuilding more durable downtowns, they are no doubt hoping for the success of Austin’s 2nd Street. But if their focus is only on nightlife, the reality is likely to look a lot more like Dirty Sixth. As the dirty district’s troubles demonstrate, a nightlife-only district is a recipe for urban decay—it’s a place that is always half-dead, a place with a half-life. Austinites have wanted to clean up Dirty Sixth’s act for years, and finally a real estate developer is working to make it more of an all-day, “18-hour” destination like 2nd Street—to choreograph a new sidewalk ballet, or perhaps a honky-tonk hoedown.
This is the right path for recovery.
In an era in which people can Netflix-and-chill after working-from-home, when nobody has to go downtown for anything, cities need to reorient themselves towards being attractive places not just to work and play but also to live. Indeed, it’s those downtowns that had attracted more residents in the years leading up to the pandemic that seem to be faring better after it. Even Detroit—once the poster child of urban decay—is enjoying a rebound as the first new residents it's seen in half-a-century bring new life to its historic center.
Yet cities have made the living part hard to do, as we have chronicled here at City of Yes, by pursuing policies that have pushed out middle-class families, lower-income people, minorities, working seniors, weirdos, and a whole lot of other folks. When a neighborhood becomes a place that is only for DINKs or retirees, when it becomes all about only one aspect or one phase of life, it too becomes a less vibrant, less lived-in place.
Single-use districts, whether those for offices or entertainment, have created dead zones in our urban ecology: neighborhoods that lack vitality, either because they are missing whole classes and ages of people, or because at certain times of day, they serve no people at all. This has made our cities inherently fragile, leaving them exposed to future shocks and incapable of new improvisations.
If there’s one thing you should know about cities, it’s this: single-use districts make for disposable downtowns. Cities ought to dispose of the idea that they can only be about one thing.