TAMPA The University of South Florida is not alone in its ambitions to build a medical school in the heart of a city.

The University of Buffalo, Indiana University, the University of Texas and the University of Washington have all launched or plan to launch similar projects.

"It makes the medical school more attractive to top faculty and students," urban consultant Paul Umbach said of a downtown campus, "and it helps economically stimulate urban areas."

He cites such institutions as Johns Hopkins Medicine in downtown Baltimore, the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. They're renowned as medical schools as well as research and treatment centers.

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn also sees successful urban cores fueled by the rise of those schools.

"An economic engine in the form of a major university," Buckhorn said, "has transformed other cities."

Umbach said it's not just medical schools going downtown. Everyone and everything is going urban.

"I think you'll see that's a megatrend in the next 50 years," he said.

His firm, Tripp Umbach, which has helped plan and build about 20 of these urban medical campuses, is working on similar projects in Evansville, Ind.; Omaha, Neb.; Spokane, Wash.; and Las Vegas.

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USF medical school's proposed move to downtown Tampa part of a trend