Wolfside: Landscape Urbanism and Shelby Farms

A very interesting and unnoted fact about the Shelby Farms Park Master Plan: James Corner, the architect chosen to make it real, is a key theorist of the growing and increasingly controversial Landscape Urbanism movement.

I know next to nothing about Landscape Urbanism (because I haven't read their key work which includes Corner's essay "Terra Fluxus") except that they and those other ascendant urbanists, the New Urbanists, don't like each other's ideas and have set themselves up in Enemy Urbanist camps. The LUers want "to prioritize the natural ecology of a site over the built environment" in explicit opposition to the NUer's emphasis on the city's built form. The other charges that LUrbanists have surrendered to suburban sprawl and NUrbanists have gone nostalgic about city living.

(Meanwhile back here in Memphis, the differences are nothing compared to the condemned-abandoned-megamall-parking lot that separates both from Memphis' default camp, the AntUrbanists. The AntUrbanists destroy both our natural and built environment with equal apathy.)

At this point, Landscape Urbanism has few finished projects. In my strong opinion, the successful metamorphosis of the massive, formless and sprawl-adjacent Shelby Farms Park would emphatically demonstrate that Landscape Urbanism is worthy of greatness.

Shelby Farms should be the Seaside of Landscape Urbanism.

Memphis Builds a Hole

My long-simmering, near burnt thoughts on August's stunningly lopsided 10-2 City Council vote, clearing at least the political path for CVS to demolish the Union Avenue Methodist Church:

• The vote's a template for future defeats that advocates for a better built Memphis can't ignore. Organizational unity, education of both leaders and citizens, and political advocacy for both candidates and systematic change are important to avoid a thousand defeats and an uglier, less livable Memphis.

• A big mistake for the built community would be to try and pin the defeat on Memphis Heritage. In voting for the CVS anti-design, The Council ignored the Office of Planning and Development, the Land Use Control Board, the Memphis Regional Design Center, the Commercial Appeal, the Central Gardens Neighborhood Association, Playhouse on the Square, the Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the district's councilmen, Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn, and Memphis Heritage. It was a blow for preservation, smart growth, urbanism, walkability, planning and Memphis' built environment.

• Urbanists can separate themselves from preservationists in fast growing cities. In Memphis, preservation is a necessary tool of urbanism. We can say, "I don't care about saving that building, I care about good design", but as a practical matter 9 out of 10 people who don't care about re-using a good building also won't care about good urban design.

• I heard someone say that the defeat was due to poor lobbying by the opponents of the CVS design. I don't know enough about political campaigns to know the truth to this, but it does scare me that our Council could be so lightly principled that some special political ingredient -- beyond the public pleas of the staff, boards and associations mentioned above -- could have turned a 10-2 defeat into a 7-5 victory. Anyway, even if extra special lobbying could have made a difference, it strikes me as a very expensive, unsustainable, politically exhausting way to move toward a better built Memphis. A thousand city-wide mobilizations for a thousand buildings and designs that start at the bottom of a 10-2 hole won't work.

• The Council made it clear in their words and horsetrading what they would do the next month -- gut the Midtown Overlay.

• I don't think the Councilpeople who voted for CVS are clueless or idiots or [insert your insult here], but I do believe that the issues of smart growth, walkability, good design, much, much less preservation, have made little inroad into our city's political leadership. At this point, the great majority of our Council don't care. Their apathy is a core smart growth problem in Memphis.

• City Council meetings are like a game show hosted by the Great and Mighty Oz. Citizens stand below the raised, intimidating dais of the Council and are given a ticking 2 minutes to speak. Instead of a screamed "Silence!" a buzzer goes off when the speaker's minutes are up.

• Near the end of the debate, Councilman Bill Boyd let the crowd in on a dirty little secret. Numbers of supporters or opponents in City Council chambers don't sway their vote. Perhaps this where the off-the-clock lobbying comes in and citizen advocacy gets the buzzer.

• If you need political support for regression in Memphis, get yourself a spokeschristian. Very effective.

5 Years at the Fairgrounds

On the grounds that were fair, I like the idea of Pretty Decent Lawn that will create a green axis connecting the old Fairgrounds gates* with the Liberty Bowl.

As a lover of gates, and those in particular,

I can't help myself.

Yet the larger Fairgrounds project is not only unbuilt, but under-demolished, under-visualized and incredibly under-imagined.

By fall 2010, we'll have the Lawn, the Liberty Bowl, parking and trees, the latter 3 of which we've already had for 40 years.

But we still don't know whether we'll keep the Coliseum, the Arena (along the axis of the Lawn), the Creative Center, the Pipkin Building, or what we'll do with all the empty space we will have even if we don't demolish any of those structures.

