A quarter-century ago, quiet Sunnyvale, California, decided it was time to do what every self-respecting suburb was doing: build an indoor mall. Away went the downtown street grid with its clusters of stores and restaurants. In its place arose the Sunnyvale Town Center, a hulking, boxy, brown structure. The town, located in what would become the heart of Northern California's Silicon Valley, was just keeping up with the rest of modern America.

The mall still stands at the heart of the city, near Sunnyvale's train station. These days, however, the mall is far from the pinnacle of commercial development it was meant to be. Few cars cruise into its parking lots. Many of its stores have folded, leaving empty, lifeless retail spaces. The shoppers who do come do not tarry long in the dreary corridors. "This mall was a disaster to begin with," says one resident. "The place right now is like a ghost town."

Once seen as the future of the city's retail sector, the mall has gradually become a symbol of everything that's wrong with Sunnyvale's downtown: boring, shoddy, ugly, and a poor substitute for the street grid it destroyed in 1976. Now, after more than two decades of downtown stagnation, the town is finally poised to take action. Following the lead of suburbs from Atlanta, Georgia, to Pasadena, California, Sunnyvale's leaders are talking these days about urbanizing their suburbia. Out with the bland, uninviting suburban streets devoid of people, say urban planners and city officials, and in with the traditional street grid, dense with pedestrians, shops, apartments, and the general bustle of people buying, selling, talking, yelling, and laughing.

This new vision of community life can be seen in the city's Urban Design Plan, which was unveiled in March. The plan intends to create "an enhanced, traditional downtown serving the community with a variety of destinations in a pedestrian-friendly environment." In part, it's a bid to keep Sunnyvale competitive with neighboring suburbs like Mountain View and Palo Alto, which either have or are creating "traditional" downtowns to attract businesses, shoppers, and residents.

After months of deliberation, the plan was approved by the city council and is now undergoing an environmental impact review. Whether it will deliver on its promises, however, is hotly contested by both residents and experts. Some critics doubt whether urbanization schemes like Sunnyvale's offer anything more than band-aid solutions to the problem of suburban sprawl. After all, they point out, urbanizing Sunnyvale--a twenty-five-square-mile concatenation of single-family houses, strip malls, office parks, and the scattered remnants of orchard fields that were once its hallmark--will be a massive undertaking, requiring much more than just a spiffy new plaza and a few office buildings. For its supporters, however, the city's plan for downtown is the best remedy to what they see as a declining standard of suburban life. Over the years, traffic snarls have worsened, and land has become too expensive and far-flung for the old practice of building low, sprawling developments. The hope is that the increased density of buildings in the proposed downtown layout will ease housing demand and create a more livable environment. "Sunnyvale has a need for a place that it can call its own," says Robert Paternoster, Sunnyvale's director of community development. "There's no 'there' there."

When suburban goes urban

City on the edge

Driving to your 'walkable' community

Story Index