Lessons From Silicon Valley's 'Downtown'

How best to revitalize downtown urban centers in the wake of the sweeping suburbanization of the past half century? It's a big issue, one we discuss frequently here at Cities. A report released Thursday, Shaping Downtown San Jose: The Quest to Establish an Urban Center for Silicon Valley by SPUR, the Bay Area-based urban-planning research and advocacy organization, provides a detailed and intriguing history of the challenges that continue to face downtown San Jose, the Valley's urban center. (SPUR is also advising on San Jose's redevelopment plan).

The report, written by SPUR regional planning director Egon Terplan with research assistance from Jason Su, notes that the city in the 1970s "was trying to do something exceedingly difficult in the history of American cities: create a major downtown center, with high volumes of pedestrian activity, within a region that was overwhelmingly low-density and car-dependent." The San Jose Redevelopment Agency, armed with $2 billion in public investment, took center stage the following decade, trying a wide variety of strategies to counter the forces of decentralization and suburbanization and revitalize downtown. Here's how Terplan describes the evolution of downtown San Jose: