Buses come and go, inhaling and exhaling passengers. Men and women clad in business attire walk purposefully along landscaped Burnett Avenue. Teenagers in baggy jeans gab on cell phones. Inside The Met Coffee & Wine Bar, pop music plays on the radio as people order coffee. Outside, a short walk away, The Delicious Dish, tucked underneath the Burnett Station apartment building, offers "Make and Take Entrees." A city street sweeper trundles along, brushing away at the streets and curbs. Someone plunks coins in a newspaper rack. Nearby, a water fountain gurgles.

Can this really be Renton, the century-old city once largely viewed as a bedroom community to Seattle? For years its downtown, left for dead when JC Penney and Sears bolted for Southcenter Mall in the 1960s, repelled pedestrians with its jumble of fast-food joints and a phalanx of auto dealers. Like many suburban retail districts, it was a place you visited by car to complete an errand. You didn't stick around. Not anymore. Today, people call downtown Renton home. And the bustling street life welcomes residents from the surrounding community to drop by for a morning coffee, open a laptop to do business or catch a bus to almost anywhere in the Puget Sound region.

The area's transformation was no fortunate accident. It took a conscious effort on the part of city planners, developers and retailers, and it's a pattern that is being repeated across Washington and the nation: Communities that have no Main Street, no center to speak of, are creating one. Areas like Northgate in Seattle, long dominated by autocentric, none-too-pedestrian-friendly retail spaces such as Northgate Mall, are finding ways to remodel the dinosaurs of suburbia to create new, human-scale living and shopping arrangements. Cities like Seattle, Tacoma and Everett that already have downtowns are working hard to protect what character already exists and to build on and expand their downtown areas in order to attract jobs, offices and houses.

And bringing back Main Street means making a place work like a healthy human body - a cluster of houses, retail shops and offices builds the heart, parks and plazas provide the lungs, and wide sidewalks and efficient public transportation ensure good circulation. Don Dally, the 66-year-old president of Seattle-based Dally Homes Inc., knows bringing back Main Street isn't easy. He knows this because he played a central role in breathing new life into downtown Renton. "It all goes together," he says.

As he gamely crosses Burnett on foot, Dally points to Metropolitan Place, a complex of apartments, ground-floor retail and underground parking that he developed and that became an important project in a concerted effort to pump new life into downtown Renton. Metropolitan Place is an example of density done well: Unsightly parking is buried underground, ground-floor retail offers opportunities to window shop, and apartments, overlooking a courtyard, bring people downtown to live, which in turn attracts more businesses. Some call it building critical mass. The American architect Robert Venturi describes it as the "messy vitality" of the built environment. Taking in the lively urban scenery, Dally says the rebirth of downtown Renton, and the reclamation of Main Street in other communities, will only gather speed. "It's just now starting to go crazy," he says.

Of course, the rebirth of downtowns like Renton's doesn't equal the end of sprawl. But Washington state, guided by a landmark land-use law, led by developers like Dally, and further spearheaded by cities seeking the kind of identity Renton forged, is bringing new life to an old concept: downtown as a magnet for people, jobs, houses and offices.