[LINK] "Mid-sized cities make progress in revitalizing downtowns"

[rfmcdonald]

Chris Atchison's Globe and Mail article, starting from the southwestern Ontario city of London with its metropolitan area a conurbation of a half-million people, takes a look at the different strategies that mid-sized cities--anything smaller than Toronto and bigger than Charlottetown, I suppose--can take to keep their downtowns active. The right policy mix is key.

But revitalizing a tired downtown is an uphill battle that requires more than money – it takes time, strategic vision, a diversity of businesses and a realization that competing head-to-head with the likes of Wal-Mart is a non-starter.

“I believe making a main street from scratch or keeping a vibrant street in a small or medium-sized city is the most difficult task in city-making,” says David Gordon, the director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

“The market forces that are arrayed against you are very difficult to deal with.”

Over time, those forces – in particular the drive toward suburbanization – have slowly squeezed the life out of once-thriving downtowns.

“We did a survey seven years ago of planners across North America and we asked them to identify downtowns of medium-sized cities of between 70,000 and 700,000 people which were in a bad state, unhealthy or declining, and it was virtually all of them,” Pierre Filion, a professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning, recalls.

“There was only about 10 per cent that were doing well.”

Despite the bleak assessments, cities across the country are making progress in transforming dilapidated downtowns. The key, say urban planners, is to understand that injecting new life into a downtown core takes a careful blend of innovative tinkering and visionary planning.

Among Atchison's suggestions i9nclude acceptance that the old shops that once filled the downtown aren't coming back and looking for replacements, and promoting the downtown as a space for events like festivals and a place with good infrastructure. Having looser regulations on development and lower taxes and fees doesn't hurt, either.