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	The Plan of Nashville
	“From Middle Tennessee” Excerpted from PLANNING (The Magazine of the American Planning Association) April 2006 Vol. 72, No. 4, pp. 55-56 in Planners Library by Harold Henderson. In 1995, a group of residents of Nashville, Tennessee, concerned about the Metro government’s plan for a six-lane highway to pass through the downtown, organized an urban design forum. One of its members, Bill Purcell, was elected mayor in 1999 on an urban design platform, and a year later the Nashville Urban Design Center-- a partnership of the University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, and the government of Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County-- was established. In 2002, the group started work on a long-term plan intended to parallel Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. (Rick Bernhardt, FAICP, executive director of Metro Planning Department, and Ed Cole, planning chief of the state Department of Transportation, served on the plan’s 14-member steering committee). Local author and planning writer Christine Kreyling was hired to turn the historical research and proceedings of the meetings into a usable text. The result is a well-written and well-illustrated book called The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City (2005; Vanderbilt University Press; 250 pp.; $45). The plan, which was developed over three years both by planning professionals and more than 800 public participants, deliberately takes a long view (50 years) and a visionary one. It is very much of its time, emphasizing history, nature (notably the Cumberland River), low- and mid-rise infill, neighborhoods, and mixed uses. “For the central city to hold its place in civic life, we must rebuild it the old-fashioned way, with a mixture of residences and retail, offices and entertainment, schools and civic spaces.” After Nashville mayor Bill Purcell’s forward, in which he describes the plan as “a gift we give to ourselves,” the book reviews the region’s history and lists the plan’s 10 basic principles. The plan itself comes in three pats, dealing with the region, the downtown, and the (close-in) neighborhoods. Highlights include: A plan to “heal the pikes”-- diagonal arterials that spider out from the center—by moving buildings up to the sidewalk, limiting curb cuts, moving parking to the side and rear of buildings, eliminating billboards, and gradually increasing density as downtown approaches, among other things. Greening the Cumberland River and its 57-mile Davidson County frontage, in hopes that it can be to greater Nashville as Lake Michigan is to Chicago. A four-step program of “weaning ourselves from the highway,” which could involve turning a number of interstates into urban boulevards, reconfiguring cloverleafs, and leaving just two major interstates to accommodate through traffic passing between Memphis and Knoxville, Louisville, and Atlanta. The goal is “a drastic reduction in local usage of the limited-access highways.” In a sidebar that’s likely to appeal to planners more than to politicians or voters, traffic engineer Walter Kulash makes the case for “deliberately tolerating congestion” because doing so “may have unintentional consequences in a positive direction.” The plan “strongly recommends” no increase in the capacity of the through routes, claiming that any increase there would induce more traffic. Upgrading mass transit, although a citizen survey in April 2003 found that only 12 percent of the 500 people polled had ever used Nashville’s public transportation. Orienting the city around the state capitol by formalizing its north, south, east and west axes. Kreyling concludes that the fate of the plan now depends on “the willingness of the public to embrace it,” and on “the Metro government bureaucracy’s readiness to respond.” Any city thinking of mounting a similar effort should pay attention to how they do things in the middle of Tennessee. The Plan of Nashville : Thinking Inside the Loop and Outside the Box Nashville Scene By Christine Kreyling September 19-25, 2002 Why yet another plan of Nashville? That was my question when architect Seab Tuck, as chair of the board of the Nashville Civic Design Center (NCDC), asked me to serve on the plan's steering committee. My skepticism was earned through years in the trenches of Nashville's urban design scene. A long shelf in my office is packed with old plans with less than compelling titles: Concept 2010: the General Plan, Mobility 2010, Transportation 2015, Area CBD (Central Business District) Access Study, Gateway Plan, Fifth Avenue of the Arts Plan, Church Street Master Plan, Bicentennial North Nashville Master Plan, all 14 subarea plans. The Scene itself added to my library with The Plan for SoBro. Since Nashville became Metro, there have been more than 80 plans that dealt with some aspect of the central city. Why add another dust catcher to the shelf? Well, for starters, because of who, what and where. WHO: The Plan of Nashville is conceived and orchestrated by the NCDC, the new kid on the planning block. Grass-roots activists founded the center a year ago, with financial support from Metro, the University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, local foundations and firms active in the building of downtown. The center is committed to the practice of urban design, a three-dimensional discipline that seeks to integrate streets and buildings, land use and transportation. This is a new approach for Nashville. As a private nonprofit, NCDC listens with independent ears, sees with independent eyes and speaks with an independent voice. Many previous plans by Metro departments and their consultants were constrained by politics and patronage. We've had plans to take advantage