Building An Urban Soul

"Go looking for downtown Morrisville or Holly Springs and instead you'll find a shared identity problem. "People come in and say, 'Where's Morrisville? I've been up the highway and down the highway, and I've seen industry and subdivisions and all, but where's the town?' " said Ben Towson, owner of Ben's Bargain Barn, which sells antiques, used furniture and collectibles just off N.C. 54 near town hall, about where a downtown would be. Both towns want to build the municipal equivalent of a soul: They want to create downtowns from scratch. If they pull off the tricky feat, they would become part of a rising trend -- particularly in the Southeast -- of fast-growing suburbs deciding that they need traditional urban centers to give them a cohesive identity. "It's happening more and more," said Dean Schwanke, vice president for development trends and analysis at Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, "because these communities are realizing they need this.""