TENNESSEE ALUMNUS

A City with a Plan

UT's College of Architecture plays a pivotal role in the Nashville Civic Design Center and the new Plan of Nashville

by Diane Ballard

The UT College of Architecture and Design is in Knoxville, but during the past decade, it has also had presence in Memphis, the Tri-Cities, Chattanooga, and Nashville by virtue of its involvement in a variety of community outreach programs in each of those locations.

Nashville in particular has much to show from the efforts of UT Architecture faculty members and students, working through the Nashville Civic Design Center. UT provides the Center’s design leadership, helping manage a progressive, independent resource to encourage public participation and high quality urban design in the state’s capitol city.

Over the past 4 years, the Civic Design Center, along with Nashville’s citizens and government, has developed the Plan of Nashville, a comprehensive vision for Nashville’s core. Since 1963, more than a hundred plans have been proposed for various parts of Nashville. This one, though, has some substantial backing, having benefited from the participation of more than 800 citizens in its process, including many key members of Nashville’s Metro government.

UT architecture professor Mark Schimmenti was the design director of the Civic Design Center until last year and is credited with taking the lead on the Plan of Nashville before returning to UT. He recalls how the organization began.

“The Civic Design Center got its start when I started teaching continuing education courses on urban design in Nashville during 1995. The group that took the course formed the Nashville Urban Design Forum, which met every month.”

Eventually, he says, Bill Purcell, then a candidate for Metro mayor, picked up on the idea and made it part of his campaign platform. After he was elected, he formed a task force on urban design, including leading Nashville citizens and members of the design community, which ultimately recommended funding of a downtown center to focus on issues of community, neighborhoods, design, and economic development.

The university was interested in being involved, Schimmmenti says. “I traveled back and forth from Knoxville to Nashville and worked with the task force.”

Faculty members from the College of Architecture and Design have a proven record in working with communities, applying expertise in urban design to some real-life challenges faced by cities. In Chattanooga, Professor Stroud Watson has been widely commended for his pivotal work for the Urban Design Center, while Professor T.K. Davis worked from 1995 to 2001 with the tri-cities region in northeastern Tennessee. Schimmenti is a founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a nationally recognized movement that promotes mixed use (that is, containing or zoned for commercial and residential facilities) in community development.

In December 2000, the Nashville Civic Design Center was announced as a non-profit joint venture between Metro government, Vanderbilt University, and UT. Schimmenti says the center is organized somewhat like a symphony.

“ Where a symphony might have an executive director and artistic director, the Civic Design Center has an executive director and a design director.” When Schimmenti gave up the design director’s position in 2004, UT architecture professor T.K. Davis succeeded him. The executive director of the center is Kate Monaghan. Former UT faculty member and alumnus Gary Gaston serves as the associate design director.

UT students have gotten a lot of hands-on experience with the Plan of Nashville. Some worked as interns and volunteers at the many community meeting from which the plan was distilled, and others did classroom follow-up. Some of the student design projects that were part of course work became part of the actual plan, among them, housing designs, a baseball stadium, and a magnet high school for the arts.

The Plan of Nashville itself required quite a plan. A representative cross section of citizens worked together to document their collective vision for downtown Nashville and its surrounding inner-ring neighborhoods. Schimmenti and Gaston led more than 30 public meetings for input. The resulting plan will serve as a guideline for future development for government and private developers.
The plan is nothing if not ambitious. It calls for-among other things- revamping the inner-loop interstate that slices city neighborhoods apart. Also on the agenda are a public transportation infrastructure, a greenway and a park system, and a focus on the Cumberland River as an identifying feature. At the core of the plan are a series of urban design principles that promote strong neighborhoods and enduring economic vitality.

“ It is a comprehensive long-term plan—a thirty-to fifty-year effort,” says Davis. HE says that the plan is based on the Plan of Chicago, a seminal 1909 effort at urban planning that integrated transportation and recreation, as well as most other facets of city life.

The Plan of Nashville’s advocacy of long-term modifications to the city’s inner-ring interstate highways and their ultimate conversion to high capacity boulevards sounds daunting, but Davis says it’s do-able. Interstate highways sliced through neighborhoods are now so clogged with traffic as to be nearly impassable. They are ripe for change, he says.

“ About forty-five cities are converting or are planning to convert inner-city interstates,” Davis says. “Interstates need to be rebuilt every thirty years or so as the result of normal wear and tear. Federal money allocated for this need is being used elsewhere for downtown highway remediation.”
But it won’t happen overnight. Davis says the first phase will be “cosmetic improvements,” such as incorporating landscape and public art into thoroughfares. Next, he says, is restructuring the ungainly downtown cloverleaf intersections.

“ We want to make them more rational and pedestrian-friendly and to recover the wasted land these intersections occupy. The cloverleaf intersection in East Nashville, better known as “Spaghetti Junction,” alone consumes 95 acres of otherwise prime developable land.”

Then the plan calls for “bridging over or tunneling under” interstates to reconnect neighborhoods severed by the superhighways. These three phases could take 20 years, Davis says. With significant concurrent investment in mass transit, next could come the conversion of interstates in the downtown area to boulevards that are aesthetically pleasing and more efficient. Through traffic would travel primarily on the outer interstate loop around Nashville, as on similar loops around Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

Another key element of the Plan of Nashville is capitalizing on the Cumberland River as a magnet for developing new green space and housing. Historically, Nashville “hasn’t related very well to the river,” Davis says. Much scenic river frontage is occupied by light industry that Davis says will likely relocate over time.

“We have a new sense of the river as an eco-resource. Nashville is in the process of completing twenty-six miles of greenway along the river.” It’s essential, he says, to incorporate housing along the riverbank and reconnect neighborhoods to the river.

Davis and others are continually promoting the Plan of Nashville with education and outreach initiatives. A video presentation, a hardcover book, forums, community meetings, and exhibits tout the principles and goals of the plan. Davis says UT has been essential to the development of the plan. He spends s3 to 4 days each week in the center’s Nashville office and makes several presentations a week about the plan.

Already, Davis says, the Plan of Nashville has had an effect. “Through the last five years of consciousness –raising, we’ve begun to see changes with numerous new downtown residential buildings and the new city hall and civic square.” He says the Civic Design Center “works within the intersection of UT, Vanderbilt, the Metro Nashville Development and Housing Agency, and the private sector”-a dynamic and exciting place to be.

“The center shows UT’s commitment to Nashville and demonstrates that UT can have an impact.”