good afternoon so these two sets of
words are at the foundation of the work
we do every day at the Nashville Civic
Design Center our mission is to elevate
the quality of the built environment and
to promote public participation to help
create a more beautiful and functional
city for all so civic engagement that is
the process of asking people what they’d
like to see happen in their
neighborhoods and incorporating that
into the vision of how we build our
cities and our neighborhoods and built
environment I define that as imagine
waking up every morning in your home
getting ready and going out into the
world and everything that you encounter
and do in the course of your day also
interacting with other people that are
on their own somewhat unique trajectory
during the day and then come back at
home at night so all of that is the
built environment it’s everything that
we touch and it’s also the absence of
spaces the the parks and the and the
other things so that can mix up the
built environment from our aspect so I
wanted to start my talk with this word
epiphany a sudden insight into the
essential meaning of something usually
initiated by a simple occurrence or
commonplace event epiphany has had a
major impact in my work and just the way
the I live life I think we’ve all
probably experienced this perhaps
multiple times in our lives and it’s
going to be a little bit of a rink a
reoccurring theme throughout my talk so
this man his name is dr. Richard Jackson
and he’s a medical doctor and we
actually brought him to the Civic Design
Center we partnered to bring him in to
speak and ironically I didn’t really
know anything about him when he came to
Nashville and he gave a wonderful talk
and he started out with an epiphany of
his own and I’ll give a short retelling
of that story
dr. Jackson worked for the Center for
Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta and he was focused on childhood
obesity and preventing this epidemic and
he tells the story in 1999 in the summer
of 1990 on 19
he was driving to work one day a hot
summer 92 degrees and he’s on a big
highway that leads to the CDC and as
he’s driving he sees an elderly lady
walking along this broken sidewalk with
no shade very little protection from the
cars that are zooming by her and he
thinks to himself while she reminds me
of my mother who’s in her 90s and he
instantly thinks I should stop and help
her but of course with traffic and just
everything else he didn’t and he kept
driving and he got to the CDC and he was
in a meeting but he kept thinking about
this woman and he thought epiphany if
she would have died at that moment when
she was walking down that hot road that
hot Highway her cause of death would
have been from a medical standpoint heat
stroke or a heart attack or if she’d
been hit by a car it would have been D
hick Euler trauma but what actually
killed her was the built environment so
that was his epiphany he actually
completely changed directions in his
work he started focusing on promoting
and investigating how the built
environment plays a role in impacting
our health and so dr. Jackson has become
the leading thought leader in the
country on this topic from the medical
side but also he teaches public health
classes and he works with architects and
designers every day to address this so I
imagine this is a an image that we have
taken fairly recently this is in
Nashville but this is anywhere and I
kind of envisioned these women being the
the people that dr. Jackson saw but all
of this is based on the foundation of
this hugely alarming spike in obesity
rates that we’ve experienced in the
country just over a very short period of
time in 20 years going from the slide in
1992 up to in the southern part of the
United States over 30% obesity rates in
our population in just a very short
period of time so after hearing his talk
I mean I was sitting in the audience
like you are and it was just the
quintessential lightbulb moment whoa
everything that I do and that we do at
the Civic Design Center has a
relationship to health
we’d never thought about it explicitly
like that before
and so almost instantly I left and I
started working on a grant proposal to
our public health department to study
this and to look into from the from the
built environment side how we can design
cities to make them healthier and
specifically focused in this instance on
Nashville
I love this quote the shape that we give
our city in turn shapes us look at that
image you can see how we’ve shaped a
healthier city and how we’ve done this
in cities all across the country how
public health officials worked with
planners and designers and architects to
transform this dirty city of the late
1800s and early 1900s very unhealthy
places due to infectious diseases that
were caused by dirty conditions unclean
water unclean air and we’ve transformed
those into much more beautiful cities is
the same city of Nashville from early in
the from a hundred years ago to now but
we’re facing much different issues now
and so we did this study we did this
book released a book called shaping the
healthy community the Nashville plan and
we looked at what are the built
environments factors that play a role in
impacting our health what actually are
they so we identified the access that we
have to transportation our walkability
and pedestrian safety issues that we
face what are our access to housing
resources what our access to food and
what are our access to open spaces and
parks and then the sixth one was what
are the community types that we live in
and I think this is pretty fascinating
that people all over the country live in
essentially five different community
types and those are rural areas low
