Today I drove past the new CVS building at Union and Cooper. When complete, it will be a case study how not to redevelop urban commercial district sites.
There was, however, no mechanism to prevent what’s been done. There was no agreed-upon urban design plan or civic vision to guide City decision-makers. Public opinion was divided. This is in part because Memphians have not yet collectively decided what kind of city they want to live in.
By contrast, people in cities like Portland or Denver are remarkably united behind a clear idea of the characteristics, content, functions, and appearance of the city they want to inhabit. These cities attract people. They have a critical economic advantage by attracting the kind of talented, educated people who are the backbone of the middle class, and the economic engine of a community.
Often such cities derive their civic visions from the characteristics and concepts that make up the soul of such places such as mountains, waterfronts, climate, lifestyle, or history. The vision stems from the people themselves knowing who they really are; the stories they tell about themselves, what they celebrate, what they stand for or represent, what they believe in and value.
Memphians sort of, kind of know some of these things about ourselves, but we can’t really agree on how to express them. For example, we generally know we have some relationship to the river, but we aren’t sure what that relationship is, and can’t seem to find a way to physically encounter the water. That’s why the recent flood was such an event; the water came to us! We know we have an outstanding and unique musical heritage, but haven’t figured out how to really capitalize on it (see New Orleans, Nashville, or Austin).
We don’t know how we wish to balance our historic architectural heritage with new development, especially when historic buildings that make major or special contributions to shaping and defining the space of the public realm occupy desirable development sites. And we really don’t quite know how to balance the economic advantage of making Memphis an appealing, attractive, hospitable city with the compulsion to do whatever is necessary to attract new business—any new business—at any cost. In a community with so many people living at or near the poverty level, that struggles even to meet its most basic service levels, where outsized fear of crime and xenophobia often seem to overwhelm any other thinking, making decisions based on the value of an attractive public realm can seem to many to be at best frivolous, and at worst irresponsible.
Taken together, these attitudes tend to erect yet another barrier to good public realm design: a pervasive suspicion of and hostility to “government.” The best vision plans are created within an open, public process that is intended to arrive at a consensus for what our city should be. It is based on shared community values, and meets the reality of the market. They are simultaneously both top (government) down and bottom (community) up.
As good as our current civic leadership is, it has its hands full repairing the damage of decades of difficulty achieving even the basics of good governing in the face of enormous challenges. Resources are strained to the breaking point with little funding available for planning. Even within those limits, the City heroically continues to advance plans that, taken together, may add up to an overall civic vision. Many neighborhood and institutional initiatives are also individually addressing small area plans that contribute to the vision. The next step will be to develop, adopt, and implement public policies based on the overall vision
Without creating and sticking to strong public policies, based on design and economic development principles proven to have strengthen cities elsewhere, the best plan is only paper.
wake up, Memphis looking at Portland and expecting similar outcomes seems boneheaded.
Memphis will never be a Portland, and using them as a yardstick for anything really for Memphis, its population, its culture, its underedcation, its politics, its physical nature, seems crazy in the first place.
also, screw CVS, its a goddam drug store…not a public space …drug store are utilitarian physical structures housing a dman retail service…it’s not city hall, palace, library, school, or nature preserve.
Portland doesn’t have any juke joints . . . losers 😉
I’ll admit I have been taking routes through that area in order that I can avoid the sight of the CVS rising at that corner. It is a painful reminder of a lost opportunity.
Good urban design can and does occur in all communities- from Manhattan, NY to Manhattan, KS. The fact that some individuals cannot contemplate how every building participates in the creation of the public realm reflects the same short sightedness shared by members of the city council.
% population on reduced price or free school lunches:
Portland:
Memphis:
% population at or below poverty level:
Portland:
Memphis:
% housing in distress or foreclosure or ‘government owned’:
Portland:
Memphis:
but since we both have a rail transport system and an Urban Service Boundary to stop sprawl, I guess it’s a wash.
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli….
No, the real variable that matters is that when Portland was a lousy city, its citizens decided that could change their future and decided that Portland would be a DIY city. That’s what we haven’t decided to do yet, because we need it to be a civic ethos here. That was the leverage point for Portland, and I’m hard-pressed to see why it can’t be here.
Every building is a part of the community. To have a community which has pride in itself, then ever building should be something to be proud of. Looking at buildings as “utilitarian physical structures housing a dman retail service” is the exact problem – because by the very nature of our society the majority of our building are “utilitarian physical structures housing a dman retail service”. If we have to go out of our way to find spaces and places we are proud of then we have lost the battle.
Some of the most amazing and elegant buildings were built to house pubs or drug stores or department stores or whatever other retail service you can think of. Some time in the 1980s we decided in the USA that everything should be cheapest and simplest – everything else be damned. So then we just build cheap, tear down soon, and build cheap again. There is nothing to make a fabric of community that stands through time. Just a bunch of crappy big box retail stores like Lowes and WAL-MART with cinderblock walls and tin roofs that last 20 years then the business relocates. In other places each and every business and building is a part of something and that makes the places more special. Some of the “lifestyle” centers around have at least tried to make themselves attractive even if the stores they house have no soul…
And can we please stop designing communities around the automobile? Please? The community should be about the people – not the tools.
huh ?
face it, the automobile is an important focal point of community and city design
where have you been ? in dreamland ? communities were also built with horses in mind, and with wagons in mind
you head seems to be stuck in academia
Re: Anonymous 1:06
Your disdain for academic urban studies contradicts your sour repetition of poor education statistics in our city. That is, in layman’s terms(non-academic), you can’t have it both ways, both complaining about and wallowing in Memphis’ need to attract more highly-educated citizens while also obstructing and deriding the progress and ideas the educated currently in the city are trying to implement (many of whom, by the way, have relocated to Memphis from other places and don’t share your “can’t do” perspective). Your comments are painfully, consistently derogatory, but you can at least look in the mirror and take the discussion seriously enough to not contribute plainly hypocritical arguments.