Welcome to the Knoxville of 2100 A.D. Or at least, these are the visions Knoxvillians have of their city 100 years from now. We surveyed all sorts of different people who make our community what it is—from politicians to professors to businesspeople—and asked them how they saw life in Knoxville in the next century.
Carlene Malone
Knoxville City Councilwoman
Unlike most cities in the world, Knoxville's major celebration will not be held to usher in the new century. The major celebration will be held in 2102 to mark the centennial celebration of the city's cultural and social revolution. The citizen-led, peaceful revolution placed education as the community's top priority and recognized information, communication, and research as the economic future. The mayor recently said, "We owe the revolutionaries so much. Imagine what it must have taken 98 years ago, for people whose culture produced and accepted sprawl development, air and water pollution, traffic congestion, rape of the land, and mediocrity in education, to rise up and demand a better place." The mayor described how thousands of acres of strip development, overbuilt roads, and parking lots were returned to housing and parks; how billboards, which once blocked views of ridges and trees, were removed; how wetlands devastated by schlock development were restored; how neighborhoods were rebuilt around compact service cores.
In 2100, Knoxville is the nation's most livable city. It is the focus of national and international studies of urban and community design. Various journals describe it as, "a beautiful city with a thriving economy," "a colorful tapestry woven from neighborhoods connected by greenways," "a city with few environmental problems, efficient transportation, and excellent schools."
The 2102 celebration will include placing a sculpture in the city's oldest square and the premier of an opera at the historic performing arts center. Both the sculpture and the opera are based on the struggles of revolutionaries, and both the sculptor and the composer live in Knoxville.
The mayor said, "If you want to know how far we have progressed, imagine this: one-hundred years ago, city leaders actually took pride in the fact that Knoxville could lead the nation in the number of parking spaces per capita. What were they thinking?"
John Nolt
UT Professor of Philosophy, co-author of What Have We Done?
The 21st century will bring worldwide environmental tragedies. As the climate heats up, agricultural acreage shrinks, and population continues to grow, there will be global famine, the agony of which will fall mainly on the poor. Wars will arise from competition for food, land, or diminishing supplies of oil. Continued habitat destruction and the mixing of species from around the world will significantly reduce and homogenize what remains of the natural world. "Nature" will be one of the rarest commodities on earth. By the beginning of the next century, the fallibility of human enterprise and ingenuity will be excruciatingly apparent, and we may finally grasp the need for long-term moral vision—and maybe even acquire a touch of cautious humility.
Avon Rollins
Civil rights activist, director of Beck Cultural Exchange Center
If the last 100 years are any indication, race will still be a major issue in the 21st century. African Americans made tremendous social progress in the last half of the 20th century, but in terms of economic progress, it hasn't been as dramatic as the social progress. When a white Knoxvillian goes to Kroger, he's got a dollar in his pocket. When an African American goes to Kroger, he's got 56 cents. I'm not sure that's getting better, and if the 20th century is any indication, it's just going to compound the problem.
I think Knoxville College will still be here—but, of course, that's dependent on East Tennesseans.
Julianne Kinkela
Clothing designer known for LeSportsac
The next 100 years will change how we wear clothes, or how our clothes wear us. Ready-to-wear clothing will be remembered as a brief phenomenon in the history of apparel, something that happened in the 20th century. In the future, machines will scan your body to create a 3-D grid of your shape. Clothes will be custom-fit to your exact measurements. You will "try on" outfits in a virtual mirror that combines your image, 3-D data, and the clothes that will be created for you. Some clothing will be cast to your specifications, rather than sewn. Think of a felt jacket that is created like a fiberglass boat. The fibers would be blown into shape around your 3-D image, creating a perfect seamless jacket.
Mark Schimmenti
UT professor of architecture
There will be so many people on Gay Street on Saturdays and Sundays it's absolutely unsafe for vehicles. It will be like Gensa in Tokyo.
We'll be putting the last remaining surface-parking lot downtown on the National Register of Historic Places, a ceremony I wish I could attend. Of course, there will have to be a lengthy explanation of what it is, because its purpose is no longer obvious. Kids will use it for ball games.
We're all going to vote on the issue of city-county consolidation that year; that will still be an issue.
The conversion of the Central Avenue jail into luxury condominiums will be complete.
Bill Dunn
State Representative, (R) Knoxville
How will the tax reform debate be remembered 100 years from now?