density often farmland suburban areas
these are post World War two development
patterns largely based on the automobile
then we have our urban neighborhoods
that are much denser have a grid of
streets and sidewalks and alleys we have
centers which is the density level
between an urban neighborhood and our
densest area that we live in the
downtown core where all of the you know
the the main offices the civic
institutions will
located in those areas so those five
different areas there’s some outliers
but those make up the main areas that we
all live in anywhere across the country
you can kind of classify those so as a
city we like to project an image of
ourselves and this could be any city but
this is the what we want people to think
we look like from the outside people who
are coming to visit us but the reality
of the situation is these are this is
our built environment that we’ve
designed for ourselves not particularly
the healthiest of places to to inhabit
to live who wants to walk who wants to
ride a bicycle in these areas and this
is not specific to this city this is how
we’ve done things all across the country
not particularly promoting getting to
know your neighbor if you live in a
house like this there’s no front door on
this home and this is one of my
favorites who wants to buy it right a
bike in that condition right
veer onto the freeway get chugging and
then of crusing lee traffic congestion
but contrast that with environments that
we can build that promote health this
just makes you feel better you want to
walk you have a place to sit you can get
some relief from the Sun you can sit in
the shade you can see what’s happening
in the buildings you can interact with
people you can live above or work above
this building and you’re insulated from
the cars of the street passing by and if
given the chance and people are given
the infrastructure they will use it they
will walk so this is one of my proudest
and happiest days this is the day that
our book was published and standing here
with co-author christine cradling and
the mayor of our city megan berry who
our thoughts were with and our love for
her right now
not only was this an amazing day for me
personally because we finished such a
long book but it was a testament to the
leader of our city coming and being
there and committing to wanting to
implement this to make our city a better
place I’ll just say and following up on
the book this has now been published for
about a year
we’ve been out implementing the work of
this and one of the coolest things we’ve
got a grant pretty quickly from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the
Pew Charitable Trusts and so we’re
continuing the work that went into this
and I’ll talk about a couple projects
that I’m really proud of they’re helping
make this work so just to give you some
ideas here are some images from this
publication we find at the design center
showing people in existing condition and
showing them what it can be through
vision and their participation in
involvement of that is a very powerful
tool because once they see it they want
to make it happen but if they couldn’t
see it it’s hard for them to realize
what it could be or what it can be
here’s a real-life real-world example of
that taking place this is an image at
the top was a street about six years ago
we showed what it could be and then lo
behold it was built one of my very first
experiences working at the design center
in the early 2000s was being approached
by another nonprofit Nashville the Oasis
Center to ask us they were they had a
group of youth from high schools all
across the county and they were doing
different programs with them they said
could we bring them to the Design Center
and do something there that shows them
what you do and get some engaged in the
process so we said okay yeah we can come
up with something and so we had about
forty kids come in and they divided into
groups and they all had to design their
own community design their own
neighborhood what our how can they
design an ideal neighborhood that
represents things that they want to do
and the feedback that we got from that
program was it was of all the things
they did in that course of that program
over the year that that was the most
important powerful thing that they
experienced so started me thinking
there’s a hypothesis here of youth
engagement if we ask you to what they
want to see happen in their communities
it’s an empowering experience for them
and it can help it can change their
lives so we applied for a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts and in
the summer of 2011 we were able to offer
this summer camp design your
neighborhood for a group of 12 high
school students a really intensive four
week summer camp called
in your neighborhood and as a process of
that we actually had a film crew fall of
us around the whole time and we created
a 52 minute documentary film of that
whole process and you can see the high
school students transform over the
course of his four weeks in those 52
minutes I want to draw your attention to
the young lady on the left her name is
shanece Brown she was going into just
finished her tenth grade year and was
the summer before her 11th grade year
and she’s amazing she had an epiphany of
her own and that process she talked
about how that really did change her
life she never really knew anything
about design was not exposed to it
didn’t know what it meant
and through this program she decided
what she want to do and she’s now a
fourth-year architecture student at the
University of Tennessee architecture I’m
so proud of her I and what she’s done
and what she continues to do and she
comes back and she works in Nashville
