Metro Pulse/Feature/Downtown Masterplan

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Unless grassroots efforts materialize, a true downtown masterplan for redevelopment seems unlikely to occur.

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

In the spring of 1997, many downtown Knoxville business owners and residents were up in arms. County Commission was preparing to vote on a location for a new justice center, the city was talking about a new convention center, and both governments were still scouring downtown for a suitable place to put a baseball stadium.

Less alarmed by any particular project than by the seeming randomness of the site selection, an assortment of community activists, architects, and proprietors urged both the city and county to try to fit their proposals into a broader idea of what the city should look like and how it should function. Their concerns were best summarized by Fourth and Gill resident Barbara Simpson, who asked, "Where is the planning in this process? Where is the vision for our city?"

Fast forward.

In the spring of 2000, many downtown Knoxville business owners and residents are up in arms. County Commission is awaiting a recommendation from County Executive Tommy Schumpert on how and where to proceed with the justice center, even as work crews have razed two blocks of State Street. The city has torn up the World's Fair Park along with half a block of Union Avenue in preparation for the convention center and its parking garages. And this week, the board of the Public Building Authority voted on a draft proposal for private development that would reconfigure three square blocks of downtown.

Less alarmed by any particular project than by the seeming randomness...well, you get the idea. We've been here before. Or more to the point, we've never left. And while voices as highly placed as former PBA administrator Mike Edwards have recently acknowledged the need for either a downtown "master plan" or "master planning process," it has not happened.

But there are plenty of people who think it should, and at least some who think that, this time, it actually could.

"Things are in the offing," UT architecture professor Jon Coddington said two weeks ago, speaking to a small group of architects and others interested in downtown redevelopment. "It might be a while before the stars are in alignment again. And if we don't seize it, it might be a generation before we have another opportunity."

The "stars" Coddington was talking about include an unprecedented wave of activity, both small-scale (residential development along Gay Street and Market Square) and large (the PBA development proposal), as well as a new University of Tennessee president with an evident interest in integrating the school with the city and a growing group of private citizens talking about downtown.

There are varying concepts of what constitutes a "master plan," but it generally means an effort to see a city or some section of it as a whole and understand how its parts relate to each other. It can be as general as encouraging street-level retail, or as detailed as setting guidelines for building heights and design. The idea itself generates skepticism in some quarters, because of a history of (as Mayor Victor Ashe puts it) "talking the talk but not walking the walk."

Even among advocates, though, there are serious questions: Who should organize a planning process? How would it work? And given everything else already under way, will the political and commercial leaders making decisions about the city's future be inclined to listen?

Some history: Knoxville does in fact have a master plan, or a "Downtown Knoxville Plan" as the slick cover to the 148-page book calls it. But it's almost 13 years old. Developed under the administration of Mayor Kyle Testerman and passed on to Ashe, it was approved by City Council and County Commission in 1988. It was the first effort at comprehensive downtown planning since a 1974 plan (which helped start the push for the 1982 World's Fair).

Most of the plan's recommendations sound familiar:

* Beautification—"A new image of downtown Knoxville should be created, featuring landscaped entry portals, attractive pedestrian linkages, and new parks and plazas."

* Urban form—"Downtown should reinforce its distinctive development pattern by concentrating various scales and heights of buildings in specific appropriate areas."

* Parking—"The continuation of the city's policy of long-term parking on the perimeter of the business core should be coupled with an emphasis on creating additional short-term parking spaces in the interior for shoppers and visitors."

* Waterfront development—"New connections from downtown to the Tennessee riverfront will provide access to an underutilized resource."

* Cultural/entertainment/tourism development—"Making downtown an active nighttime as well as daytime center by expanding visitor attractions and services will benefit economic development and residential growth."

(An interesting footnote: the plan also urged the Volunteer Ministry Center, which provides services to the homeless, to consider leasing its Gay Street location "for a high quality, revenue producing retail use." Moving the VMC—and its clientele—to some unspecified location is still a goal of some downtowners.)

Wayne Blasius worked for the Metropolitan Planning Commission at the time and served as project director for the plan. Now employed by the construction firm Denark-Smith, Blasius says the 1988 document spurred interest in downtown, focused attention on World's Fair Park, and led directly to the current riverfront development. It also gave a foundation to the 1995 Next Big Steps process, which identified specific projects to pursue.

"I think both [the 1988 plan and Next Big Steps] were legitimate attempts to improve coordination and develop a vision," Blasius says.

But almost nobody talks about the old plan anymore. Does that mean it's time for another one? "Planning for downtown, as with the rest of the community, should be done on an ongoing basis," Blasius says. "But... you need to make sure there is the will to follow through and use it, or it's wasted motion."

Mike Edwards has taken some heat lately as one of the authors of the PBA development proposal. The draft includes recommendations for a shopping center to span Henley Street, a cinema complex, a new hotel and office building, a high-tech housing block, and undefined "shoppertainment" for Market Square (including "consideration of" the now notorious "unobtrusive glass enclosure"). Much of the criticism has been directed at the planning process itself, which Edwards—who recently left PBA but still serves as a consultant—says was never intended to produce a comprehensive downtown plan.

