Hal Rothman wonders what’s in store for the emerging modern cityscape

Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006 | 7:44 a.m.

I met an Austrian film crew at The District, easily greater Las Vegas' most successful mixed-use development to date. With its acres of parking, wonderful restaurants, concerts in the evening, and with the new Whole Foods complex across the street, it shines bright among the many developments we have seen in recent years. It could almost be a real town center. As they strolled the faux street, the men seemed impressed. One of them quipped: "It is very beautiful. It looks exactly like the village in the Alps where I grew up."

The District is one of two developments that encourage the suspension of disbelief in the best Las Vegas style. Like Lake Las Vegas, it creates illusion of being better than real, subtly promising the fulfillment of desire. One canny local bicyclist jokes that his Sunday morning ride through the make-believe village by the lake is as close as he will ever get to the Tour de France. It may not be Europe, but in the right light, it feels awfully good.

But there is something unusual about both places. They are strangely unreal, as if they have countless visitors, but no residents. The signs of daily life are absent. The stores do not comprise a village. Instead they are all specialty endeavors, reminiscent of a mall, but in the open air. There is no hardware store, no place to get lumber or wallpaper, none of the things you would expect on any self-respecting Main Street.

This is the real difficulty as we make the transition from single-family homes to more dense forms of living in the Las Vegas Valley. Simply put, Americans are not used to living atop one another. We no longer have the kind of physical intimacy that we see in old movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window," the classic where Jimmy Stewart spies on his neighbors from his wheelchair. The movie expresses a common way of life for urban Americans a half century ago. My students, largely born in the 1980s, could not believe that anyone ever lived like that.

The cityscape we have built so far will surely become denser, but the question of who will live in these new communities is entirely unsettled. To date, the great run-up in real estate prices has brought a new constituency to the valley, a more affluent group than we had previously seen. While this has been good for us so far, the boundaries of this group are increasingly apparent.

We don't know who will be buying the units in the proposed mixed-use developments. The main attraction here has been the opportunity to own a single-family home for a great deal less than the cost of one in coastal California. It remains to be seen whether future buyers crave a townhouse or a condo as much as a home, no matter how small the back yard.

We do know that most of the units in the existing mixed-use properties are strictly investments, purchased as play toys rather than homes. This poses all kinds of problems, not the least of which is the fact that no one really lives there.

We run the risk of building a new but vacant city, one without full-time residents. Think about it. What would any village, faux or real, be without its people? They are the essence of place, the key feature in giving any place its charm. Las Vegas works because we understand this critical precept.

The absence of permanent residents would put us in the remarkable position of hiring the next stage of the service economy, people who would pretend to live in the faux communities we will build. They would show up to work every day and "live" in these communities, shopping in the stores and populating the cafes, for pay. They could play roles. Some might be students, others artists, still more ordinary working people. A script could govern the day, as it might at a living history museum such as Williamsburg. How else would we continue the illusion of being better than real?

The goal of mixed-use developments is to create live, work and play environments. We have got the play part down. The work part is coming along. The live piece is still a long way off.