Near a McDonald’s in the heart of downtown Dallas, developer Ray Washburne walks along Griffin Street, laying out a vision for a “great, grand avenue” to reshape the city’s core. He imagines a narrower road with wide, tree-lined sidewalks to create a scenic walkway stretching some two miles, from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center northward to Uptown and the popular Katy Trail hike-and-bike path.Businesses and “affordable housing and workforce housing and student housing,” he says, would pop up along the way. He brings up Mexico City’s iconic Paseo de la Reforma as an example, but he also pulls out his phone to share pictures of bike lanes and shaded sidewalks in downtown Indianapolis, to show that such transformations aren’t solely for cosmopolitan global capitals.Today…