The following is a guest post from Matthew Clarke, the Capital Project Manager at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. He’s from Lexington and studied architecture at the University of Kentucky from 2003 – 2007. He then studied architecture and urban policy at Princeton University from 2009 – 2012.
In 2011, I had the privilege of working in Mayor Jim Gray’s office to assist the Rupp Arena Arts and Entertainment District’s (RAAED) Task Force on their work reimagining the Lexington Center. That fall, I developed an independent research project while at Princeton that imagines how touchstone projects like RAAED and the more recent Town Branch Commons can leverage broader institutional change around the “Town Branch.” Scholars today believe that strategic planning and physical planning should not be carried out in isolation of each other, and I took this into account when developing my research and recommendations into the book, The Town Branch Project.
The Town Branch Project is a vision for Lexington based on a unique re-imagination of the city’s linear, spatial structure. The Project first situates Lexington within the emerging discourses of urban planning around the nation, which have begun to focus on regionalism, sustainability, and infrastructure, and then describes the history of planning in Lexington itself, with its long-standing role as a leader of land-use policy. The Town Branch Project makes manifest an incipient interest to capitalize on the Bluegrass Region’s unique and treasured landscape, all-the-while reinvigorating the urban core(s) that fosters civic identity and creates space for public discourse.
The Town Branch Project serves two purposes: on the one hand, it identifies an opportunity area within Lexington, KY that borders the Town Branch. Characterized by former industrial sites, the properties contiguous with this tributary of the Elkhorn Creek is ripe for development. Secondly, the project is a metaphor for the city, its institutions, and its role in the region; a region whose values were bestowed by its landscape and history, values which remain today.
The foundation of The Town Branch Project rests upon an emerging culture of planning and development in the United States, championed by a range of institutional actors: universities, governments, and NGOs, that promote a trinity of planning principles that include, 1) regional governance, 2) sustainable infrastructure, and 3) municipal innovation. These larger themes are spelled out in terms of the very real politics of the Bluegrass Region.
The Project is framed in five discrete “initiatives” that are immanently realizable and that will have a demonstrably positive affect on the area. (1) A Food Policy Council will help create the first official agricultural and food related policies in the region; a (2) Regional Trail Consortium will help make regional trails a reality and will foster regional collaboration; (3) a Distributed Arts Infrastructure that will coordinate cultural policy by using placed-based management and development and it will foster an innovation-economy grounded in new media; (4) a Metropolitan Development Authority will connect physical and strategic planning efforts with a new county-wide development agency. Finally, this report concludes with the potential to develop a linear park (5) along the underutilized Vine Street corridor, directly above the now buried Town Branch. This “central park” will completely restructure downtown, integrate north and south Lexington, re-imagine transit infrastructure, and will provide a new cultural “hub” for the city. (This initiative is well under way thanks to the “Town Branch Commons” competition now underway).
To manage these initiatives, to provide vision for strategic plans, and to further support the ongoing downtown planning projects, I’m also suggesting that the Mayor appoint a special Town Branch Commission in place. Such a group would be comprised of diverse community members who can shepherd visionary ideas into reality.
In the coming days, ProgressLex will release two more blog posts that highlight some of the key initiatives of the project. The Town Branch Project book is now available for purchase here. More information and ongoing posts will be updated at: www.townbranchproject.com.
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I like the idea of the town branch park and the Manchester st revitalization, but it has to be done in a way that includes affordable retail space for small business. The trend to build glamorous and showy spaces and then charge premium rents for over large retail spaces insures that only corporate players get to occupy the business landscape. Giving a shiny happy place to send our money out of city and out of state is not helpful in the long run. There is no place in Lexington where small retail stores can cluster. This fragmented retail landscape fosters heavy car dependence, decreases foot traffic, undermines profitablilty, and keeps small innovative retailers priced out of the market. If the goal is the relocalization of the economy and increased opportunity for the marketing of local food, goods, and services, then we will need to foster a Lexington that more closely resembles pre 1940. Pushed to the extreme, possibly by economic contraction, resource scarcity, and climate change, it’s possible to imagine a Lexington connected by light rail to all the ring cities and once again playing the role of agricultural aggregator for the larger region. Imagine market days resuming their historic role. Small farm families riding the electric streetcar into downtown to sell produce and see the sights. Not so bad really.
Rod is about “spot on” on this topic. The fact that we have “…no place in Lexington where small retail stores can cluster…” was addressed in an earlier post of mine about neighborhood options for non-residential uses. What once worked in the early 20th century has now been legislated out of the realm of possibility. The small and innovative retailers began in the small retail cluster which Rod would like to see again.
Roger K. Lewis, a practicing architect and a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland, wrote “Let’s dump the word “zoning,” as in zoning ordinances that govern how land is developed and how buildings often are designed. Land-use regulation is still needed, but zoning increasingly has become a conceptually inappropriate term, an obsolete characterization of how we plan and shape growth.” In the minds of many, the increasingly complex layers of zoning laws have been the tool which has fragmented our retail landscape and fostered our heavy car dependence. Neighborhood retail is what used to knit and bind our neighborhoods together, something that is missing today.
Do we need the five initiatives listed for the Town Branch Project and do we need a Town Branch Commission to add another layer of bureaucracy to our overloaded development rules of today? While the early portions of the Town Branch Trail are nice to look at, the downtown part appears to be just another iteration of Urban Renewal from the “60s. Remove the old and overprice the replacement is standard practice.
To me, the problem with Manchester Street and the Town Branch ideas are that it’s essentially suburban development for the city. That corridor is the least populated in the downtown area and one of the lesser-populated in the entire city. The Town Branch trail/creek runs to the country, is only owned by a handful of owners (including the city/Rupp Arena), and is imagined as housing large-scale “entertainment venue” type locations that, by definition, must be big-box in nature. And like the Legacy Trail, Town Branch will be a path that moves away from where our current population resides, so most of the city will have to drive in our cars to experience/participate in it. And like suburban developments, the significant infrastructure costs to make it an attractive residential space will be largely paid for through public moneys.
So it’s expensive, is sure to attract large corporate businesses, and is fairly limited in terms of what it does for the city. Meanwhile, creeks of similar size that actually run through and nearby residential and commercial developments (Wolf Run across Southland and Cardinal Valley and West Hickman from Veterans Park to the edge of Landsdowne come most immediately to mind)–areas that stand to spread the benefit of public investments in transport/park space to a significantly greater amount of people and areas–lie mostly forgotten, mainly because they have the unfortunate luck of not being located near downtown and not being where global horse-basketball-bourbon tourists might stay. It may not fit our aesthetic sensibilities, but these suburban strip mall areas are where the upstart small-scale local businesses are located–not downtown. It’s these (perhaps) aesthetically unpleasing but largely local-first places we need to support and figure out how to knit together.
Like everyone else, the Town Branch project and vision look fantastic–but I’d love to see that thinking about places where we all currently reside and not as a visual backdrop for a $150 million arena makeover.
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