"There's no such thing as a plan," he says. "It needs to be a planning process, it's dynamic, it's changing, it's multi-disciplined."

While he thinks someone—but not the PBA—should initiate that process, he cautions against trying to produce anything too detailed or restrictive. For example, he says it would have been impossible to place the justice center in a master plan ahead of time, because the project changed dramatically as it went along (and may still change more). "Had there been a pre-existing site [identified] for a justice center, it probably wouldn't have met the square footage [requirements]," he says.

Edwards' successor at PBA, Dale Smith, is new in town, but he's noted the apparent dissatisfaction with the state of downtown planning (voiced most ardently on the Internet forum K2K). "If it has a master plan, it doesn't sound as if it has a sufficiently strong consensus behind it, at least for the entire downtown core," he says. "It's usually helpful to everyone, developers included, if there is at least a set of principles guiding the development and/or redevelopment in each significant area."

But Smith agrees PBA is not the agency to put a plan in motion. For that, there are several other potential candidates. Knoxville architect Frank Sparkman is the current president of the East Tennessee chapter of the American Institute of Architects. For the past month, he's tried to get the chapter involved in developing a planning process. It's not an easy sell; some AIA members represent large firms like McCarty Holsapple McCarty and Barber & McMurry, both of which are involved in major downtown projects already (McCarty with the convention center, Barber & McMurry with the justice center). And some non-AIA members see the group as ineffective.

"We've got to get the power brokers in, or it's going to be a real battle," Sparkman concedes.

One way to do that may be with the help of MPC, which supervised the 1988 plan. Executive Director Norman Whitaker says his staff could undertake it—if someone asks them to.

"The [1988] plan I think should be revisited and updated," he says. "A lot has happened since then... MPC's a logical coordinator of a planning effort like that. We wouldn't take off on our own on a downtown planning effort without being asked by our client, the city."

And the city? Mayor Victor Ashe says he "conceptually" supports updating the old plan, but he cautions the city hasn't budgeted any money for it. "This year's budget is going to be extremely tight," he says. "A lot of well-intentioned projects are not going to get funded...I'm not saying we're not going to do it. But it's not going to be free."

In the meantime, Ashe says he wouldn't want to delay development proposed by PBA for a plan that might just "sit on a library shelf." But since Ashe was the one who put the convention center and related development in motion, why wasn't a planning process started at the same time? On that count, the mayor is candid. "I'll just confess that I'm human. I can only bounce so many balls in the air at one time. That may be a fair criticism, but I just didn't get it done."

In Chattanooga, which some downtown advocates like to hold up as a model for Knoxville, the lead planning agent is the Riverfront Downtown Planning and Design Center. It grew out of a University of Tennessee urban design studio similar to the one that UT architecture professor Mark Schimmenti opened on Market Square in Knoxville last year. The Chattanooga center's manager, John Bridger, says the city had to start by assessing its existing resources and finding ways to connect them. "We sort of had to learn about the city," he says. "Sometimes if you try to understand the whole city and come up with a master design plan from the get-go, you miss a lot."

One key, Bridger says, is broad-based public involvement—something critics of the PBA process say has been missing in downtown Knoxville.

"Anything we did always started out with sort of grassroots public input," Bridger says. "When you get people involved in building their own future, you'd be amazed at the positive energy you can generate."

MPC's Norman Whitaker agrees. "Downtown plans of, say, 20 years ago were characterized as 'blue-ribbon committees,'" he says. "In many cities, downtown planning was done by a relatively homogenic group of downtown business leaders. In the planning community in general, that has changed... MPC's approach generally is that open participation generates a broad range of ideas."

The 1988 effort seems to fit the "blue-ribbon" model. Although it involved a handful of public hearings, much of the work was done by a group of committees made up of Knoxville's business aristocracy: Rodney Lawler, Bruce McCarty, Bill Regas, Kristopher Kendrick, Bill Sansom, Darrell Akins. Overseeing the entire project was none other than Chris Whittle.

Even an MPC-led process may not satisfy local planning advocates, though. Architect and developer Buzz Goss, who organized the K2K forum, says bluntly, "I don't have any faith in AIA or MPC." He instead points to the regional model of Nine Counties, One Vision, with its open brainstorming sessions. Goss envisions "charettes"—community design forums—led by planners and architects from outside of Knoxville.

"In my mind, a master plan would not come up with what project fits where—but how any project, no matter what it is, would fit into the downtown and the surrounding areas," Goss says.

Given Ashe's less-than-hearty endorsement, however, it's hard to imagine a process—let alone a plan—that would have credibility with both the urban design activists and the people whose opinions count the most in shaping downtown. In any event, the likelihood of anything being produced in the next several months that could provide a framework in which to judge the PBA development proposal seems remote. As Smith notes, reviewing the nearly identical discussions of three years ago, "[It] does make one wonder how broadly and seriously the community wants such an effort."