The Downtown Council has a new $2 billion plan for spiffing up the heart of Minneapolis. It's called "Downtown 2025" and aims to double the number of people living downtown to 70,000, including children.
How? By adding a prison and an orphanage?
Actually, no. They want to level the Metrodome and build a new urban village from scratch.
Good luck; hope it works.
See also, Cedar Square West. Granted, we've learned not to stack people sky-high in a concrete desert, and if they can avoid the quasi-historical prefab instant-city feel these developments can have, wonderful.
The plan also foresees a "bustling, walkable streetscape" that takes people from the old Guthrie site to the new one. Well, you can walk from the Walker to the river today; there aren't any great chasms with creaky rope bridges guarded by trolls.
It's good someone's thinking ahead, though. The last plan called for a Twins stadium downtown: check. It also called for Block E (insert buzzer sound used on game shows to indicate wrong answer and forfeiture of all winnings). But the plans cannot help but look backward, since they project into the future what we think we want today.
There was once a magnificent plan for Minneapolis that foresaw our future as a glorious embrace of the past: wide diagonal boulevards, just like 19th-century Paris, civic monuments dripping with classical details. If they'd remade the Mill City according to this plan, everything would have looked out-of-date by the '30s, derided by modernists in the '50s, dismantled in the '60s with federal urban-renewal money, and then mourned in the '90s when KTCA did a documentary on it and everyone realized we were idiots to tear it down.