I just got back from the Congress for New Urbanism (www.cnu.org) conference in Philadelphia.
At one of the small group sessions, I heard a wonderful phrase describing what's going on in Philadelphia and some other cities: "BosTroit"- like Boston downtown (i.e. walkable, prosperous) and like Detroit in most of the outer neighborhoods between downtown and suburbia (i.e. poor, losing population).
For example, Philadelphia has a very strong downtown (like Boston) but is not quite as prosperous in the rest of the city, except for neighborhoods like Chestnut Hill just a mile or two from the city limits- thus, it is a "BosTroit" city.
By contrast, Buffalo exemplifies another postwar model: a weak downtown, and a city that gradually gets more and more prosperous (at least in one direction) the further from downtown you get.
Jacksonville seems to mix the two: before gentrification, it looked like Buffalo. But the intown neighborhoods have been improving for a decade or two, and the downtown is beginning to revitalize. But the 50s suburbs are in deep trouble: not walkable enough to benefit from intown gentrification, not new enough to be appealing to suburbanites.
