The past couple of days I’ve been thinking about the City’s short sighted decision to approve the CVS at Union and Cooper over recommendations of rejection from both Office of Planning and Development and the Land Use Control Board.
Why is it that just as the City seems to be gaining momentum (Unified Development Code adoption, Midtown Overlay, Sooner’s development withdrawal from Overton Square, a new city skate park, and 55 miles of new bike lanes) the City makes a decision that both chills the momentum and will be haunting us for years to come? This has nothing to do with the loss of the historic church and everything to do with missed opportunity due to shortsightedness.
There are a handful of properties in the core of the Memphis that make sense for smart, urban, infill redevelopment and the corner of Union and Cooper is one of them. Playhouse on the Square provides a cultural anchor and in a vibrant economy the redevelopment opportunities would have tempted developers to build on the foundation established by Playhouse. In approving a single story, single use, suburban drugstore, the city has undermined the stabilizing qualities that the Playhouse brought to the intersection and has all but guaranteed that Union and Cooper will remain underutilized as a suburban drugstore and asphalt dominated gateway.
Racing to the Bottom
Secondly, when you make decisions like this you broadcast that Memphis will not enforce their development standards and is more than willing to race to the bottom for the next chain that comes along. At an equivalently positioned intersection in Austin, Nashville, Raleigh, or any of our other peer cities, CVS would not have walked in the door with a suburban site plan. CVS has shown that in other markets they are willing to build an urban model if the community has a pattern of requiring such.
How did we get here? When did we stop thinking about long term impacts and start racing to the bottom? In listening to the tone of the CVS supporters a severely poor self image seems at least a plausible reason. If you wonder why 25 – 34 year olds are leaving Memphis at an alarming rate consider how our leaders broadcast our self-image and question whether anyone has ever told the next generation of leaders why they should stay.
So if the City action is a symptom of a larger problem of low self-esteem and a race to the bottom mentality, what do we do?
I suggest taking a cue from 1909 Chicago. After the 1893 World’s Fair and the completion of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for the City of Chicago, the city was swollen with civic pride. They had a shared community vision for what they wanted the city to become and they had a blueprint for how to get there.
Planning and Doing
So they had a plan — lots of cities have plans. What matters is what they did with it.
A businessman and philanthropist named Charles Wacker thought that the best way to ensure continued momentum was to educate the next generation of leaders why and how cities work, the importance of the built environment, and the continued focus on the shared community vision. So in 1911 he published Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago, an 8th grade level text that for close to 20 years became a core part of the 8th grade curriculum in Chicago’s schools.
This illustrated text taught students the basic fundamentals of city planning, how to take ownership for your city, and perhaps most importantly PRIDE IN THEIR CITY! Below is an excerpt from this manual…
“It is becoming a recognized fact that the power, growth and advancement of a city is limited only by the measure of united civic interest of its people. The stronger and more vital the Community, the greater and more influential the city. It is this spirit which gives Chicago its great world distinction—an indomitable, living, throbbing love for the city, expressing a demand of its united people that the city shall deserve and achieve greatness. “
Memphis as a Treasure
The Wacker Manual influenced a generation of leaders, public servants, and most importantly engaged citizens. As a result –the Plan of Chicago was embraced and implemented.
I grew up in Memphis and attended school in Memphis and never once was told about the intricacies that make Memphis a treasure, about how communities are the building blocks for great cities, about how cities work, or about the importance of civic engagement. In fact, if anything I was told to be afraid of downtown and midtown and to get out of Memphis as soon as I was old enough.
Now the City Beautiful movement has passed, and Memphis lacks a plan and is far from a shared community vision (it does have a start in Sustainable Shelby), but I think there is a lesson here that hopefully could impact the next generation.
Why not introduce a curriculum into the school system that would teach students the importance of their city? It could focus on what gives Memphis its grit, soul, and texture, how the city survived yellow fever and emerged a world leader in sanitation, how the city’s most famous export has shaped modern music, how Memphis has evolved over the years and how they as Memphians have an opportunity to shape what the city becomes in the future. Most importantly it would ask students to “own” the city to take pride in it and to stick around and help clean up the mess.
Getting this implemented is another issue that will take a team of dedicated and talented educators, urbanists, and financial backers to figure out. In a city so chilling of new ideas is not likely to be easy. At a minimum the requirements are: (1) A shared community vision; (2) A crafted curriculum; and (3) A willing school system. Three requirements that individually seem insurmountable and weighted down with political agendas.
I am confident that there are hundreds of reasons we can come up with for why this will not work but what if we as a community were able to pull it off? What if it worked? What if, as in Chicago, teaching students about their city actually instilled pride and served as the foundation for a future Mayor Daley or future City Council member?
As Daniel Burnham said… “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized” – Isn’t it about time we tried something different?
Great post. We need a new champion. A business leader who is not in the traditional political hierarchy but someone who commands respect and is hard to say no to.
Anyone with any ideas on who that champion is/could be?
I bet some of us could make some calls and put TP in front of them to pitch this.
Great analysis of the CVS situation. As a whole, our city council is worthless. The Midtown overlay, if passed, will be worthless as well unless the city council grows a spine.
Tommy – great post. I couldn’t agree more that we all need to take pride in our city, preserve our historic architecture, and have higher standards in place for PUDs.
Memphis Heritage is having a meeting tomorrow at Howard Hall at 6pm regarding the CVS development and what we need to do in order to unite and make sure that the Midtown Overlay is passed. This meeting is open to all interested parties.
Thank you for the fine history lesson to help us understand the critique of Memphis leaders.
Ed Bacon, Planning Director of Philadelphia used a scale model of the downtown plan in the 1950s to show school children the vision of the future, which was later realized. This also influenced a generation of leaders.
He said, “the city is an act of will”; and we must make certain that our leaders have the will to create and achieve a vision from and for its citizens.
The Memphis City Council, with its vote on the CVS zoning, has made a decision without the will to have a real vision of the future.
Tommy proves one more time how much we are losing when we can’t keep young talent here.
Thank you for the comments.
Anonymous you are spot on regarding planned developments!
The PD, as a zoning tool, gained traction in the 60’s and 70’s as a way to provide flexibility for innovative thinking in building techniques and development practices. It was originally intended to allow the creation of a complete Clarence Perry type neighborhood unit (hence planed unit development) and not a single story building on a single lot, or as often the case in Memphis, a billboard or drug store.
With the exception of a few other communities, Memphis among them, the PD is typically accompanied by language that states something along the lines of…
“The Planned Development district provides flexibility in developments in exchange for a more desirable built form than would be possible under one of the other zoning districts. The Planned Development district is intended to allow innovative and imaginative projects that generate amenities beyond those expected in conven¬tional developments.” — See Also: Build neighborhoods not subdivisions
The general idea is that in most modern regulatory schemes a PD would be required to generate a superior project not be used as an end run around the zoning code.
The UDC is light years ahead of the old City/County zoning and subdivision regulations but its glaring Achilles’ heel is the Planned Development process.
Tommy–fantastic piece.
This piece, and your name, actually came up Wednesday night at the Memphis Heritage meeting.
I know that I’m not the only person that would love for you to keep sharing your thoughts and expertise with us about this and other challenges that Memphis faces.
Thanks for the insight and keep us informed!
hey what happened to that big model of downtown memphis that was in city hall years ago? I remember seeing it on a boy scout hike or something. I think it had the downtown expressway on it.
too bad, leaving it in place might have encouraged more civil engineers and highway planners…
Great post Tommy. Nice to see you are alive and well. Let’s hope the Midtown Overlay is respected. This entire project has been bizarre.