While much has been made of CityCenter’s difficult birth, far less attention has been paid to the design behind it. It’s a design that speaks in equal parts to the challenges of the Las Vegas Strip, the unsustainable sprawl of the Las Vegas Valley (now home to 2 million people) and a fundamental shift in American demographics.
“After 30 years of suburban flight, people are moving back into the urban core,” says Billy Vassiliadis, CEO of R&R Partners (the ad agency behind the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” campaign). “You see it in Boston and Chicago, and we’re going to see more of it in Las Vegas. People are increasingly interested in living in a place where everything they want — shopping, restaurants, entertainment — is nearby.”
And residents aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the shift to a higher-density, more pedestrian-friendly Las Vegas.
“We’ve grown so big recently that moving around has become a burden,” says Vassiliadis, who believes CityCenter represents the beginning of a trend toward more destinations within a destination: “Las Vegas is going to evolve into something like Paris [the one in France, not the one up the street] where you spend one day in one arrondissement and go to another the next day.”
“CityCenter is Las Vegas entering the 21st century,” agrees Christopher Leinberger, a professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s fundamentally different than anything else that’s been built in Las Vegas before — modern, high-density, mixed-use — but it’s following the lead of metropolitan areas around the country.” Hard money training
