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Brigham Young famously wanted streets wide enough to turn a team of horses and wagon in, and the superblocks were designed to be neatly divided into plots that would give the settlers enough land to grow crops, have an orchard and sustain themselves.

Few wagon trains are pulling U-turns in downtown Salt Lake these days, and the office buildings and parking lots don’t leave much room for fruit trees. And even the most meticulously planned community loses its luster over time and needs some modernizing especially if the alternative for new investment is not unsettled wilderness but the growing suburbs and towns strung along the Wasatch front.

So Salt Lake is embarking on a major redevelopment effort under an umbrella plan called Downtown Rising in which nearly $2 billion will be invested in new offices, residential and retail buildings, arts, culture and governmental facilities and transit projects.

There’s a Seattle component to this. Seattle-based architecture firm Callison is a participant in one of downtown Salt Lake’s biggest projects, City Creek, a 20-acre mixed-use project across the street from Temple Square.

Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom was one of the drivers behind the redevelopment effort generally and City Creek in particular.

“Frankly, the heart of downtown has for the last 20 years been slipping into a worse state of repair,” says Callison principal Stan Laegreid. “It was turning into quite a liability. Everyone agreed something needed to be done.” As a downtown tenant with a lease nearing its end, Nordstrom was “watching the value of a downtown and a commercial market just steadily slip away.” The retailer was reluctant to stay unless “there was a larger commitment to turn downtown around.”

Beyond those specifics, Salt Lake’s efforts to rejuvenate its downtown have some interesting parallels and contrasts for Seattle as it considers its own redevelopment efforts in places such as South Lake Union, south downtown and Sodo.

Salt Lake and Seattle are hardly alone among western U.S. cities considering large-scale redevelopments that involve millions of dollars in investment and years of planning and wrangling. Some cities get a blank canvas to work with in the form of abandoned rail yards that cover acres of potentially prime developable real estate. Sacramento, Calif.; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Spokane are in varying stages of rail-yard redevelopment projects. Renton is working with former Boeing property near Lake Washington. Yakima is looking at what it can do with a former sawmill.

Salt Lake differs somewhat in that it’s trying to work a somewhat coordinated plan into and around an existing downtown, although Laegreid says there’s actually considerable open property in the downtown core.

But the biggest difference between Salt Lake and Seattle is the influence and participation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Temple Square is at the physical heart of downtown, drawing visitors as both a religious center and tourist destination.

“They have deliberately spearheaded this effort,” Laegreid says. “That introduces a dynamic and a patronage in the process that very few cities have. That was a big trigger in allowing this to happen.”

Contrast that with development efforts in Seattle. One striking feature about Downtown Rising is the breadth of business sector and governmental participation in a shared plan for downtown. With Seattle’s fractious political scene, very little gets done in a coordinated fashion unless, of course, a private developer such as Paul Allen’s Vulcan in South Lake Union has the size and drive to come up with a large-scale redevelopment plan on its own and push it to reality.

Not that having such an influential partner meant immediate unanimity in Salt Lake. “There still were a lot of vested parties that collectively had to share a vision,” Laegreid says. Once the first ideas were floated, human nature took over. “Everyone’s got opinions,” he says. “There was a certain amount of compromising, everyone getting their voices heard.” Although Salt Lake isn’t as consensus-crazy as Seattle, “given the high profile of the project, it started to feel much more like a Seattle” process.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska In a city where fashion sense has always played a distant second to staying warm, a cluster of boutiques in the budding “SoNo” district, south of Alaska’s only Nordstrom store, does a surprisingly brisk business in $50 body lotions and $180 designer jeans.The homage to New York City’s trendy SoHo district is just one of the many signs that this once-unruly oil-boom town at the edge of the American wilderness has been tamed.In some respects, Anchorage could even be called sophisticated.”Anchorage has really changed since I moved here 30 years ago,” said Ellen Arvold, owner of the Out of the Closet luxury consignment shop, where leopard-print Prada ballet flats and Louis Vuitton handbags are big sellers. “People don’t think there’s a market for us, but there really is.”Strip malls have replaced strip clubs, big-box stores draw more customers than bars, and residential neighborhoods have supplanted the RV parks that once sprawled across the state’s most populous city.”Anchorage has kind of grown up,” said longtime resident Charles Wohlforth, who writes the annual Alaska travel guide for Frommer’s. “It’s left its adolescence and is becoming more of a mature city.”The tumultuous years of oil booms and busts in the 1970s and ’80s have given way to two decades of steady growth, and Anchorage’s economy has expanded to include burgeoning retail, health care and tourism industries.The influx of non-oil, non-military jobs has altered the city’s demographics, making it less like a frontier town.At one time, men far outnumbered women in Alaska. But in 2006, the city of 270,000 had 102 men for every 100 women, state demographer Eddie Hunsinger said. The ratio for the rest of Alaska was 108 to 100.Leese Lloyd and Ashley Brusven, young baristas who grew up in Anchorage, said the notion that the city has an overabundance of men is an outdated stereotype.”Where are they?” Brusven joked as customers in the adjacent New Sagaya City Market surveyed stuffed grape leaves, caprese, baklava and other un-Alaskan foods.The city is also reshaping its modest skyline with a $100 million museum expansion, a $93 million convention center and a parking garage with room for 830 vehicles. Companies are putting up new hotels and glass-plated office buildings.Development has its critics. Many Alaskans see Anchorage as increasingly out of sync with the rest of the state, prone to sprawl, traffic, crime and the other usual urban ills.”Rural Alaskans have a love-hate relationship with Anchorage,” said Stephen Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. “What they hate is that people in Anchorage don’t have a good understanding of rural Alaska, which is a truly different world. But they love that Anchorage has neat things to buy and neat things to do.”The growth has triggered a steady exodus north to the state’s first suburban community, the farm and sled-dog country of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. About 2,000 people leave Anchorage each year for Mat-Su.Anchorage’s latest promotional campaign, called “Big Wild Life,” depicts city life as a mix of bold outdoorsy activities and urban comforts. The Web site of the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau highlights the city’s spas, opera and symphony, and downplays the long, cold winters by describing Anchorage as “a city of lights and flowers.”While Anchorage is no longer the rugged place Jack London knew, many characteristics of classic Alaska remain. Winter temperatures can dip to minus-20 and daylight dwindles after five hours in December. The peaks of the Chugach Mountains form an imposing backdrop, a striking reminder of the wilderness beyond.Grizzlies, black bears and moose are still a common sight. Moose browse along the popular paved trail system, trot through cookie-cutter condo developments and occasionally attempt to navigate fast-moving traffic.In November, a bull moose tangled his rack in a municipal Christmas light display before strolling into the courtyard at a lounge and dance club in SoNo. With the dead string of lights dangling from his noggin, the moose grew tipsy on fermented crabapples, prompting the local paper to nickname him “Buzzwinkle.”