Cities are exposed to the increasing competition at local, regional as well as global level. This pressure can be observed especially in the city centers that have been decreasing their importance lately and have not been playing the dominant role in the city structure anymore. The city centers are loosing the key elements of their urban atmosphere, i.e. retail. The subjects, who are threatened by the above mentioned development, try to eliminate this process through innovative concepts, which are being realized by state as well as private sector. The contribution deals on the one hand with a brief characteristic of framework conditions which lead to the need of implementation of these concepts, on the other hand with the analysis of these concepts. The great deal of the contribution will be devoted to the American BID model.