This story is part of Dwell’s yearlong 25th-anniversary celebration of the people, places, and ideas we’ve championed over the years.

Downtown Orlando will soon look a lot different. The one-way streets designed to make car travel more efficient are changing back to pedestrian-friendly two-way traffic, and there will soon be wider sidewalks, more bike lanes, dog parks, plazas, and street trees around. These changes are part of an action plan, one that calls for downtown to become a daisy chain of public spaces that entices more foot traffic.

“One of the reasons we’re so focused on the public realm is that it is the thing that’s most important to our cities,” says Cassie Branum, the Atlanta-based urban design practice leader at Perkins & Will who is helping Orlando reinvent its core. “Those are the backbones of our cities and what brings humanity to life in these places.”

The American downtown has always been a site of reinvention and experimentation, making visible the social, economic, and political priorities of the time. Until the middle of the 20th century, downtowns across the country thrived. Then suburbanization, white flight, and deindustrialization pulled people away in the postwar era. As their cores emptied, cities relied on raze-and-rebuild urban renewal projects—think Interstate highways, new sports stadiums, and state-of-the-art office towers often built over neighborhoods of color—to improve their fortunes. It’s a strategy that continued into the early 21st century, with various cities vying to become the next tech hub or home base for large companies (remember Amazon’s HQ2 competition?).

But the missing element, cities came to understand, was a robust public life. People want to be around people. Think bustling sidewalks, cultural attractions, buzzing restaurants that are open beyond office hours, and parks and playgrounds. Detroit, the poster child for downtown depopulation, experienced two consecutive years of growth in 2023 and 2024, which Mayor Mike Duggan attributed to new residential development that has attracted families, young professionals, and seniors; more entertainment and cultural attractions; and crime reduction.

Downtowns now are contending with a new set of challenges. Even college-educated workers are priced out of expensive coastal cities, and these same places—like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle—have had lower return-to-office rates. Since the pandemic, the country’s 12 largest cities have lost eight percent of their population. Meanwhile, fast-growing Sun Belt cities, which rapidly developed during the car-centric postwar era, are figuring out how best to accommodate and encourage the right kind of growth and do it sustainably.

Across the country, cities are remaking their downtowns into livable neighborhoods, layering housing, humane streetscapes, and vibrant public spaces into areas that have primarily served as central business districts. In some cases, bringing more people downtown has been an ongoing desire for decades, but the affordability crisis, the shuttering of offices due to the pandemic, and people seeking out lower costs of living has prompted cities to rethink the role of the urban core. There’s growing consensus that these places should be walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that are vibrant 24 hours of the day—or as close to that as possible. It’s not just about bringing people downtown with projects like new stadiums and entertainment or innovation districts; it’s about keeping them there.

A return to livability

The heart of downtown Indianapolis is a 285-foot-tall limestone obelisk dedicated to soldiers and sailors from the state of Indiana. A bronze of Lady Victory alights its peak and at its base are cascading fountains adorned with statues depicting battle scenes and a reflecting pool. Despite the monument’s somber subject matter, it is a pleasant place to be—save for the traffic circle that disconnects it from the rest of downtown. But a couple years ago, amid a bid for more livability downtown, the city transformed a quadrant of the roundabout into a temporary park. Designed by the landscape and urban design firm Merritt Chase with Big Car Collaborative, it featured a beer garden, a bright blue Imagination Playground, wood picnic tables, movable bistro and Adirondack chairs, lime-green umbrellas for shade, and turf circles. Over 5,000 people visited on opening weekend in 2023. The pop-up was so successful that Merritt Chase and the city are exploring a permanent design.

SPARK, as it’s now called, is part of a larger plan to revitalize the urban core of Indianapolis and draw more people to it by focusing on new housing, upgrading infrastructure, and economic development programs. It’s working: Over the past 10 years, the number of families living downtown has increased over 66 percent. What stitches it all together is an improved public realm, including new parks and more pleasant, beautiful streets. Instead of serving as primarily a place to work, downtown Indianapolis has the ambition to become a highly desirable neighborhood.

“People really want to live in downtowns,” says Nina Chase, a founding principal of Merritt Chase, which is also working on a street connectivity plan in the area. “The pitch is: bring people downtown, not just for big sports events or big tourism draws, but for people to have a good quality of life.”

