wishful thinking, downtowning

Another grand debate of downtowns - a meta-issue, if you will. It should come as no surprise that I'm a fan of downtowns. Cities. Urban. Busy, doing... there-ness. Over the holidays in Evanston, the new fresh (well, to me) development... buildings rising to 15, 20, 25 stories downtown where once it was rare to be more than 10. You can see the in-vogue intentionality of the downtown planning in place - the mixed use, the "wedding cake" architecture to keep streets and pedestrian areas "at human scale".

But I wonder to myself... do I really see the connections and community that dense urban downtowns promise? Sure, there's activity, and more people - but are those people actually connecting to each other? Cafes strewn with singly-occupied tables. But all that just seems to be like Apple and Dell swooped in and shat out a bunch of laptops with people hunched behind them.

Apartment buildings, condos, etc. etc. tightly clustered together, but do people actually know their neighbors? I'm wondering how much of this is wishful thinking, how much of it actually happens, and how long it will take to really know one way or the other. Some of the streets I walked down seemed pretty sterile, even in the midst of the Christmas Shopping Season. I don't think you can Manufacture Community.

And my cynical brain is wondering how many of the cutesy shops are going to survive the recession, what with the disappearance of the almighty consumers, and the tightening of belts and all. Debating how much we really need artisan handcrafted dog bowls and fair trade organic vegan chew toys.