This essay originally published in the Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024 edition of the Fortune Archives newsletter.
Every city center has its own story. Some have long, glorious, and troublesome pasts, while others are lively and new. But each should be designed for and by its inhabitants. After all, downtown is for people.
Jane Jacobs, the acclaimed author, journalist, and urban activist, argued this very point in a 1958 article for Fortune: Downtowns shouldn’t be designed from above, by “scale models and bird’s-eye views,” she wrote, but rather from street level, eye-to-eye with the people who make a city what it is.
“The best way to plan for downtown is to see how people use it today; to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them,” Jacobs wrote. “This does not mean accepting the present; downtown does need an overhaul, it is dirty, it is congested. But there are things that are right about it too, and by simple old-fashioned observation we can see what they are. We can see what people like.”
If Jacobs were alive today (she died in 2006), she might be dismayed by some trends in urban redevelopment. As developers push to unite skylines and street-level brick-and-mortar retail struggles, downtowns are losing the character that makes American cities unique. A massive push is underway to reinvigorate depressed downtowns following the COVID-19 pandemic that shuttered businesses and left millions of square feet of office space empty. While developers try to find uses for now-defunct office spaces, many central business districts are torn between the needs of a growing urban unhoused population and those of residents and business owners.
Indeed, what Jacobs wrote in 1958 could just as easily be said today: “This year is going to be a critical one for the future of the city. All over the country civic leaders and planners are preparing a series of redevelopment projects that will set the character of the center of our cities for generations to come.”
The big challenge remains finding a balance between giving a city what it needs—like housing—and keeping its people at the forefront of urban planning decisions. This will be a task for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to address, in collaboration with local governments, if she is elected: She has promised to get 3 million new homes built to alleviate the housing crisis, and some see her as a proponent of YIMBY-ism—an approach that prioritizes saying “yes” to development projects to increase the housing supply.
Whoever ends up shaping the country’s urban future might do well to heed Jacobs’s argument that the people who walk the streets are the true mind’s eye of a city. After all, as Jacobs notes, “Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”