Indianapolis wants to turbocharge the momentum and increase the downtown population by 20,000 people—roughly 65 percent—in the next decade. “If we invest in better livability, everything else will benefit,” says Chase’s fellow founding principal Chris Merritt. “People are really mobile and flexible and so they can choose where they want to be. You have to invest in better quality of life in cities to get the kind of talent cities want.”

In addition to Monument Circle, the firm is remaking Georgia Street—a European-style promenade built for the 2010 Superbowl—into a park-like setting. Three blocks away, it’s updating the plazas and open space around City Market, a 19th-century market hall that is being renovated into a mixed-use campus. The firm is uncovering part of an old foundation that still remains in the plaza, which is a nod to the architectural heritage of the city and adding more greenery. The hope is that instead of getting into your car and driving to your next destination, people downtown will walk from place to place instead. “Especially post Covid, we’re trying to build better social cohesion and not just have isolation,” says Merritt. “We think public spaces do that, and that can improve our lives and strengthen community.”

Revitalization for sustainability’s sake

The revitalization work happening downtown is also a play at long-term social resiliency to cities. The pandemic cratered downtowns, laying bare just how dependent central business districts are on nine-to-five office workers for economic vitality in these areas. Nearly six years later, recovery has been slow and uneven. It took Manhattan until August for foot traffic to surpass pre-pandemic levels, a shift attributed to return to office mandates and safety perceptions. San Francisco, once a poster child for the so-called urban doom loop, is still experiencing significant office vacancies and lower foot traffic than before the pandemic. However, cities with lower rates of hybrid work, which includes midsize and small cities and those in the Sun Belt, recovered faster. There’s a sense among planners that diversifying the reasons why people come downtown is crucial for reducing the potential impact of future crises.

Houston is one Sun Belt city that has been remaking its central business district into a more sustainable and resilient place. While downtown Houston was mixed-use until the early 20th century, midcentury suburbanization and sprawl led it to become a place that people mostly drove in and out of to go to work. Since the 1980s, Houston has been adding hotels, convention centers, stadiums, and an arts and culture district. “We’ve been on a multidecade journey around this question of diversification,” says Kris Larson, the president and CEO of Downtown Houston+, a nonprofit organization that has been shaping the growth strategy of the area since its founding in 1983.

In recent years, the organization has been advocating for more residents in the area. Since Downtown Houston+ launched its downtown living initiative in 2013, developers have constructed over 15,600 units of housing with more on the way. Thanks to a number of state and local subsidies, office-to-residential conversions have become a new avenue to add these units.

Brooks Howell, a principal in the Houston office at Gensler who specializes in residential and mixed-use developments, notes that office buildings constructed since 2010 are in high demand and fully leased while those that are older than 1990 are struggling. However, offices built before 1975, which have come to the end of their useful lives as workplaces, since they are too expensive to retrofit, are in demand for adaptive reuse. These buildings qualify for historic tax credits that make them financially appealing to redevelop as residential buildings. Howell also sees opportunities for other cities with older office buildings to employ a similar strategy, especially mid-size cities that have experienced depopulation. “In some of these downtowns, every building is more than fifty years old. Every single one,” he says. “We could take this downtown and essentially plan it into one giant mixed-use project.”

Howell is currently working on the $26.5 million renovation of One City Centre, a 1960 skyscraper by SOM, into apartments and short-term rentals targeted to corporations that need to bring employees in for an extended period of time, convention attendees, and patients of nearby medical centers that are coming downtown for treatments. “Residential is really the chicken-and-the-egg,” says Howell, referring to achieving a critical mass of people downtown. “You’ve got to get retailers, you’ve got to get arts, you’ve got to get culture, but really you need rooftops. You’re not going to get the grocer before you get the other.” Downtown Houston+ wants to increase the number of residents in the area to 30,000 people by 2036 and office-to-residential conversions will be a significant part of the equation.

Now that there are more constituencies in downtown Houston—residents, office workers, and visitors—Larson wants them to come together. This has been challenging because the area hasn’t had a robust public realm for many decades. Because of Houston’s hot and humid weather, 95 blocks of downtown are connected by a climate-controlled underground tunnel system that includes concourses with shops and restaurants. While it’s convenient for workers in the towers above, it has led downtown sidewalks to feel deserted. “The next chapter of transformation that we’re working on here is thinking about how we create that space where people not only move through, but also connect and participate in city life with one another,” says Larson.