I don't think I'm just being an itinerant civic butthead to say that after 5 years of public meetings, public input, studies, committees, RFPs, ignored RFPs, demolitions, closings and evictions that we would should have a much stronger sense of what the Fairgrounds will become.

I know that large tracts of empty real estate render Memphis catatonic before their highest-and-bestest radioactive mega-value, but 5 years and counting and waiting should be a sign that we need another way to rebuild our city.

* In this rendering (the only one I've seen), the present gates don't appear. I don't know what to make of that except to say that I can't believe Fairgrounds nudgers and shruggers would have such bad taste as to not use them.

anturban

I propose that we stop calling energy-killing, car-addicted, city-uglification

suburban

and start branding this destruction

anturban.

Use anturban to describe the intentional voids left where place and nature once existed and use suburban to neutrally describe settlements that exist on the fringes of major urban centers.

While modern suburbs may be mostly anturban in layout (because they've been built during the last 60 years, anturbanism's Pyritean Age), they don't have to be, or remain, that way.

And many urban areas far from the suburbs have devolved into the anturban during the same 60 years (see the horrendous east side of Memphis' Medical Center).

It's better if we can insult dysfunction without insulting our fellow citizens.

Open Meeting about Overton Square Demolition Request

From Memphis Heritage:

Before the City Council hears the owners request for this demo permit, Councilman Shea Flinn, sponsor of the Resolution that passed requiring council approval of any demo permit for the Overton Square area, would like interested parties to meet.

This meeting is being held this Wed. Dec. 9th at 4pm at City Hall 125 N. Main in the 5th floor conference room.

We want our supporters and the community to know about this important meeting. This is an open meeting. The public is welcome to attend.

Sooner Investments, the proposed developers, have not submitted a plan for the site. Instead the owners' plan to demolish the buildings at Overton Square before a plan is approved. It is a possibility that the proposed development might not move forward and there would be an even larger parking lot.

Buildings to Cherish: the Memphis Police Station at Second and Adams

I've driven past the old Memphis Police Station a thousand times, but walks past it this fall have really opened my eyes to its beauty and power. It's a special Memphis building, a beautiful Beaux Arts corner companion to the 100 year old Shelby County Courthouse.

Unlike the Courthouse, it's empty. And since Memphis has preferred bland empty void over beautiful empty space for 50 years, we have to be vigilant.

A good use would be as hotel since the building abuts the Civic Plaza. Guests could move to and from the convention center through the Plaza, giving that public space much needed life.

A visualization of the hotel/plaza connection.

I also think, no matter the use, its front steps and wall-defined lawn could be a special mini-public space of their own.

Wall Cities

I saw a bunch of framed prints depicting scenes of nostalgic urbanism for sale at a strip mall thrift store last week.

A European village,

a European city,

and a New England village.


I only saw one print depicting suburbanism. It was an architectural visualization* for a suburban motel. Probably a Hampton Inn.


I imagine that visualization hung on the office wall of the motel's architect, developer or owner until they couldn't look at it anymore, while the former images hung on a living room wall of a home, perhaps not far from the strip mall.

You probably won't see the motel image on a living room wall in a house close to the motel. And you probably wouldn't see brick and mortar urban village neighborhoods on the streets close to the homes where their images hung.

We all might crave beauty in our built and natural environment, but flattened wall hangings appear to be one way (along with nostalgia, knicknacks, theme parks, vacations and migration) we can ignore its absence on our streets.

*idealized. The mature if boring trees in front probably wouldn't have made it through construction. The robust stand of trees in back would already have been whacked for a parking lot or speculative clearcut for more highway commercial use. And despite a hefty parking lot, there are no cars in front of the motel.

Innovation Should Become Deloach

Why does the incredibly wide Deloach Street, just across Central from the University of Memphis, prohibit parking on its east side? The neighborhood has a huge need for parking, historically satisfied with destructive surface parking lots, yet the east side of the street is roped off.

Why?

Possibly...

• public safety. Yet the street is incredibly wide and would almost certainly allow 2 cars to pass each other simultaneously. Public safety vehicles would have plenty of room to get in and out -- if they even used that path.
  


• to avoid competition with the parking fees of nearby institutions -- the University and the University Holiday Inn.
  


• use as an arterial road. It does have traffic lights on its Central end, where Innovation Drive empties out of the University. But there are no lights where it terminates at Poplar so it seems of limited use for that.
  


• the residents don't want the parking. But the east side is the increasingly institutional and decreasingly residential, side with the Holiday Inn taking up a good half of the block. The west side is still completely residential and allows parking.
  

