Tennessee Perspective

Civic Design Center announces plan for Nashville

UT College of Architecture + Design Newsletter

What should Nashville become in the 21st century? The Nashville Civic Design Center, directed by Associate Professor Mark Schimmenti of the College of Architecture and Design, has worked with citizens to formulate ideas, which have been documented in a book to be available in April 2004.

“The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City.” The Plan’s vision for Nashville includes broad tree-line boulevards serving as grand avenues, replacing sections of urban interstates. The Cumberland River is also a key element, with its banks treated as prime locations for recreation and housing, and a balanced transportation system integrates pedestrians, bicyclists, and mass transit riders into an infrastructure long dominated by automobiles.

As the plan developed, residents were asked to envision how the urban core of Nashville should look and work. Over 500 people attended a series of workshops in downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods to express opinions and draw their dreams. The Nashville Civic Center’s staff translated the results into a series of maps and illustrations with explanatory test to articulate a three-dimensional vision for Nashville’s future.

Since the inception of metropolitan government, merging city and county governments, more than 90 plans have been proposed for various parts of Nashville, but this is the first effort to consider the central city and its contiguous neighborhoods. The Plan integrates the central core with adjacent areas via spoke roads that are the historic entries into downtown. Conceptually based on the Commercial Club’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, the Nashville Plan provides design principles to serve as guidelines for current and future development, with the goal of helping the central city hold its place in civic life. “Right now in Nashville, when a project is proposed for a certain site, all we know we’re giving up is what’s there now,” explains Schimmenti. “By comparing proposal with Plan, the community is able to see what they are giving up for the future, not just the present. And potential investors are able to see, not just what the city is, but what it wants to be.”

“The Plan of Nashville” Avenues to a Great City” includes a brief history of the forces that influenced Nashville’s form, urban design guidelines and policy recommendations as tools to shape future development, and an explanation of the process that produced the Plan. The book was written by Christine Kreyling, a freelance writer and architecture critic for the Nashville Scene. UT participants in the work, in addition to Schimmenti, were Gary Gaston ’99, Assistant Design Director of the center, and student interns Jason Hill ’03, Matt Gregg (4th year architecture) and Amanda Posch (4th year interior design).