of federal funding, such as for interstates and urban renewal. We've had plans as prelude to a big development, or as a response to disgruntled property owners complaining about failing businesses. Some plans were designed to solve specific problems: what to do about a Church Street at rock bottom, or a Fifth Avenue with great buildings and few tenants. WHAT: The Plan for Nashville will be painted on a broader canvas, and with a broader brush. This highly ambitious, 18-month project will develop a community-based vision of how the urban core should look and work, and principles of urban design to guide the area's future. The point is to help the community realize what choices are before us, what directions we want to take and what tools will help us get there. " It's not top down," says John Houghton, NCDC executive director. "What we at the design center are doing is organizing the process of listening to the community. It's not what we say should happen, but what the community says." WHERE: A significant difference from previous planning efforts is the area of study. The Plan of Nashville will not be bound by the noose of the interstate loop. This plan will consider, in addition to downtown, the frame areas--Germantown and East Nashville, west side and south side--as well as the spoke roads that are the historic entries into the central city. According to NCDC design director Mark Schimmenti, "This is the first plan since 1962 that will look at the entire urban core." " This will not be just another plan for the central business district," Houghton adds. "We need to get away from the island concept, and emphasize the links between the surrounding neighborhoods and the core." Accentuating connections that transcend the interstate barrier could, for example, enable merchants to discover retail and service possibilities for downtown that would find customers in the frame areas, as well as make downtown living more attractive. Ultimately, the plan will help Nashville reimagine itself as an urban entity. "If you study the rhetoric about Nashville ever since the consolidation of Nashville and Davidson County," Houghton says, "we talk about Metro Nashville, about the CBD, about individual neighborhoods. We seem to have lost the ability to think about the city of Nashville, even though it's still out there. This plan will think about the city." Nashville began when a small group of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant land speculators decided that a site combining river access with game to hunt and a long growing season was a good investment. The founders' intent to rationalize a wilderness is evident in the city's first town plan. In 1794, before Tennessee was even a state, surveyor Thomas Molly laid out Nashville-in-embryo in 200 one-acre lots, with a four-acre public square on the bluffs above the Cumberland as its center. From this grid Nashvillians have cultivated a network of spoke and ring roads, lined with neighborhoods and subdivisions, strip malls and big boxes--everything from a Hillsboro Village to a Cool Springs. Today we are sprawling beyond the horizon all the way to the Highland Rim, and the question is whether the center that begot all this will hold. Downtown Nashville has made great strides since the days of boarded-up storefronts and winos passed out in planters. But land use is still too restricted to 8-to-5 offices and special events. And the decline of tourism along with a stagnant office market have made us more conscious of the vulnerability of the central city to quick fixes. The absence of retail and residents, the ubiquity of surface parking and the fact that most recent downtown projects were either built by Metro or subsidized by government, leaves open the central question about whether Nashville's central city is marching forward into the future or staggering in a dance of one step forward, one step back. The purpose of the Plan of Nashville is to help the central city hold its place in civic life. Schimmenti says that in planning for Nashville, it's logical to start at the center and work outward, mimicking the way the city grew. "Everyone in the region is a stakeholder in the central city. When you make it better, you make something better for all the citizens. It's the place where the community comes together, whether it's to see the Titans or The Magic Flute." Since its founding, NCDC has engaged many fragments of the cityscape--everything from which colors we should paint our bridges to what should happen on the East Bank. The staff have conducted planning sessions in many of the neighborhoods that frame the core: Rutledge Hill, Salemtown, Buena Vista, Germantown and Cameron-Trimble. They have staged workshops on the public square and downtown housing, sites for a symphony hall, a new federal courthouse and a new convention center. Now it's time to think big picture. "We've been doing helter skelter," Houghton says. "We need something to test and measure individual projects against." The concept of "something to test and measure against" was inspired by the 1909 Plan of Chicago. This benchmark book was developed by architects Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett at the behest of the local Commercial Club. After Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition, which launched the City Beautiful movement in America, "Everybody in Chicago felt that the city was destined for great things," Schimmenti explains. "The Commercial Club wanted a specific vision for greatness, in part to make outside interests feel comfortable investing in the city." The club hired a PR firm to distribute 165,000 copies of the plan, covering 10 percent of the population, and set up a commission to implement it. They developed the Wacker Manual to teach the plan to high school