Here's a chance to freely add ~50 parking spaces to the area without building an expensive parking garage, or ripping up more of the University District's neighborhood. An urbanism approved solution that would only require a few revolutions of a screwdriver.

Also, people walking down the east side of the street would be an opportunity for the Holiday Inn -- the lone commercial presence in the neighborhood -- if the hotel had fronted their part of the street with a hotel rather than a storm water mud grass pit.

News from a Sustainable Shelby

Chatting last Thursday night in the Bridges cavern with several people who were part of Sustainable Shelby's creation, I heard 2 pieces of good news:

• MLG&W is collaboratively and successfully resolving its issues with the Unified Development Code. As our utility was the only public voice of opposition to the UDC at the Land Use Control Board, this hopefully means passage in the near future of this progressive development toolkit.


• Rebuilding of the Greater Memphis Greenline's Wolf River bridge will start this fall and the Greenline should open, from Tillman to Farm Road, by spring 2010.

The Greenline and the UDC are just 2 of the many organizations and efforts that Sustainable Shelby has federated into a single plan. Movement sustainability comes from these orgs' independent devotion to an environmentally sustainable, urban future for Memphis and Shelby County. If the umbrella organization were to disappear tomorrow, the forward push into that future would not.

From the Overton Square Charrette

Just in time for the second public meeting (tonight, Tuesday, August 25th, 6 p.m. at Playhouse on the Square), here are some random notes and thoughts from/about last month's Overton Square charrette.

• The leaders of the charrette have created a great website, http://www.squaretalk.org, for the redevelopment effort. You can share your comments and ideas there.
  
  
  
  


• The leader of the charrette, Chooch Pickard of the Memphis Regional Design Center, acknowledged that a lot of folk weren't happy that it was held on a weekday. He said this session was just a beginning and there would be more sessions at more publicly accessible hours (see top).
  


• It was still packed.


• The participants weren't all preservationists (although it did have substantial preservationist participation). All were advocates for a quality built environment in the area known as Overton Square.
  


• Architects, planners, developers, businesspeople, students, preservationists, environmentalists and dumbass bloggers were there.
  


• The morning session began with a walking tour of Overton Square, followed by a general brainstorming session. I missed both of these.
  


• The afternoon session had the participants split into 3 groups:
  
  
  1. those who wanted to save all the Overton Square buildings,
  2. those who wanted to save some buildings and most of the facades,
  3. those who considered the entire site as a tabula rasa.
  
  The 3 groups (and sub-groups) brainstormed ideas for the area.
  


• The Regional Design Center has now posted its summary of the charrette plus the specific plans from each of the 3 groups.
  


• The original Overton Square founders were visionary businessmen with a great eye for Midtown commercial architecture but the monolithic ownership and regional parking lots they bequeathed are the root of the present problem.
  
  
  
  


• A great comment I heard from a charrette participant: the size of the Overton Square footprint overwhelms us with big dreams. Just start with something small -- and good. Begin.
  


• Monolithic ownership and dreams of the big score make the small, iterative difficult. In Overton Square, at the Fairgrounds, at the Pyramid.
  


• I voiced what many?most?all? probably thought was a dumb idea: Overton Square should choose Cooper-Young as a model.
  
  My explanation for my dumb idea: Overton Square should at least learn from its never so flashy, but ever so sustainable Midtown twin.
  
  Lessons like iterative, piecemeal development; reuse rather than rebuild; mixed-use; strong participation and input from its neighborhoods; distributed leadership; diverse ownership.
  


• Monolithic ownership, dreams of the big score and the urban scars left from a viral parking lot make following the Cooper-Young model difficult. But it's still a healthy, home-growing model to consider as we search for solutions to vitality.
  


• Low density, pedestrian discontinuity (e.g., Union Ave), and single use zoning and mentalities are obstacles for a vital street and public life in Memphis. Overton Square needs residential and residents to seed the street life.
  


• The biggest missed opportunity in Overton Square's history was the design of the now-defunct French Quarter Inn.
  
  
  
  
  
  Taking the spot of Solomon Alfred's nightclub, which was firmly and directly planted on the corner of Madison and Cooper, the owners pushed the hotel back from the corner (and the street), separated it with a parking lot, then walled it up. While the wall made the parking lot more palatable to the neighborhood, the lack of entrances and the parking lot barrier made the French Quarter Inn a non-presence in Overton Square.
  
  Had the owners placed it directly on and opening to the corner, the hovering hotel and Overton Square would have fed each other's energy and business, just as the district began competing with Beale Street and fake neighborhood bars in the 1980s. Disconnected, they both began a long decline.
  


