Excerpt from the introduction:

"...what follows is not a review of the architectural projects now freckling downtown Las Vegas nor of the plans for additional density, housing, retail, or even technology-related start-up activity. Instead, I’ll meander and machete a way through the project as an enacted proposal and prototype for a general form of urbanism in search of the kind of city-making now active along Hsieh’s Fremont and its immediate environs. It’s a haphazard and necessarily belligerent path. There can be no clarity, elegance, or subtlety in mapping a funhouse—tracing processes that are more “Vegas” than “downtown,” more signifier than substance, more affect than effect, more wizard than Oz. Along the way, I’ll infer an urban-planning approach about which I cannot be sure by its own strategic design. Hacking through crafted public statements and a short catalog of awestruck dispatches from the desert, I arrive at indictments, more nervous than before. This breed of urbanism is an anti-public version of social space requiring only the semblance of city-ness for its sustaining. The image of the Downtown Project, as it is and as it seems, is the logical end of privatized planning ad absurdum drawn as a diagram of hubris over a fading erasure of civic responsibility."