ONE of the first things Veletta Forsythe-Lill recalls from driving through Dallas 30 years ago was the “atrophied downtown”. A former city councilwoman, Mrs Forsythe-Lill remembers vacant land, empty buildings and desolate sidewalks. That was at the beginning of Dallas’s downturn, when office towers emptied out and most retailers followed their consumers to suburban shopping malls (apart from the Neiman Marcus at the corner of Main Street and Ervay Street, which has been there for a century). At a recent New Cities Summit it is clear that the old Dallas is fading into a distant memory. Today the downtown of America’s ninth-most populous city has thriving museums, performing-arts spaces, a green market, restaurants and innovative retailers that are bringing people back to its pavements. Detroit, Kansas City and Cleveland may be struggling to reinvent themselves, but Dallas has prospered, not only because of its oil wealth and low taxes, but also because the city and private-sector developers and investors have combined their efforts.

City planners began to model Dallas’s downtown on the idea that people wanted to parachute in and out from the suburbs. “You had no real walkability,” explains Michael Tregoning, the president of Headington Companies, which invests in a wide range of businesses. The streets of downtown Dallas remained relatively empty until 2005; that is when Headington bought 1530 Main Street, the former home of Dallas National Bank, a 20-floor neo-Gothic building that was completed in 1929. Headington converted it into The Joule, a luxury hotel which opened somewhat audaciously in 2008 at the height of the global recession.

Headington also bought the surrounding properties and from there turned the area around the Joule into a shopping and dining destination. “We decided, let’s do everything we can to create a neighbourhood here”, centred around niche retailers, says Mr Tregoning. Headington avoided bringing in the kind of pedestrian global retailers that be found in any run-of-the-mill mall and instead secured partnerships with two specialty retailers based in Los Angeles.

John Crawford, the president of Downtown Dallas, believes that businesses must “give people a reason to come downtown,” and his non-profit organisation is dedicated to pushing for incentives to do just that. Over the past three decades the city has opened a Farmers Market and an Arts District, which began with the Dallas Museum of Art in 1984. A slew of buildings designed by starchitects, such as the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Centre (I.M. Pei), the Nasher Sculpture Centre (Renzo Piano) and the AT&T Performing Arts Centre (Norman Foster's Foster and Partners) are additional draws. Klyde Warren Park, which borders the Arts District, was added in 2012.

The majority of the newer projects have been completed through some sort of public-private partnership, which, Mr Crawford says, is the key to successful redevelopment. The latest addition to Dallas’s burgeoning downtown is The Joule expansion, which the local government aided by doing things like moving stoplights to encourage more pedestrian traffic, and favourable tax conditions. That isn’t to say that the redevelopment of the downtown has been completely seamless. Some tenants on Main Street were displaced, for instance. In addition, says Mr Tregoning, “the scale and scope is very large; all it takes to disrupt that is some kind of disruption to the capital markets…or some of the construction or design issues to stall.”

Headington also has plans to transform parking lots into a residential and tech hub catering to the film and photography industries. But the completed projects are already having an effect. Property values are up, the residential population is swelling and foot traffic is growing. It is well on its way to becoming a “pedestrian-friendly live, work and play urban environment”, according to Mr Crawford. “Dallas is a young city and I think one of the major things that people can take away from here is the…can-do attitude, the philanthropic endeavours that people step up to, the public-private partnerships that we’ve been able to enter in to achieve common goals,” he says.

Thanks to this attitude, the atrophied downtown area from three decades ago that Mrs Forsythe-Lill remembered is being wiped from the memory faster than Sue Ellen Ewing could get to the bottom of a bottle of vodka.