• Playhouse on the Square, now building a cool new theater complex above the corner of Union and Cooper,
  
  
  
  
  
  
  has the most to lose from antisocial, butt-ugly neighboring development. But it also presents Overton Square development a new opportunity: the people pouring in from all over the city, region and country for plays, camps and events.
  
  This major cultural investment should not only be enough to stop a bad development, it should be more than enough to entice a great development to build next to, on to.
  
  
  

Public Input about Dis/Connections

From Shelby Farms Park Conservancy and the Greatest Memphis Greenline:

Shelby Farms Park Conservancy, Shelby County Government and Greater Memphis Greenline have announced two public input meetings for discussion of the design and management of the new urban greenway connecting Midtown Memphis to Shelby Farms Park.

• July 6 from 7pm-9pm at the Benjamin Hooks Central Library, 3030 Poplar Avenue.


• July 7 from 6pm-8pm at Agricenter International, 7777 Walnut Grove Road.

The meetings will be an opportunity for citizens to talk about the opportunities and challenges that come with greenways and will feature national trails expert Robert Searns. Representatives from Ritchie Smith Associates, the trail designer, will also be present.

The greenway—a former rail corridor being converted into a multi-use path—will stretch from Tillman Street at Walnut Grove Road to Shelby Farms Park, connecting neighborhoods and providing a safe opportunity for people to recreate, commute and exercise.

Shelby Farms Park Conservancy will manage and operate the greenway, with support from Greater Memphis Greenline—a nonprofit organization whose mission is to collaborate in a public-private partnership with local government in the development of unused railway right-of ways and easements in Memphis and Shelby County, and to create a world-class recreational park/hiking-biking trail system.

And from the Memphis Regional Design Center:

Are you concerned about the designs of our highway interchanges?

Then plan to attend the

TDOT Public Hearing to review proposals for the I-55/Crump Blvd. interchange Tuesday, July 7th, 6 to 8 pm Central Station Corner of S. Main & G.E. Patterson

The redesign of the I-55/Crump interchange will have a major impact on the future of the Historic Marine Hospital, the National Ornamental Metal Museum and surrounding developments. Please plan to attend this important meeting that will clearly impact this important Downtown Memphis neighborhood.

There's a FAQ from TDOT on their proposed changes.

Beauty == Utility

The only voice of opposition at the Land Use Control Board's affirmative vote on the Unified Development Code a few weeks ago came from Memphis Light Gas & Water.The utility had a problem with several sections of the code, especially

A. New electric utility services shall be placed underground where functionally feasible...

(section 5.3.4)

I seem to remember the MLG&W rep stating that the aesthetics of the code would be a drag on functionality for utilities. A utility's utilitarian argument.

Yet the mass disruptions whipped up by last weekend's storms (mostly by trees and branches falling on above-grade power lines) and the historic storm data exposed by this NOAA map (hat tip Naomi)

show the impracticality of this opposition. Storms will cross the Mississippi, branches will fall from the sky, above-ground electric lines will get knocked out. But happily, safely, beautifully, increasingly buried electric lines will keep on humming.

Good aesthetics in tree-rich, storm-happy Memphis is good utility.

Begin Again with Trees

If you were alive in the Paris of Louis XIV, the impression of these new boulevards and avenues would be of a tremendous formalizing of nature, rather than of urbanization. The chief device, the parallel rows of trees was a fairly easy way to achieve stunning monumental effects and perspectives with little actual material and labor. These abstract diagrammatic schemes signified little beside the kings' ability to make a rural landscape orderly --something he clearly relished. However, when they finally were developed with buildings decades later, the boulevards and avenues of Louis XIV would become templates for the best of the Second Empire's new street typologies, and they remain models for excellent street sections into our time.

The City in Mind,

James Howard Kunstler
(emphasis mine)

Making ordered rows of great Memphis native trees could be the first, relatively easy step toward retrobeautifying our problematic ugly avenues and boulevards. Even -- especially -- in commercial districts.

It Matters

As Memphis and Shelby County prepare to take up the Unified Development Code, we should take to heart and law fearlessvk's wisdom, based on her first trip to Memphis:

...the physical landscape of space matters. It affects first impressions - and sometimes it's exceedingly difficult to put aside those first impressions. When you drive aimlessly around midtown for the first time, you can't tell how cool and creative the people are or how interesting some of the places are. You come to discover that later, but none of it is apparent from the window of your car. Coming from a dense city with a lot of pedestrian activity, midtown feels like a suburb. Its physical landscape doesn't do justice to its countless virtues - it sells itself short. They say you can't polish a turd, but perhaps you can do the opposite: midtown is like a golden nugget coated in shit.

