If downtown Baltimore didn’t exist, City Hall would probably have to invent it. Come to think of it, the historic reasons for downtown – as the center of the surrounding region and its transportation system – have withered away, so the city feels a need to invent it. And reinvent it, over and over.

It’s time to step back. Downtown’s current identity crisis – overabundance of vacant office space, morbid retailing, gaping “dead zones” of delayed redevelopment – is greatly intensified by the fact that the metropolitan region doesn’t revolve around it anymore.

Nowadays, Baltimore revolves around the Beltway, whose main defining characteristic is that it doesn’t serve the city.

Meanwhile, the city planning juggernaut – led by the Greater Baltimore Committee, Baltimore Development Corp. and the Mayor’s office – seems obsessed with trying to figure out the exact mix of hotels, convention space, restaurants, tourist attractions, sports events, Ferris wheels, Grand Prix street racing, etc., that will save downtown.

The old bromide that downtown needs massive tax and other public subsidies to renew the rest of the city makes less sense every time it’s repeated.

Shifting Perspectives

Let’s be clear: downtown is still the city’s defining icon. Think of Baltimore and you still think of the Inner Harbor. But whereas the classic view was once of Harborplace taken from Federal Hill, the image has shifted to a view of a waterfront neighborhood, say Locust Point or Harbor East, from a vantage point of one of downtown’s taller buildings.

Such subtle shifts of perception mean a lot. While the city bent over backwards for decades to lure big-box stores to Howard and Lexington, Walmart opened its first Baltimore store at Port Covington (halfway between Locust Point and South Baltimore) and is now planning a second store two miles north of downtown, at Howard and 25th streets, near Charles Village.

A first step to redressing the city’s skewed priorities is to follow the lead of Walmart and stop pretending that downtown supports the city’s neighborhoods. Let’s recognize that neighborhoods support and nourish downtown.

What would the Inner Harbor be today without the sprinkling of healthy, viable neighborhoods around it, like Little Italy, Federal Hill, Otterbein, Cross St. Market and Fells Point? Or farther north, Mt. Vernon, Bolton Hill and Charles Village?

Four Directions for Renewal

Healthy neighborhoods need to be the norm, not the exception. Too much of the city surrounding downtown is vacant, abandoned or trapped in marginal uses.

And far too often, the city’s response has been to hatch mega-projects that, as the Urban Land Institute points out in the case of the Howard Street retail district, stumble in their own complexity and cost.

To make every neighborhood a “choice neighborhood,” the city needs to to create maximum inherent value. Here are four corridors where this can be done without reliance on the same old failed strategies:

Camden Yards to Westport. A new contiguous investment corridor should extend from the edge of downtown, where the Oriole Park warehouse converges on the Convention Center, southward past the football stadium, the no-man’s land of abandoned factories to Pat Turner’s fledgling Westport development, converging on Annapolis Road.

Long-suffering Westport residents already recognize that glitzy proposed waterfront developments can really be neighborhood redevelopment projects. It’s time for everyone else to realize this, too.

Mount Clare to Carroll Park. The north edge of Carroll Park is the city’s most squandered redevelopment opportunity. Imagine if an entire side of Patterson Park was separated from its communities by an abandoned industrial railroad wasteland.

It’s even worse than that because this wasteland also isolates the magnificent Carroll Mansion, the beautifully restored Montgomery Park (the city’s largest office building), the now-defunct Mount Clare Safeway and even a golf course.

This could easily be the city’s next great community corridor, providing meaningful context for the University of Maryland Baltimore campus, as well as Barre Circle, Mount Clare Junction, Barre Circle and Pigtown.

Franklin-Mulberry. The “highway to nowhere” that destroyed an entire neighborhood and severed others from downtown has been temporarily closed. Let’s make it permanent.

Downsizing the highway to a single roadway would open up a huge corridor for redevelopment, make Heritage Crossing (at Martin Luther King Blvd.) one of downtown’s prettiest neighborhoods and situate the soon-to-be abandoned Social Security Metro West complex as the strategic center of a restored and repopulated West Side. Here are some specific ideas.

Old Town to Johns Hopkins Hospital. The cataclysmically disruptive and controversial redevelopment by East Baltimore Development Inc. north of the medical complex has underperformed because it is so obviously oriented to the derriere of Hopkins.

What’s ripe for maximum-value redevelopment is the area extending eastward from Hopkins to Old Town. The blame for Old Town’s virtual abandonment has often been placed on its proximity to the Jones Falls Expressway (JFX) and the prisons. But Stirling Street, the original dollar-house community, has held on bravely, waiting for quality redevelopment to envelop it. This can definitely happen.

By extending McElderry Street westward, Old Town can be framed by the Hopkins Hospital Dome the same way Annapolis is framed by the State House. The presence of JFX can be overcome – just look at the popularity of the farmers’ market located under its concrete pillars ever Sunday.

Rebuilding Neighborhood Infrastructure

To revive these four battered neighborhoods, the city needs to give top priority to rebuilding streets and updating infrastructure. This would then enable the private sector to revive these communities. That’s the way it was done in Fells Point and Federal Hill.

While it is difficult to predict what the exact impact would be, a downtown surrounded by living, breathing, growing communities would be the natural place for residents and businesses to congregate.

The ugly reality of abandonment that now separates the Inner Harbor from many neighborhoods would fade away, and downtown could reclaim its historic role of actually being the center of something.