I think this is something so obvious that we often overlook talking about, but it occurred to me that we all have very different ideas about what downtown should be. This is reflected in what our priorities for everything are, for how Bricktown should grow, for where the convention center should go, what should go around the park, where the streetcar route should go, how serious we should be about preservation, and how we should go about incentivizing development. When you get down to it, every major downtown issue we have hinges on what our personal definition of downtown is.

So I broke it into 6 different groups.

1. Downtown is a place of business, a place where the city's elite do business, the economic engine of the state. This is where people wheel and deal. Downtown should cater to the business class who utilize it during the day time and focus on growing the business class, to the benefit of the entire city. City Hall is downtown and the building should be a focal point, as the most important building in the city, where decisions affecting the entire city are made.

2. Downtown is a mixed-use live/work/play environment where people legitimately base their lives. Urban living is beginning to take root and after 5, people who work in the CBD will make their way to one of the restaurant/bar hot spots and then to their home after work. Downtown is buzzing consistently with different types of activities going on, appealing to different classes of people. The residential aspect of downtown is going to be key toward growth. Downtown is defined by the single user and the human scale, and it is what people make out of it.

3. Downtown is an image, a place to impress. It has to say "OKC" with an exclamation mark and make a great postcard. Appearance and impression is more important than functionality. Downtown is where people will judge OKC, and pictures of downtown will be considered representative of what OKC is. This is where OKC must pull out all the stops. That postcard look is important, and maximizing the potential of visitors to come away impressed is of the utmost importance. The visitor experience to OKC and being hospitable is what makes downtown special and unique.

4. Downtown is a laboratory for developers to make money building homes just like they do anywhere else in the metro, and for planners to scheme up masterplans and try and organize life. It's a district with rigid processes and construction procedures, and it's planning process powers our civic discourse and its construction phases power our economy and provide thousands of jobs. It's not so much functionally relevant as it is economically relevant, and municipally relevant just for the sake that it is downtown. It's that center of our city where we're all supposed to come together, that's why we have MAPS.

5. Downtown is a fun place. It's a place where these enigmatic business executives who I could dream about being pull up in limos and make insane deals. It's a place where you have to go to on the first date and walk around, get a nice dinner in Bricktown, see a movie, and then go to a club and get very drunk at. Downtown is Bricktown, that's where everyone in OKC goes to have fun. It's a very glamorous life downtown, and I look forward to doing it all over again next weekend. Alternatively, it is a place of arts and culture, where you can indulge in tastes that are unique and too privileged to happen in other parts of the city, or state. It is the hub of society.

6. Downtown is a place to host events. The infrastructure must be capable of handling large volumes of traffic at once, several times a day, even if for most of the time it goes relatively unused. It must contain all of the city's premier venues for events of every kind, and these events will power our economy and keep OKC relevant, even win OKC some good press. By hosting these events, and revolving around events, what makes downtown go is large crowds. Downtown must focus on the venues that host these large events several times a week and the businesses that support and please the people going to these events. It is a place defined by the large crowds and not the single user, and the experience of those large crowds is paramount.

And you can't say it's a mix of all of these, that's a cop-out.