The space created by Memphis' built environment matters.

That's why you need to come down to show your support for the UDC

By the way, I've discovered a summary of the code that might fill the void between the code itself and a brochure.

A Vote on Unified Development Code This Thursday

In what could be the most important civic breakthrough for Memphis' built environment in 100 years, the Land Use Control Board will vote on the revised and long-awaited Unified Development Code this Thursday, May 28th, at 5 p.m., in the Memphis City Council chambers at 125 N Main – City Hall.

If you, as a citizen, neighborhood, developer and/or leader, want better tools to rebuild a greater Memphis, or just want a better built Memphis, please show up to show your support.

If you're not up to inspecting the toolkit, 424 pages of development code, the Office of Planning and Development has created a short document which lists the organizing principles of the UDC. Given the importance of citizens and neighborhood groups to its real success, how-to's, case studies, mailing lists, websites, etc. would also be very useful auxiliary tools moving forward.

Wall of Trees

On my way to the Barbecue Fest last Friday I noticed this growing wall of trees on Main between Beale and Peabody Place. Eventually they should be as tall as, if not taller than, the buildings behind them.

The trees are inexpensively creating architectural space where demolition and a surface parking lot removed it 40 years ago. The feeling of enclosure helps bridge the walking gap between the Orpheum and the buildings and businesses north of Peabody Place.

Unfortunately, this is the only side of the block square parking lot that has trees, as you can see looking down the Beale side towards the River.

Maybe planting trees in an urban pattern is not as good as building, but it is something we can do now all over the city to begin filling chronic gaps.

It's Both, Alcaeus

Carved into marble and just a few feet from being a literal cornerstone of Memphis City Hall.

Forgotten No. 5

Fred Smith recently laid out an excellent list of core public responsibilities that Memphis should focus on:

1. Public safety
   
   
2. Education
   
   
3. Efficiency
   
   
4. Economic Development

I got one more:

5. Physical Form -- the built, cultivated and natural form of Memphis.

Beyond the effect it has on Mr. Smith's 4 areas (for instance, sprawl's effect on safety and efficiency, blight and banality's effect on safety and development), I simply believe our streets should radiate Memphis' humble greatness.

More on Demolition Without Design

The most frustrating thing for urbanists is that there is so little rhyme or reason to how the city disposes of these buildings. With no plan for replacement, the creeping creation of vacant lots in the name of “much needed” parking or blight removal is insidious.

Detroitist Francis Grunow has written a very interesting plea for a comprehensive redevelopment strategy -- what I think you would call urban planning -- in the midst of Detroit's demolition free-for-all. Without at all denying the need for urban triage in a shrinking city like Detroit, he argues for "the repositioning of the city’s core assets, its undervalued anchors, as the urban basis for revival and long-term regeneration".

One of the bases, the anchors, is the incredibly beautiful and incredibly threatened Michigan Central Station,


designed by the same architects who designed Grand Central Terminal. Detroit plans to "use economic stimulus money to demolish Michigan Central and stick the gratuitously negligent billionaire owner, Matty Moroun, with the bill"

Random questions that aren't completely rhetorical:

1. why is demolition of neglected private property considered an acceptable governmental responsibility but moth-balled maintenance is never, even when the plan is to force a billionaire to pay up?
   
   
2. what's wrong with treating urban anchors as visual and monumental rather than economic anchors, especially if we're talking about low demand real-estate? Monumental anchors give a city body and presence.
   
   Even as monuments, you can't let the street front die, but can you mothball the tops without having to mothball the bottom?
   
   
3. Is there such a thing as phased renovations of major buildings like you see with the Phase I, Phase II of suburban developments? Could you "subdivide" major buildings?
   
   
4. Why can't a municipality pay for modern infrastructural improvements like electricity and plumbing in a dense urban renovation like they do for new roads, sewers, electricity and water in suburban developments. The former might make greater economic sense.
   
   
5. Will a full-blown urbanist movement emerge, in the mode and possibly from the ranks of the preservationist and environmental movements, with the same willingness to fight for its principles? Or has it already emerged?
   

Urban Redo

Let's take a mulligan on the last 50 years of Memphis city planning.

That's what we had to do with this massive Jackson Avenue urban renewal tract from 1961, immediately north of St. Jude (from the Commercial Appeal's Memphis Memories).

Memphis renewed the area cleared as suburbish strip malls. 40 years later, it had to renew the renewal.

Absence of decay is not presence of vitality. Demolition is not design.