At Home Magazine, July/August 2005

The Nashville Civic Design Center sets the shape of things to come

Text: Chris McCoy
Photography: courtesy Nashville Civic Design Center

The Nashville Civic Design Center opened its doors in June 2001 with a dauntingly broad mandate. “Our mission is to elevate the quality of the built environment and to promote public participation in the creation of a more beautiful and functional city for all,” says Kate Monaghan, the center’s current executive director. The first step in accomplishing a goal as broad as remaking an entire city is to make a comprehensive plan. “This would be the beginning of what we would try to do in the community,” says Monaghan. “It was very ambitious for a brand-new organization to try and do this.”

The problem with most grand civic plans handed down from above is that they tend to be heavy on the “wow” factor but lacking in regard to livability. So the Design Center set out to learn what the people who actually lived in Nashville wanted for their city. More than 40 intensive meetings between Design Center planners and community leaders were held in every neighborhood to take the pulse of the city. “We wanted people to express their ideas and be creative about what they would like to see,” says Monaghan. “I don’t think we had a lot of preconceived notions going in.” In the end, around 800 people participated. “The depth and breadth of it was pretty amazing.”

Three years of hard work resulted in the publication early this year of The Plan of Nashville, a document Monaghan is rightfully proud of. “It’s created a sort of ideal vision for Nashville over the next 50 years,” she says. “It’s relatively unique, in that many cities engage in this kind of planning process, but very few of them document it the way we did, with a 250-page book with 400 illustrations and drawings.” It is a book intended not only for policymakers and government officials, but also for private developers, community organizations and individual citizens. Each neighborhood has a section devoted to it. “There’s a history and descriptions of what is in each district, and then a vision for how they might change,” says Monaghan. “It has been very helpful to those neighborhoods, and many of them are working on those plans. There are a lot of developers carrying it around, too. It’s had a pretty amazing effect for a document that’s only six months old at this point.”
Central to the plan are 10 principles meant to guide the city’s future development. The Cumberland River was vital to the city’s earliest settlers, but one common complaint from today’s Nashvillians was that it was underdeveloped and hard to access. “The river is really key,” she says. “That provides a real focus for downtown development.” As the city grew, a series of pikes radiated outwards from the original downtown area, but over the years these natural routes have fallen into disuse. “We see those as entry-ways to their original use, and in some places that’s going to require an awful lot of work.”

The most controversial proposal is to phase out the Interstate highways that bisect the city center. “These Interstates were built in the 1960’s. They don’t last forever, and they’re going to have to be rebuilt,” Monaghan says. “We advise that they not be replaced, but that boulevards and avenue be built instead. The latest thinking in highway engineering is that you don’t build Interstates for local access traffic.”

Monaghan says she hopes that The Plan of Nashville gets people thinking about the future of their city. “I think everybody who lives in a neighborhood, owns a home, sends their kids to school or does any of those things that are about community, already cares about civic design. Our role in the community is to help them see things at that next level and to give them the vocabulary they need to be able to talk to each other-and to talk to their elected officials-and to encourage them to expect and demand the best communities they can have.”