Downtown Houston+ is converting seven blocks of Main Street into a pedestrian-only promenade. While part of this is to accommodate visitors to the 2026 World Cup, the redesign builds off of temporary sidewalk extensions that were installed for pandemic relief. There will be more trees, shade awnings, and cooling elements to make the area more comfortable for visitors. “We’re still combating that legacy of car orientation in design, but also know that to be competitive, we need to offer a better experience for humans,” adds Larson.

A walkable take on pandemic recovery

Public realm improvements aren’t just about bringing more people downtown for the first time, like in Indianapolis, Houston, and Orlando. Cities that experienced population loss as a result of the pandemic are also using this strategy to entice people back.

San Francisco—with lower return-to-office rates, vacant storefronts, and empty malls—is one of them. Robbie Silver, the president and CEO of the Downtown SF Partnership, an urban management and placemaking organization that launched in January 2020, sees public space as a critical part of sparking more real estate investment.

“We need to be proactive in making physical streetscape improvements to the public realm and creating conditions so that when the market starts to come back again and when leasing activity increases, we’re in the best position possible,” he says. To do that, Downtown SF Partnership hired the urban design firm SITELAB urban studio to create a public realm action plan that called for turning underutilized plazas, back streets, and alleys into vibrant public spaces and focusing on entertainment to draw people outside.

“Truthfully, San Francisco probably under invested in the public realm downtown for a very long time because it didn’t need to,” says Laura Crescimano, SITELAB’s cofounder and principal. “Between the economic powerhouse that had grown around tech and business and the natural setting, I think that the city was able to not invest.” She sees an opportunity now to bring in those long overdue improvements, especially as businesses begin to return. “We actually have that office energy coming back and at the same time, I think we have a choice to think about what more and how much more diverse can we actually create, make the ecosystem.”

To wit: the Partnership developed an “Entertainment Zone” program with the city, which enables bars to sell drinks to go for outdoor consumption within a designated area, and launched the inaugural zone on Front Street, near the Embarcadero, last year. Since then, the program has expanded statewide. Entertainment zones make it simpler for special events, which ordinarily require special permits and vendors, to take place. So far, the Partnership’s programming for Front Street has included an Oktoberfest-style beer garden, a drag-themed block party, watch parties for the Valkyries, San Francisco’s WNBA team, and a family-friendly autumn-themed hoe down. “We’re trying to introduce a new customer base, a new audience, and then, as people are coming back to work more and more, incentives for people to come to work and stay later,” says Silver. Tellingly, some businesses reported a 1,500 percent increase in sales on the days that these events took place. In addition to helping the businesses that are there, it’s also “an opportunity for brokers to show prospective tenants what a great amenity an activated street is,” adds Silver.

Similarly, new developments in Boston—which has also struggled with foot traffic since Covid —also emphasize public space. On the edge of the South End, a 15-minute walk from the financial district, the design firm Elkus Manfredi Architects recently completed the master plan for the Ink Block, a 16-acre mixed-use redevelopment of the Boston Herald’s offices and printing presses that includes five residential buildings (including condos and a co-living building), a hotel, and retail. Between the buildings, the firm integrated dog parks and small plazas with outdoor seating. Meanwhile, the city of Boston and Massachusetts Department of Transportation turned an area beneath an underpass adjacent to the Ink Block into a park with landscaped boardwalks, pickleball courts, and bike paths. Similarly, at Lyrik—a mixed-use redevelopment in Boston’s Back Bay that was built over a highway—Elkus Manfredi designed 28,000 square feet of publicly accessible space that is open 24 hours a day. It’s become a place where neighbors watch the sunset and musicians from Berklee stage street performances.

David P. Manfredi, the CEO and founding principal of Elkus Manfredi, believes this type of nontransactional public space—meaning you don’t have to buy anything to use the space—is essential for restitching the social fabric of the city. “It’s an invitation,” says Manfredi. “That’s what brings people together, but also what brings people back to the city and has them hanging around on Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, more than almost anything else.”

The emphasis on community is a through line across downtown revitalizations. These areas are not isolated places, but part of a larger metropolis. “The hardest thing with most cities is that all neighborhoods are important,” says Perkins & Will’s Cassie Branum. “We have to remind ourselves that downtowns are for everyone. I don’t think that that message is making its way throughout all of our downtowns. All ships rise together. If we thought of our regions as a unified ecosystem and downtown is the heart of that ecosystem, I think we’d see more success in our cities and in our downtowns.”

Top photo of Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis by Hadley Fruits, courtesy of Merritt Chase

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