A new report, Downtown Rebirth: Documenting the Live-Work Dynamic in 21st Century U.S. Cities is the culmination of a year-long effort by Philadelphia’s Center City District, the International Downtown Association, and partners across the country to develop an effective way to quantify the number of people who live and work in and around 231 job centers in 150 American cities.
Without standard geographic definitions for downtowns and downtown residential neighborhoods, previous research relied on overly simplified boundaries that did not capture the unique, idiosyncratic shapes of urban employment nodes and thus failed to maximize the use of existing Federal data resources.
For the first time, Downtown Rebirth suggests a way both to define and quantify downtown workforce and population numbers and document how these employment hubs and live-work environments are quickly changing.