GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The idea of building a year-round public market to tie the city’s skilled chefs to the region’s big complement of young farmers had already attained an air of inevitability by the time this Midwestern city held its first Restaurant Week three summers ago.

Next year, just in time for the fourth annual Restaurant Week, Grand Rapids is scheduled to open the $30 million, 130,000-square-foot Downtown Market, a destination that is expected to attract 500,000 visitors a year. The three-story brick and glass building, under construction in a neighborhood of vacant turn-of-the-20th century warehouses, is intended by its developers to be a state-of-the art center of commerce for the culinary arts and fresh local foods.

It is also seen as having the potential to accomplish much more.

“This project fills a variety of needs,” said David Frey, chairman of the Frey Foundation and co-chairman of Grand Action, a nonprofit group of local business leaders that joined the city’s Downtown Development Authority to raise money for the market and to build it. “It creates a lot of synergy for the development that’s been happening in Grand Rapids for some time now.”

The Downtown Market, in effect, is the newest piece of civic equipment built here since the mid-1990s to leverage the same urban economic trends of the 21st century — higher education, hospitals and health care, housing, entertainment, transit, and cleaner air and water — that are reviving most large American cities.