The role of design centers

Mark Schimmenti, design director of the Nashville Civic Design Center, says design professionals and grassroots activists began thinking in the 1990s that Nashville needed a design center because “they had noticed that cities that seemed to be doing things had a design center, or a design studio in the planning department.” “A lot of us were familiar with what Stroud Watson was doing in Chattanooga,” says architect Seab Tuck, a founding board member of Nashville’s Civic Design Center. Watson, an architecture professor at the University of Tennessee, had organized a design center that helped Chattanooga overcome its reputation as a dismal industrial city. “Watson taught students and got engaged in the politics of the city,” Tuck says. As urban design gained a following, Chattanooga built a much-talked-about aquarium, started reclaiming its riverfront, and burnished the physical character of what had been one of America’s worst-polluted cities. The first step toward establishment of Nashville’s Center was the founding in 1995 of the Urban Design Forum, a group of 100 to 125 that discussed local development topics and sponsored classes on urban design for professionals and the public. Bill Purcell, elected to his first term as mayor in 1999, endorsed the idea of starting an Urban Design Center, believing it “could provide reaction to proposals made from inside and outside government and also provide leadership for the short and long term.” In some cities, design centers are part of government — attached to the planning department or the mayor’s office. In others, they are associated with universities and are intended to train students, among other purposes. Some “community design centers” rely on volunteers who work on projects for neighborhoods or towns. In Nashville the decision was that the design center should have paid professional leadership. “We needed a group that sat just beyond the lines of the legally established government,” Purcell told New Urban News. “I felt we needed a charter that required the right people to be in the room, but that wasn’t part of government. It could be the conscience of that part of the community that’s interested in issues of urban design. Government should contribute but should not be the primary funder.” There had been groups, like the Urban Design Forum, that sometimes succeeded in stopping projects or modifying them. The problem was that those groups usually lacked the ability to inspire new visions and to generate the collaboration upon which the realization of those visions depended, according to Purcell. The Design Center, Purcell said, is able to present visions that will be taken seriously, and implemented, by people who wield economic and political power. The Center, a 501c3 organization, has a $290,000 annual budget supported by Metro and other sources, including Vanderbilt University, the University of Tennessee, local foundations, and architecture and engineering firms. Three Metro employees — from the public works, planning, and development arms of the city-county government — each work 20 hours a week at the Center, at no charge to the Center. The Center’s board is composed of about one-third nonprofit organization representatives, one-third designers, and one-third “economic types” — bankers, developers, and commercial real estate people, according to Schimmenti. This mix assures that various segments of the community will talk to one another — a crucial factor in stimulating discussion throughout the city. Progress has been encouraging, Schimmenti says. “The city just wants good things to happen.” For more information, see www.civicdesigncenter.org.