A shopping district consists of a coffee place, a restaurant, and a boutique or two. Often, a theoretically walkable neighborhood is actually a tourist strip, or a tiny nugget that you can cross in just a few minutes on foot, before you hit a multi-lane road or a strip mall. In most of those places, it’s not clear what the word “city” even means: neighborhoods of single-family houses don’t look much different on one side of the county line than they do on the other. The hope that American cities would gradually morph into miniature Manhattans or heartland Copenhagens evaporates as soon as you try walking around Nashville or Phoenix or Louisville. Richard Florida, who once believed the “creative class” would bring a new inner-city Eden, now thinks that saving downtowns is a good way to destroy them. That optimism has curdled, largely because of the side effects of success. Studies and news articles have celebrated the young people who flock to urban centers, live in apartments, walk to school, and bike to work, promoting diversity and tolerance, raising property values and coffee standards, and foretelling an end to sprawl. For decades, planners, mayors, and activists have promoted the dense, walkable downtown as the solution to a vast array of problems. In reality, it’s a lukewarm spot at best.Īmerica is getting cities wrong again. Except the sidewalks are empty and the streets as wide as rivers. This is what the 21st-century American city is supposed to be, a satisfying and active mix of cultural holdovers, storefronts, and apartment buildings. Down the block, a cluster of high-rise rental buildings sprouts from the vale of parking lots and one-story warehouses. Around the corner, the Turnip Truck supermarket is running a sale on kombucha. ![]() ![]() ![]() There’s an Urban Outfitters across the street, next to a Lucchese store selling $500 cowboy boots. The beer is still cheap and the music homespun, but outside the metal door is the Gulch, “a hotspot for young urbanites,” as the city’s visitor website puts it. A decade ago, the squat stone structure was the only sign of life in an industrial tract down by the rail yards. On a spring evening in Nashville, I join the line outside the Station Inn, the venerable joint where grizzled fiddlers and young banjo hotshots converge for the Sunday-night bluegrass jam.
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