students--a civics lesson in what it meant to live in a great city. The citizens of Chicago looked at the drawings, and they saw not just buildings and streets, but systems: a network of parks, transportation systems for people and goods, a series of view corridors and major avenues, the freight yards relocated out of the central city, the lakefront area as a whole. These visionary drawings allowed the community to measure the worth of individual projects against the collective good. For example, say someone wanted to build a skyscraper on a site that the plan had designated for a park, or a civic building or a sightline to a major monument. By comparing proposal with plan, Chicagoans could see what they were giving up for the future, not just the present. From the published plan potential investors could see not just what the city was, but what it wanted to be. " Right now in Nashville, when a project is proposed for a certain site--a courthouse or ballpark or convention center--all we know we're giving up is what's there now: the thermal plant, surface parking," Schimmenti explains. "All outside investors have to go on is the way we are. We all know that Nashville can be great, but we don't have a vision of what form that greatness could take." Schimmenti feels that the Bicentennial Mall, as a massive and aspirational public works project, has for Nashville the significance that the Centennial Exposition had for Chicago. "The Plan of Nashville is the logical next step." The first step toward a plan was looking backward. That's because, as Adlai Stevenson once claimed in a speech, "We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path that has led to the present." Last June, 10 volunteer teams--led by local designers, planners and developers--began researching the city's history from a variety of perspectives. Each team had a topic: natural history and topography; economics; cultural, social and political history; and themes relating directly to the built environment, such as transportation, urban form, previous plans, existing land use and regulations. Team members dug through archives and history books, interviewed the experts, pored over maps and charts, walked and drove along every street. Their research will form the platform on which a plan can be built. Phase II will start in late September, when the teams shift to actual design. The entire study area has been divided into districts, one to a team. The basic lines of demarcation are the historic pikes, such as Fourth Avenue/Nolensville Road, Eighth Avenue/Franklin Road. "But the lines are fuzzy," Schimmenti says, "and we're asking each team to consider both sides of these arterials. Historically, neighborhoods shared the big streets, even if these streets were class dividers." Care has been taken not to fracture distinctive neighborhoods, and to include both sides of the river within a district, to consider the banks as complementary. Team leaders are seeking volunteers--residents, business owners, anyone with knowledge of a specific area--to help devise each district's plan. On Nov. 21, each team will present its plan at a public meeting. Then Phase III, the synthesis, begins. The NCDC staff will look at all the plans and pull them together into a cohesive whole. They'll resolve issues of duplication--more than one team may think its district is the right place for a baseball stadium or an elementary school. They'll consider the systems--such as transportation, parks, utilities--that link the districts. The staff will not work in isolation. "We'll have a big jury," Houghton says. The team leaders, as well as a steering committee composed of NCDC board members, academics, planners and designers, will meet regularly with the staff to critique the evolving plan. The work in progress will also be presented to the public several times for comment and criticism. Sometime in April all the interested parties will sign off on a final version at yet another public meeting. Das Book, the publication of the Plan of Nashville, is Phase IV. The goal is to produce the book in December 2003. NCDC is seeking funding sufficient to publish the plan itself and a booklet for high school students--a la Chicago's Wacker Manual--to educate the citizens of the future on the need to plan for Nashville. The Plan of Nashville will be a visionary, forward-looking document. But it will be constructed with building blocks of the past. The research teams have not focused merely on assembling the facts of history. They are interpreting data to discover Nashville's character--what ways our city is distinctive, as well as what it has in common with other American cities. Raising the collective consciousness of the choices made by citizens of the past in shaping the city, and why they made them, will help participants in the design phase make more intelligent choices for the future. While the reports by the research teams are not yet final, information the members have turned up already suggests themes that can be used to guide the shape of the plan's components and implementation strategies. Some examples: Topography Nashville's topography offers fine sightlines, but past city planners have done little to protect or enhance them. "The view into town from Lafayette Street is a major visual avenue into the city we've not taken advantage of, which is also true of the approach from the Woodland Street bridge, the view from Church Street as the land terraces down to the west and the view from the east porch of the State Capitol," says architect and topography co-chair Gary Everton. "And of course, the first thing you see coming into town on I-40 from the east is [Myers] carpet warehouse. We're mapping these view corridors so that the design teams can realize the possibilities." Urban form Landscape