Las Vegas Downtown Master Plan 2045
Core idea
Innovation district + arts
Why it matters
Diversifies tourism economy
Description
The Las Vegas Downtown Master Plan 2045, adopted by the City of Las Vegas in 2016, is a long-range framework for the city's historic core north of the Strip. It designates districts including an innovation and medical district and an expanded arts district, and promotes infill housing, walkable streets and cultural investment to broaden downtown's economic base beyond casinos. The plan was prepared by the city's planning department with extensive stakeholder input.
Significance
The plan reflects a wider North American movement to retrofit downtowns in tourism- and entertainment-dependent cities with diversified, knowledge-based economies. In planning terms it is a modest but telling example of district-based revitalisation strategy applied to an unusually thin traditional urban core. Its interest lies less in formal innovation than in the attempt to build civic urbanism in a city whose identity was forged by the resort corridor outside its municipal boundaries.
What shaped it
- Learning from Las Vegas (1972)
- Machine learning & AI (2012–)
- The smart-city critique (2015)
- The pedestrian zone (1953)
Sources
- https://files.lasvegasnevada.gov/planning/Vision-2045-Implementation-Plan.pdf
- https://www.westernplanner.org/2019articles/2019/4/25/downtown-las-vegas-form-based-code-a-nevad