The notion that real cities have big downtowns is firmly ingrained in the minds of many urban planners and city officials. As Joel Garreau points out in Edge City, this ignores the fact that such downtowns were only built for about a century, from roughly 1820 to 1920.
Modern cities, which planners deride by calling them “sprawl,” have job centers spread out all over the place. San Jose, Phoenix, and Los Angeles are all typical examples. Planners and officials try to re-create obsolete downtowns by building pork-barrel projects such as convention centers and giving developers huge subsidies for hotels and office buildings. This enriches developers and contractors, but it never really creates a “real” downtown.