architect Ben Crenshaw, who co-chairs this team, has found that "Nashville has never been particularly dense in its development patterns. Nor has the city ever done a lot of development that integrated a mixture of uses vertically," like living over the shop. Even before the automobile enabled us to sprawl, densities in Nashville never reached the degree of compactness of the northeast's urban neighborhoods. This insight might lead a design team plotting residential infill to utilize a low- or mid-rise model rather than high-rise towers. Current conditions The central city is underdeveloped. "Just about everything north of the Capitol to I-40, and south of Broadway to the interstate, is zoned for four to five stories," says planner and co-chair Keith Covington. "But there are almost no historic examples of four or five story buildings in SoBro, for example, and there are lots of vacant lots and surface parking, and many one-story metal structures. That seems like a ton of underutilized property." The team questions whether there's a lack of demand for more intense development or whether the high-rise zoning in the heart of the city has sucked the development potential from the frame. It will be up to the design teams working on these frame areas to determine what intensity of development is appropriate and realistic. Mobility Gillian Fischbach, a transportation planner and co-chair of this team, says it's important to distinguish between trade transportation and personal transportation when charting the city's history. "For trade, one mode has tended to replace another, from horse to steamship to train, and now we have trucks," she explains. "Personal travel tells a different story. We once had several modes simultaneously--trolley and train overlapped bus and car--but we did away with the options. Without a doubt we need to provide more modes. But planners have been so busy just keeping up with growth day by day that it's been hard to come up with a plan." Fischbach points out that Nashville is at the junction of three interstates, which may be good for trade, but it's lousy for air quality. "This situation makes trucks the key component of highway design. And we can sprawl along six corridors instead of just two or four. There are no geographical boundaries to sprawling, like an ocean or mountains. The challenge is not uncommon--Portland took it head on years ago--but it's a hard wave to ride. We have to be willing to make some tough decisions." Economics Nashville's tradition as a diverse economy with a lack of dependence on heavy industry has made the city ready and able to reap the benefits of the nation's shift to a service economy. Team member and Vanderbilt professor William Collins also points out how federal funding has been central to the post-WWII "evolution of U.S. cities, including Nashville, financing, among other things, interstate highways, urban renewal programs and hospital expansions." The rapid decline in federal funds for cities is a factor the designers must consider in mapping strategies. Preliminary reports by team members note that while plenty of people still work downtown, the loss of residents in the central city has definitely hurt. But downtown residential won't be easy to develop until the area takes on more of the characteristics of a traditional neighborhood. "What's drawing people back to the city are places like Sylvan Park and Hillsboro Village," says team member Ray Friedman, on the faculty at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management. " There aren't enough of them," Friedman continues. "But if you live downtown, you still have to drive" to get to the retail necessities and amenities such neighborhoods provide. The Culture The team researching cultural history--led by landscape architect Gary Hawkins and developer Bert Mathews--seems to have had the most fun, perhaps because they conducted lengthy interviews with good storytellers such as author John Egerton and Bill Ivey. The team has traced the theme of the Athens of the South through the city's historic foundations for higher education. They note how the theme of Music City U.S.A. reflects Nashville's creative and entrepreneurial aspects. They point out the city's reputation for racial moderation, hospitality--the incredible politeness of being--and a certain provinciality. So what does all this have to do with urban design? "With Metro Government, Nashville came up with a creative solution to the city's funding problems," Hawkins explains. "This creative and entrepreneurial character can be harnessed to address current problems with our growth patterns--sprawl--if we just think before we build, build, build. But the solutions should take into account our conservative tastes. We may need to employ a traditional architectural vocabulary to make urban infill attractive to Nashville." History of plans Randy Hutcheson, the planning department staffer who works with NCDC, has spent the past month or two boning up on the multitude of previous Nashville plans--approximately 100 since the first, a thoroughfare plan of 1933. His research leads him to strike a cautionary note. "We hired good planners," he says, "but we didn't really follow what they produced." The plans have sat on the shelf, in some cases, because "they were co-opted by special interests, or used, if used at all, to back specific agendas." Hutcheson thinks that the fate of the Plan of Nashville can be different. "The key is that the mayor and council be strong in their support, that they allow the plan to serve as a gatekeeper for the individual project. And we must sustain the momentum, go out and sell it to the whole city." The major impact of The Plan of Chicago on the average citizen was through its illustrations. Chicagoans looked at the pictures, and