Specific Connotations
The typical North American downtown has certain unique characteristics. During the postwar economic boom in the 1950s, the residential population of most downtowns crashed. This has been attributed to reasons such as slum clearance, construction of the Interstate Highway System, and white flight from the urban core to the rapidly expanding suburbs. Due to well-intended but ineptly executed urban revitalization projects, downtowns eventually came to be dominated by high-rise office buildings in which commuters from the suburbs filled white-collar jobs, while the remaining residential populations sank further into unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. By the 1990s, even office-oriented businesses began to abandon the tired old downtowns for the suburbs, resulting in what are now known as "edge cities". One textbook, in explaining why edge cities are so popular, stated:
| “ | The big central city comes with dirt, crime, subways, stress, congestion, high taxes, and poor public schools. Edge cities are not immune to all of these problems (especially congestion) but for now they largely avoid most of them. | ” |
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Famous quotes containing the word specific:
“I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly,
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I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
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Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an
island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)