He argued that parking and malls are not helpful. A downtown should be different from surburbs or no one will bother going downtown. See Archives: Journal of the American Planning Association<\/a> for his article on “The Successful Few: Healthy Downtowns of Small Metropolitan Regions”. Certain attributes are disproportionately present among these downtowns. Seven of them have a large university that is either in or adjacent to the CBD. In five more cases, while not immediately downtown, a university is located within 2 miles of this district; and in two additional cities, Savannah, GA, and Asheville,NC, there is a smaller college in or close to the CBD. (p. 332)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bibliographic Reference: Pierre Filion, Heidi Hoernig, Trudi Bunting and Gary Sands<\/b>. The Successful Few: Healthy Downtowns of Small Metropolitan Regions Journal of the American Planning Association. 70, 3. 328-343. 2004.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My wife just attended a talk by Pierre Fillion where he argued that successful mid-sized cities have: Proximity to a university Cultural attractions and historical buildings Pleasant pedestrian walkways Retail space (but not a mall) He argued that parking and malls are not helpful. A downtown should be different from surburbs or no one will … Continue reading Successful Mid-sized Cities<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-and-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nUpdate (March 25th, 2005). I tracked down the article. Here is part of “Table 1. Features of downtowns rated as successful from respondent’s own regions (question 2).” from the Filion article:
\n![](\"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/notes\/images\/city.fill-thumb.gif\")
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\nAnd here is the a quote about the importance of universities.<\/p>\n