they saw how beautiful a city could be if streets and buildings were organized into a visual hierarchy. Nashville has a lovely topography, but it's not been very good at visual planning. Sure, the state sited the Capitol on the tallest hill in downtown to symbolize the government's predominance. But we have obscured all but the view from the north to the state's acropolis with other buildings. The public square, with its successive city halls and courthouses, occupies a visually strong site on the riverfront. But its front yard is a parking lot. Broadway is lined with major monuments, and the back door of the convention center. Metro built the arena, and then subsidized the construction of the Hilton Hotel, which blocks the best sightline--from the east--to the arena. Billboards and chain link clutter the avenues of approach into the city, announcing that a visitor has arrived, not somewhere, but anywhere. Nashville has some lovely neighborhoods and fine buildings, but the fragments of beauty are hyphenated by ugliness that casts a pall over the city as thick as a summer smog. Part of the purpose behind the Plan of Nashville is to educate citizens about the visual possibilities inherent in daily life. The art of civic design is not primarily the art of the thing itself, but the effect of structure on the human spirit. "Design is all about people's priorities: economically, socially, culturally, quality of lifestyle," Houghton says. "Those priorities take visual form in the way a city is shaped. The point behind the Plan of Nashville is to give all citizens a clear understanding of what we value." Christine Kreyling is a member of the steering committee for The Plan of Nashville. Planner for a Day: Citizen Summit to Sketch Future Look of City Nashville Scene By Christine Kreyling April 10, 2003 Want to play 20 questions--actually, more like 100 questions--about the future look of our city? The Nashville Civic Design Center (NCDC) has just the game for you. On Saturday morning at the Nashville Convention Center, NCDC is staging a citizen summit on a new vision for the urban core and surrounding neighborhoods. Called the "Plan of Nashville," this highly ambitious, community-based vision will paint a picture of how the urban areas of Nashville should look and work. It will also establish principles of urban design to guide the area's future. After an opening pep talk by Mayor Bill Purcell and a brief explanation of the planning to date by NCDC design director Mark Schimmenti, the summit will take the form of a survey. NCDC staff will ask the public to answer questions on 10 topics, ranging from what to do with the Cumberland riverfront--greenways? marina?--to how to get more residents into downtown. Schimmenti will demonstrate principles of urban design that apply to each topic--why narrowing streets can help make them more pedestrian-friendly, for example--to help participants frame their responses. Then each citizen will mark his or her scorecards. The topics of the survey are rooted in themes that have emerged from a six-month series of public workshops NCDC conducted. Last fall, design center staff divided the entire study area--downtown and framing neighborhoods--into 10 districts. Each was assigned a pair of design leaders from a pool of volunteers: local designers, planners and developers. The teams held community meetings in each district that focused on existing conditions. They asked residents, business and property owners--and anyone else who showed up--to explain what was good about the district and what wasn't, where they took visitors and what places they avoided. In February, team leaders returned to their districts for another workshop, this time asking participants to imagine the futures of their districts. As they gathered around tables covered with maps, they drew new bridges over the river, buried the interstate and sketched a home for boats on the East Bank. They placed mixed-use structures next to the stadium and a black history museum on Jefferson Street. They renamed North Nashville "The River District" because the area is inscribed by the arc of the Cumberland. Dickerson Road was turned into "Dickerson Village." In all the workshops, according to NCDC design assistant Gary Gaston, certain themes were mentioned again and again: * The Cumberland River is a major and under-exploited amenity. The scrap yards and industry should be moved away, and the real estate should be redeveloped for recreation and living space. * The parts of the city don't connect well. The downtown grid should be repaired. Interstate barriers between downtown and the neighborhoods should be lessened. Gateways into the city and civic gathering places, linked by beautiful and usable streets--for pedestrians and bikers as well as for cars--should be created. * Convenient and efficient mass transit is a top priority. More road capacity for cars is not. * More--much more--downtown housing is needed. * The gaps downtown made by surface parking should be filled in. * The East Bank needs major redevelopment. A majority prefers new neighborhoods and greenways. * Home ownership in neighborhoods with high percentages of rental housing should be promoted. * An infusion of public art into downtown and the urban neighborhoods is needed. Inevitably, with hundreds of people thinking outside the box and all over the map, conflicting suggestions arose. Many thought a system of linear parks along the Cumberland was a top green priority. Others preferred more neighborhood parks linked by green boulevards. Some favored the thermal plant site for a new baseball stadium, but locations on the East Bank or a return to Sulphur Dell north of the State Capitol, where baseball originated in Nashville, also drew support. Where to place a new convention center--if we