Part One:
Designing Action International Design Competition 

A project by the Nashville Civic Design Center and the National Endowment for the Arts

Designing Action is an IDEAS competition to envision the many ways that active, healthy-living concepts could accomplish Nashville’s desire to become the “Healthiest City in the Southeast.”

Designing Action seeks to encourage reimagining an industrial site along Downtown Nashville’s Cumberland River, with emphasis on creating acitve spaces for healthy citizens, highlighting alternative sports and activities. Big ideas can inspire big change, and Nashville is a city that thinks big! The site has many challenges that confront its redevelopment. It is a brownfield that is disconnected from the neighborhoods of East Nashville by an elevated interstate. Almost the entire site was flooded, deeming it important that any proposal should consider this factor in the design.

Our goal with this IDEAS competition is to generate innovative ideas and conceptsthat could inform the future redevelopment of valuable riverfront property – ultimately increasing the quality of life for all Nashville’s citizens.

Additional details will be discussed at Thursday's Urban Design Forum, and posted online soon afterward.  Competition begins June 1st. 

Part Two:
Bold Urban Design Proposals for Nashville from The University of Tennessee

This past year, three major urban design proposals have been produced by former Design Director T. K. Davis, his colleagues and students from theUniversity of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design. These projects have been pursued at the request of the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), and have benefited from the MPO's support, in cooperation with the Nashville Civic Design Center.
 

Trinity Lane Transit Oriented Development

Transit-Oriented Development with as many as 10,000 housing units to be located on city-owned land at the intersection of Trinity Lane and Ellington Parkway.
 

Rationalizing "Spaghetti Junction" 

Rationalizing the interchanges at "Spaghetti Junction," where the Ellington Parkway meets Jefferson Street, Fifth Avenue, Main Street, and the Interstate, as proposed in The Plan of Nashville. Sixteen new blocks of mid-rise, mixed-use development become possible on this fifty-acre site, now largely owned by the city. It is part of a designated redevelopment district, at the threshold of Downtown and East Nashville.

Capping the Interstate

Capping the Interstate Canyon from 12th Avenue to Church Street on the west flank of Downtown, to form a 2/3 mile linear park that can link Downtown and Midtown, as well as generate mid-rise development on numerous adjacent blocks.