I don't really think people 100 years from now will look back and dwell on what does or does not happen. You've got to remember that 90 percent of Tennessee doesn't have a thing to do with state government. I drive down the road and I see private industry, I don't see state government buildings. Tennessee is going to keep on being Tennessee... Now, technology changes, but human nature doesn't. There will always be people who do things out of greed. There will always be people who do things out of the kindness of their hearts. If you read about legislatures of the past, you'll see it—the exact same kinds of people. There are people who just want to get re-elected and there are people who go to Nashville and Washington because they want to make a difference and help their constituents. I'm sure that was happening 200 years ago when the country first started and it will happen 200 years from now if your type of government stays the same... It's just that as more and more people depend on government, it creates a critical mass where government's going to want to take everything and redistribute it. And that's kind of what we have to fear. Taped to my desk in Nashville I have a quote from someone named Fred Settelmeyer. It says, "It is painfully written in the pages of history and it is obvious to all who will read that long before any government can give its people all that they want, it will have taken from them all that they have." Like I said, everything repeats itself.
Curt Piehler
Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society, UT
Will the next century be a safer one?
Unfortunately, violence will still be prevalent. I think when you look back on this era, you see that the end of the Cold War has woken up some old, ethnic rivalries... More civilians are being killed and I think that pattern will continue. With civil wars, it gets messy for civilians...When people look back, they'll see the 20th century as a very violent time. But some societies have actually become less violent. British society, for example. And you see more countries doing away with the death penalty... I think advances in technology will make war more deadly. You sort of hope that the weapons will become so deadly that, like nuclear weapons, there's a reluctance to use them.
Jeff Welch
Director, Metropolitan Planning Organization (transportation arm of the MPC)
Smarter vehicles and a smarter transportation system will mean a virtually incident-free transportation system. Accidents and breakdowns will be virtually nonexistent. The opportunity will be there to program your vehicle to take you to the beach along our major transportation corridors with minimal driver involvement and do it safely and efficiently. These automated highways will serve as a mass transit service by virtually connecting cars together with the flexibility of departing from the system at an individual choice. An intelligent transportation system will also address the concerns of an aging population continuing to drive.
There will be a core rail system connecting East Tennessee to the nation and intermodal transportation centers such as McGhee Tyson Airport and transit centers served by a regional transportation system of buses. A comprehensive regional greenway/pedestrian network will connect our neighborhoods and communities together. This regional system will be the show case of the east coast by providing access to the scenic byways in the Smoky Mountain National Park.
Finally, by the year 2100 we should see the completion of Pellissippi Parkway and I-40/75 interchange and Middlebrook Pike from Liberty to Proctor Street.
Sandy Anderson
Hair piece promoter at Apollo Hair Systems of Knoxville
In the next century, will there be a cure for baldness?
Maybe in about five or 10 years. In Britain they're working on harvesting your hair genes. I saw this on TV. What they do is they take genetic material from a man's scalp and inject it into a woman's arm and his hair grew on her arm. And you have Propecia and Rogaine's been around forever. But until there's a cure, here's what we do. We do hair systems—hair pieces. But not the hair pieces people laugh and joke about. The owner here wears hair. I'd say one in eight people you see walking down the street wear hair. Yeah, I'd say that's a fair estimate.
David Patterson
Director, UT Graduate School of Planning
* Cas Walker's philosophy and myopic vision, which lived in the hearts and attitudes of too many voters for too many years after his name was forgotten, will finally disappear into folklore. As a result, the region will support education and will have governments led by leaders who have an eye on the future, beyond the next election or two.
* Traffic problems will still abound but will have ceased to grow as residence and work are either driven close together or even into the home. This will be because, sometime about 2030, Knoxville recognized what Atlanta recognized in 1999, that the automobile and its associated sprawl was destroying the locational advantages that had led to growth in the first place. Hence a local wheel tax and the gasoline tax have combined to make the personal car a luxury once again. The change was gradual but was precipitated by the TDOT proposal to 10-lane I-40, six-lane Emory Road and to eight-lane Middlebrook Pike and Hardin Valley. The situation was also caused by Knox County and the adjacent counties raising taxes 50 percent in just three years to widen and improve the country lanes presently serving the residential subdivisions. The fact that asphalt had tripled in price was also a factor.
* Neyland Stadium will be an internationally known venue for women's and men's soccer. Football was relegated to club sport status about 2075. Historians think this happened because rising educational levels throughout the South severely reduced the number of African-American young men who saw football as the only way out of poverty and to fame and fortune. Football fell to a par with rugby and that nearly insane sport, invented by the Iroquois, where people run around hitting each other over the head with little baskets.
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