decide we need one--produced several suggestions, including the northern end of the Gulch, the East Bank and the wedge of land at the intersection of Lafayette Street and Eighth Avenue, where the old Sears building (now Union Rescue Mission) stands. The summit is not designed to resolve the finer differences of opinion. Rather, "It's the first opportunity for people from all 10 districts to come together, react to all the different visions and build some consensus on how we should proceed," Gaston says. "At the summit, we'll put all 45 maps generated in the workshops on the walls and all the ideas on the table, and ask the citizens as a whole to sift through the possibilities, narrow the options and establish priorities." Then the design team leaders and NCDC staff will take the survey results and distill the 45 maps into five. One map will cover downtown, and the four others will cover the surrounding quadrants. These maps will be presented at the May 17 meeting of the Nashville Urban Design Forum for further public comment. By the end of the summer, Schimmenti and his crew plan to have one big map, with accompanying design guidelines and policy recommendations, to present to the public as the official Plan of Nashville. The design center, with the assistance of Vanderbilt University, will publish the plan in book form in the spring of 2004 to mark the third anniversary of the founding of NCDC. At that point, the design center will develop action groups to implement the plan in collaboration with other civic institutions. The public art aspect of the plan, for example, is a natural for the Metro Arts Commission. And the Nashville Downtown Partnership would be a logical key player in the economic revitalization of downtown. The point of the plan is to integrate the efforts of these groups into a coherent program. Another purpose of the plan is to give us something to test and measure individual projects against. What if someone suggests the construction of a skyscraper on a site that the plan had designated as a park? Or what if someone wanted to build a downtown school that would impede a sightline to a major monument? By comparing proposal to plan, Nashvillians will be able to see what they'd be giving up in the future, not just in the present. " Right now in Nashville, when a project is proposed for a certain site--a courthouse or a ballpark or a convention center--all we know we're giving up is what's there now: the thermal plant, surface parking," Schimmenti told the Scene at the plan's inception. "All outside investors have to go on is the way we are. We all know that Nashville can be great. But we don't have a vision of what form that greatness can take." The Plan of Nashville--by the citizens and for the citizens--will be our blueprint. The Plan of Nashville summit takes place this Saturday, from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in room 204 of the Nashville Convention Center.Cover story: March 11-17, 2004 Ten Things Nashville Needs And the People to do them By Richard Cook Nashville Scene 4 Mr. Purcell, Tear Down Those Interstates Idea: Rip up interstates 65, 40 and 24 within the 440 loop. argument/plan: Okay, we're stealing a little bit of thunder from a soon-to-be-released urban studies plan coming out of Nashville Civic Design Center, but the idea's so good we can't stop ourselves. For starters, it makes no sense to have hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks--most of which are from out-of-state--pouring through the heart of our city on three interstates on a regular basis. It's loud. It's unhealthy. It does not contribute to a nice, compact, pedestrian-oriented, comfortable urban core. Instead, it trashes it, interrupts it, shatters it. Let us also point out something that would make your average developer drool: The land in question is highly valuable property. Suppose--theoretically speaking--that this land were to become whatever the citizenry wanted it to be. Apartments! Houses! Shops! Parks! The private sector could get a chunk; the public sector could have a piece. What a thought! A bunch of local urban theorists have begun bandying about the notion of ripping up some of the interstates that pass near the central part of the city, and getting rid of them. (More specifically, when we looked at the map ourselves, we were intrigued by the possibilities of getting rid of everything within the loop created by interstates 440, 24/40, 24/65, and 265/40.) If you dig up all those massive thoroughfares, and replace them with apartments, parks, houses, stores, bike paths and a grid of streets and sidewalks, then the city will be a warmer, more human, more livable place. Ask the people in Portland, Ore.: They dug up an interstate to positive effect. The streets, sidewalks and other corridors now interact nicely with one another. One of this city's great economic strengths is that it is so centrally located and has transportation arteries to the rest of the nation. We're not proposing that strength be eliminated. The trucks will still be able to roar out of town just as they did before. As to the objections from people who currently use one of the interstates to get very close to downtown, there will be plenty of exits off the interstate that would allow for cars to speed to their final destinations. To be certain, other connector roads would have to be strengthened. But if you dig up all those interstates and force pass-through traffic to use an interstate loop, then the city will be a better place. Who to do it: Gov. Phil Bredesen has turned the Tennessee Department of Transportation completely upside down. Bredesen and that department's commissioner, Gerald Nicely, are well acquainted with Nashville, and if they're looking to make a splash, this would certainly get national acclaim.