Brooklyn’s residential neighborhoods have transformed over the last few years into some of the most desirable urban areas anywhere. Now a public-private partnership is taking aim at revolutionizing downtown, the city’s third largest business district.

The offices of the new Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, high up in the Metrotech Center, enjoy panoramic views of the borough, from the Verrazano Bridge north to Newtown Creek, where Brooklyn it borders Queens. The organization’s president, Joe Chan, and his staff of 25 want to expand and refashion the borough’s central business district.

“If our views are obscured, we’ll know we’ve done a good job,” Mr. Chan said.

Since the 1980s, downtown Brooklyn has been popular as back office depots for tenants from the financial services industry, like Bear Stearns, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase, which have their corporate offices in Midtown Manhattan.

The business district was rezoned in 2004, but the commercial expansion that was envisioned has not happened. Instead, the city’s residential market exploded and Brooklyn’s neighborhoods boomed. The surrounding areas, like Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights, and Dumbo, are among the most desirable in the borough, but the commercial district at their center remains a ghost town after 6 p.m. and on weekends.

The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a public-private, non-profit organization created earlier this year, is an attempt to streamline the duties of four local economic development organizations and catalyze development.

Mr. Chan, 35, has some powerful friends, including his old boss, deputy mayor Daniel Doctoroff, whom he served as a senior policy adviser. Previously, Mr. Chan was the director of real estate for the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.

“Who — beyond back offices of banks and insurance companies — are the next group to populate downtown Brooklyn?” Mr. Chan asked.

Mr. Chan said that in the next six months he hopes to convince a developer to build a large, mixed-use project of more than 1 million square feet in the business district. He hopes to leverage the workforce of the surrounding borough to create a business district centered on more creative industries, like publishing, entertainment and design companies. New buildings, he said, will be designed for a new generation of tenants, and are unlikely to contain the large floor-plates that characterize Metrotech.

To set the stage, Mr. Chan promises a host of new initiatives to make transform the area into a more vibrant 24/7 environment, one of the signature goals of the Bloomberg administration’s economic development strategy. That includes a creating a pedestrian friendly Flatbush Avenue, hiring a landscape architecture firm to create open space around the BAM cultural district, attracting a mixed-income housing project east of Flatbush Avenue, and connecting downtown to the low-rise brownstone neighborhoods to the south.

Real estate experts say that downtown Brooklyn competes for office tenants with Jersey City and Long Island City, areas where businesses pay less rent to work outside Manhattan, but want to remain within striking distance of Midtown or Lower Manhattan. Last week, it was reported that Viacom could move some of its offices and studios to Long Island City in Queens, bolstering the area’s hopes for itself as an eastern province of Midtown. Other areas, like Jersey City, enjoy big tax breaks and low rents.

Some real experts say that downtown Brooklyn’s advantages are better transportation infrastructure, with access to 9 subway lines and the Long Island Railroad, along with more restaurants and services. They say that the demand for Brooklyn office space exists, but that the supply of the right kind of space is lacking.

Deputy mayor Daniel Doctoroff said that downtown Brooklyn will compete for tenants with Jersey City. To spur the area’s development, he said the city will direct nearly $500 million in public funds towards parks, open space, infrastructure improvements and to pave the way for the nearby Atlantic Yards project and an accompanying basketball arena.

“We lost 50,000 to 60,000 jobs to New Jersey in the nineties because we didn’t have the space,” Mr. Doctoroff told the Sun. “Downtown Brooklyn is changing dramatically over the next five to ten years. What we have to sell will be very different than what we have had to sell before. We will have the ability to attract a totally different kind of corporate tenant.”