Urban renewal, corporate-style: Zappos.com founder tries to resurrect downtown Las Vegas.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns

Before facebook, there was Babylon. Before Twitter, Rome. Cities have always served as social networks, exciting places with an abundance of venues in which to cultivate new ties over lattes and shots of tequila.

And then there's downtown Las Vegas, miles away from the glitzy strip. Tacky and outdated, a little bit scary, largely abandoned, you might call the Fremont Street area of Vegas the MySpace of urban America.

But just as there are those who believe MySpace can regain its former glory, so too downtown Las Vegas has its boosters. For the last two years, one of the most passionate has been Internet entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, the online shoe and apparel retailer.

In December 2010, Hsieh announced that Zappos.com was planning to move its thousand-plus employees from an office park in Henderson, Nevada, to the old Las Vegas City Hall, a transition that will happen sometime later this year. When it does, Hsieh won't be commuting. In 2011, he leased 50 units in a luxury high-rise in the neighborhood, and he and some of his Zappos.com co-workers moved in. He's hoping more will follow--Zappos.com employees and anyone else who wants to live in a lively, community-oriented urban neighborhood near his eight-acre worksite. It's something he calls The Downtown Project.

Primarily bankrolled by Hsieh, The Downtown Project plans to invest $350 million in up to 200 small businesses, dozens of tech startups, and a diverse mix of other public resources and amenities. The ultimate goal: To create the sort of dense, walkable, mixed-used Shangri-La championed by the urban theorist Jane Jacobs in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Put another way, Hsieh would like to make downtown Las Vegas a more compelling social network, a feature-rich platform that encourages frequent chance encounters, fruitful knowledge exchange, and over the long term, greater innovation and productivity. Where abandoned liquor stores now fester, yoga studios shall one day bloom.

In a town where development typically takes the form of another massive casino resort, Hsieh's dream is a fairly radical vision. But Las Vegas has already replicated Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the NewYork skyline, so why not thriving urban neighborhoods like San Francisco's Mission District or Brooklyn's Williamsburg?

Call it a venture-capital take on urban locavorism. Hsieh and his cohorts in The Downtown Project are trying to catalyze and accelerate...