The convention-hosting capability of Las Vegas is pretty much un-matched and as Alon pointed out, that’s their secret weapon.

And while other US regions have discovered gambling, none has managed to develop out of it; none has Vegas’s brand, just like none of the casinos in the French Riviera has the brand name of Monte-Carlo.

I don’t think Sin City is destined for the same fate as Motor City.

It’ll be a slow process. Vegas has plenty of land and can still attract capital and workers, so it can reinvent itself a few more times.

Yet reinvention in itself is a diminishing return.

To torture a gambling metaphor, Las Vegas has bet its bounty on a single throw of the dice. Gambling tourism is pretty much all Las Vegas has. It has too large of a gravitational pull. Jobs, capital, service sources, knowledge trees are all tied to gambling.

Nevada’s reputation for business friendliness has not really translated into anything visible. Again, gambling crowds out the other independent economic actors.

Las Vegas is especially screwed when it comes to climate (’nuff said) and transportation. Its interstate highways and railways are only connected to California and Utah (same problem for Reno), and it has no navigable waterways.

Plus, given the fact that gambling has become more socially accepted and economically depressed areas crave the jobs and tax revenues provided by casinos, it’s not hard to see that Las Vegas will lose its economic moat.

Las Vegas may not ever be as bombed-out as Detroit became, but as gambling becomes commoditized it may revert to the niche that racetracks have fallen into now.

Like Jarrett says, it reacted and adapted long ago to its competing casino satellites. Just a few years after Venturi’s book, Atlantic City stepped up to the plate. Vegas started becoming kid-friendly in the late 1980s and hasn’t looked back–it’s getting more ecumenical every year.

What the successive brains behind Vegas have been so good at (where they have not in Biloxi or Atlantic City) is perpetual reinvention, often with infrastructure that anticipates this short life-span. One of my favorite college instructors, who loves sprawl even more than I do, asserted confidently that all the Styrofoam Vegas replicas of New York and Paris and Egypt will fade before too long, and when they do, developers will cheaply tear them down and the material will line the insides of our Patagonia sweaters. (That is, if the Patagonia company outlasts the kitsch-of-the-decade in Vegas.)

Though I have never read either book in its entirety, I can’t help but think Garreau assumed a similar aesthetic gaze two decades later with his “Edge City.”

As for any anticipation of an academic study of that other aspiring “Strip”–the one in Branson, Missouri–I’m not holding my breath. Sleaze will always be more interesting.

Here in Australia, it’s striking that almost every Aussie who’s been to America has been to Las Vegas. It’s one of those “only-in-America” experiences that foreign tourists specifically seek out.

So while I agree that it’s future is in doubt, it does have the regenerative powers of an annual plant, and if another boom comes, I fully expect to see it bounce back for one more round. If not, it will keep dying. I certainly wouldn’t invest there myself. Eventually, of course, gas prices and/or water will push back.

Here’s another striking thing: Look at Las Vegas on Google Earth, especially out toward the northwest. It has the same one-mile grid of arterials that most southwest cities have, but you can see it’s been really badly surveyed. An arterial may bend 2-3 degrees from one mile to the next, following a crude approximation of the ideal grid. That sloppiness is an important feature, I think, of a city that’s built entirely for near-term returns.

Las Vegas had decades where it enjoyed a virtual monopoly as “Sin City.”

The problem now is that casinos are socially acceptable, or at least an elixir for blighted areas, all throughout the U.S.

The watershed moment came when California approved Indian gaming, and in about a decade, California’s casinos were able to replicate the Vegas experience — something that Vegas needed 50-60 years to create.

Now, Vegas-style casinos are sprouting throughout the deindustrialized Midwest as well. Nevada stalwarts are lending their names to these projects. Detroit and Kansas City already have casinos. Cincinnati has approved casinos.

This doesn’t bode well for Las Vegas, which stands to become the Detroit of gaming.

The Las Vegas Strip became middle America’s playground, and middle Americans walked in search of better slots and cheaper buffets and more-titillating shows because they were too cheap to pay for two or three cabs a night.

Las Vegas moguls figured it out and rebuilt the city to match. A “big box” version of Jane Jacobs’ neighborhood?

This explanation, of course, really appeals to the pragmatic economist in me…

Ever read Simon Schama’s “Landscape and Memory”?

Back to what Jarrett said in the post though, I think a lot of environmental type writing invites being criticized as aesthetic because the writers can’t resist piling that on. A good example is Kunstler’s “Geography of Nowhere”. One problem is that descriptions of urban functions and such tend to be dry, while snarkiness about aesthetics is amusing, and that’s what sells books.