First, I would like to thank Smart City, Carol, Tom, and everyone for allowing me to post on Smart City’s site. Smart City is a don’t miss part of my reading every day. I hope that I can contribute event just a bit to the creative thinking that Tom has helped to stimulate throughout and beyond the Memphis community.
A little bit about my background. I’ve been dabbling in city planning for 35 years. I did a stint in my home state of New Jersey, then 25 years with Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development. I then spent a couple of years with the Memphis School System dealing with school planning, construction and transportation. Now I’m on the other side of the fence doing a little consulting. I’ve lived in Memphis now for over 30 years.
I began writing this blog a few weeks ago and it was along the lines of traditional community planning. But, one little event happened last month that made me completely change my thoughts. I was at a luncheon one Saturday at the home of Adrienne and Matt; Adrienne being the daughter of a very dear friend. It was a happy family affair celebrating an early Thanksgiving.
My inspiration came from a young, loquacious boy named Seth who is my friend’s grandson, a legacy from his beautiful daughter Emily. We were sitting outside on a wonderful Fall day and the group was finishing up some soup, dunking and scraping up remains with what Seth called, “tough bread.” Somehow the group got into a discussion of dunking Italian bread into various foods, something I consider a sign of a really great meal. Tom, one of the diners, expressed his total dislike of runny eggs, which I also disdain, but was forced to eat as a child by my mother. The only way I could do it was to dunk.
Directly on the heal of Tom’s words without skipping a beat, Seth launched into a long descriptive tale starting with Tom’s egg yolk breaking open and running all over his dish and onto the table. He proceeds to describe a boy running and running to escape the runny egg – through the woods, down long roads – far away where no one could find him. And then he abruptly stopped, looked up at the four adults waiting for the next part of the tale, and Seth just said matter of factly, “See what happens when you let a kid have Imagination.”
So a nine-year-old boy changed my whole chain of thought about how and what I was going to write in the coming months on city planning, urban education and urban/suburban dynamics.
Imagination. That’s what I want to blog about. Imagination. I believe it is the single most important contribution to city and regional planning that, as a whole, is and has been sorely missing in Memphis and its environs.
Imagination. That’s not to say that the planners for Memphis, Shelby County and the suburban communities in our metropolitan area are not creative and imaginative. They are. It is just that they are overwhelmed by the political process, archaic ordinances and State laws, the influence of civil and traffic engineers, the “make money quickly at any price to the community” developers and, in the case of Memphis and Shelby County, mostly straight down the line division directors, prisoners (willing and not) of the staunchly political agendas of countless mayors, legislators and their minions.
Imagination. What I want to do is present projects and programs that have influenced the urban and suburban landscapes and the quality of life of the Memphis metropolitan area. I hope to point out some of the exceptional projects that demanded imagination from the public sector and the projects that have driven our quality of live downward due to lack of imagination, inability to yield to conventional engineering, planning and zoning (read stuck in the 1960s and 70s) and the inability by large corporations to yield to requests of neighborhoods, communities and planners for more creative design or design more respective of its surroundings (as has been done in thousands of cities).
Imagination. Let’s talk in future columns about how creative imagination from the private sector has delivered livable, high quality of life developments on both large and small scales, despite the brick walls presented by archaic rules and regulations.
Imagination. Let’s talk about the most creative and successful of education programs, highlighting those teachers and administrative staff that have used their imagination to bypass roadblocks and actually reach our children to help provide a better path to their futures.
Imagination. If only our public planners had been given the opportunity to use their imaginations. Maybe we would have neighborhoods in the suburbs that mimicked the best of the neighborhoods in urban area instead of the sprawling behemoths that are Cordova and Hickory Hill. Our planners have had the ideas and they have had the knowledge to create a better city. But, the planners were handcuffed deliver the best. The neighborhood plans which cried out for a change in the way we do business were ignored by legislative bodies, even after they had adopted them as law.
Imagination. Do you ever wonder why when you drive past Walmart or Target or any of the other big box retailers why there is so much parking that in the best of times is only filled two weeks a year? Does it make you think about the acres and acres of pavement that contributes so excessively to our storm water runoff problem and has resulted in the necessity of instituting a fee to control the problem? Do you ever think about the six and more lane roads like Austin Peay, Winchester, North McLean, eastern Walnut Grove, Third Street, Appling, Whitten Road, Riverdale and the like that are maybe, just maybe, only slightly backed up once a day in any given direction? Do you know that just as one side of the government is insisting that we must control our storm water problem, that another side is insisting that we continue to overdesign our roadways and parking lots?
Imagination. Do you ever wonder why it is impossible for our children to walk to their schools in the eastern parts of Memphis and in our suburbs? Do you ever wonder if our kids could design their schools and their neighborhoods, what they would look like? You would be surprised at their creative and imaginative approaches to city planning that our children produce in schools. I learned during my stint at Memphis City Schools that their view of our world is much different than that which we adults have produced.
Imagination. So in the coming months through this medium I hope to return to my first, and really the only vocation I truly loved and cared about, city planning; the reason why I ended up living and working in Memphis for over 30 years hoping to make a difference. I trust that the words I write inspire you to use your imagination so that we can go forward creating the kind of vibrant, safe, livable community we all want for ourselves and our children.
And, expect to hear another story or two from Seth. I think I will make him my number one reporter in the field.
