Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Street Mall is being given a face-lift that the city hopes will transform the shabby pedestrian area into a well-heeled shopping Mecca.

The stretch between Adams Street and Flatbush Avenue – the city’s third largest shopping area in terms of dollar volume, after Midtown and Union Square – connects the up-and-coming Atlantic Yards neighborhood with the Brooklyn Academy of Music cultural district.

The street, open to pedestrians, buses, and delivery trucks, is crammed most days, with shoppers milling about the urban clothing stores, and with traffic able to move only slowly. The city hopes to clear the congestion and offer a wide range of retail stores to draw shoppers who live in the nearby brownstone belt, including the Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights neighborhoods, or who work in the neighboring Metro Tech center.

“Metro Tech workers shun the Fulton Street Mall because there are low-priced shops, and not the type of merchandise they are looking for,” the executive director of the Metro Tech Business Improvement District, Michael Weiss, said. “The surrounding neighborhoods, like Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, and the rest, also don’t consider downtown Brooklyn a shopping district. We want to change this.”

To redesign the street, Mr. Weiss and his group have hired Jane Thompson, the Boston-based urban planner who redesigned the South Street Seaport and Grand Central Terminal, among other sites. “This is the heart of downtown Brooklyn, and it is time to update it,” Ms. Thompson said. Part of the problem is that bus traffic is too heavy. That makes deliveries difficult for merchants who have shops on the thoroughfare, and it makes the streets tough for pedestrians to navigate, she said.

The redesign will focus on a number of factors, including linking the BAM cultural area with Fulton Street by improving the entranceway across Flatbush Avenue. Ms. Thompson said her company, the Thompson Design Group, expects to finish the Fulton Street plans in the coming weeks.

Some of the buildings along Fulton Street have historic significance but do not have landmark designation and indeed are falling apart. There is a proposal on the table, which requires approval by city officials, to create a tax credit program, in which owners of historic buildings would receive a tax break in exchange for renovating the structures. “We are discussing this with the city but nothing has been decided yet,” Mr. Weiss said.

The Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, has designated $500,000 to revamp the area, and the city’s downtown Brooklyn rezoning plan guarantees some subsidies for the project. Ms. Thompson and her group are being paid from fees collected by members of the Metro Tech BID.

The vision for the street includes a mix of brand-name stores, appealing to a wide spectrum of shoppers, and local merchants, Mr. Weiss said.

“We are not looking for Madison Avenue, just a grade above where it is now,” he said. “We don’t just want national chains. The street is big enough for smaller merchants and the bigger stores to coexist.”

The largest need is more diversity. “Although there are some great strengths along this section of Fulton Street, there is no diversity,” he said. “For instance, a record store like Virgin or J&R, and a house wares store like Bed, Bath & Beyond or Crate & Barrel, would do great,” Mr. Weiss said. There are no discussions under way with any of these retail giants, as officials wait for the physical revamping of the neighborhood to be in place, he said.