she works with kids now because of this
we were able to get a ongoing grant so
that was the summer of 2011 we skipped a
few years and now we have a grant to
actually continue this program we
started in 2016 we did it again this
summer we just finished a couple weeks
ago but we also added an educational
curriculum to this so we just finished
the pilot phase we’ve actually had about
400 high school students in Davidson
County go through this pilot program and
now we’re launching it much broader into
the school system this coming academic
year and this too is an incredible thing
for I’m so excited about this this is
some of the students from last summer
and a little bit more about that another
thing that we do at the Design Center we
have a group called turbo which stands
for tactical urbanism organizers and
that’s the active arm of the Design
Center it’s a group of motivated
citizens that want to be engaged and
want to be involved in making a
difference happen in their communities
and they’re out there working they’re
doing projects over the weekend they’re
making change happen in neighborhoods
across Nashville here’s an example of a
project
that was John a few weeks ago we did a
temporary installation of a traffic
circle just to show people what it could
be to how to slow down traffic and make
it safer for the communities and that’s
now informing through working with the
city how a permit process can could
transpire to make that process go much
smoother so when I end my talk on this
is from this summer the design your
neighborhood program and this young man
macarius he’s equally inspiring and
brilliant all these kids were all the
participants but particularly his story
I found impressive because he I think he
also experienced epiphany his was
through he knew what he wanted to do he
he’s very methodical and he wants to be
a structural engineer but his epiphany
was that the citizens and the people and
the design process needs to be brought
into that and he can reflect that in the
work that he knows he wants to do in the
future so I say that these students
inspire me continually they give me
optimism for the future which I think we
all need right now and I’ll just end on
you perhaps you’ve experienced epiphany
today from one of these incredible
speakers that were with but there is a
way for you to get engaged and make a
difference in your communities and I
would just challenge you all to take
advantage of that thank you
you
words are at the foundation of the work
we do every day at the Nashville Civic
Design Center our mission is to elevate
the quality of the built environment and
to promote public participation to help
create a more beautiful and functional
city for all so civic engagement that is
the process of asking people what they’d
like to see happen in their
neighborhoods and incorporating that
into the vision of how we build our
cities and our neighborhoods and built
environment I define that as imagine
waking up every morning in your home
getting ready and going out into the
world and everything that you encounter
and do in the course of your day also
interacting with other people that are
on their own somewhat unique trajectory
during the day and then come back at
home at night so all of that is the
built environment it’s everything that
we touch and it’s also the absence of
spaces the the parks and the and the
other things so that can mix up the
built environment from our aspect so I
wanted to start my talk with this word
epiphany a sudden insight into the
essential meaning of something usually
initiated by a simple occurrence or
commonplace event epiphany has had a
major impact in my work and just the way
the I live life I think we’ve all
probably experienced this perhaps
multiple times in our lives and it’s
going to be a little bit of a rink a
reoccurring theme throughout my talk so
this man his name is dr. Richard Jackson
and he’s a medical doctor and we
actually brought him to the Civic Design
Center we partnered to bring him in to
speak and ironically I didn’t really
know anything about him when he came to
Nashville and he gave a wonderful talk
and he started out with an epiphany of
his own and I’ll give a short retelling
of that story
dr. Jackson worked for the Center for
Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta and he was focused on childhood
obesity and preventing this epidemic and
he tells the story in 1999 in the summer
of 1990 on 19
he was driving to work one day a hot
summer 92 degrees and he’s on a big
highway that leads to the CDC and as
he’s driving he sees an elderly lady
walking along this broken sidewalk with
no shade very little protection from the
cars that are zooming by her and he
thinks to himself while she reminds me
of my mother who’s in her 90s and he
instantly thinks I should stop and help
her but of course with traffic and just
everything else he didn’t and he kept
driving and he got to the CDC and he was
in a meeting but he kept thinking about
this woman and he thought epiphany if
she would have died at that moment when
she was walking down that hot road that
hot Highway her cause of death would
have been from a medical standpoint heat
stroke or a heart attack or if she’d
been hit by a car it would have been D
hick Euler trauma but what actually
killed her was the built environment so
that was his epiphany he actually
completely changed directions in his
work he started focusing on promoting
and investigating how the built
environment plays a role in impacting
our health and so dr. Jackson has become
the leading thought leader in the
country on this topic from the medical
side but also he teaches public health
classes and he works with architects and
designers every day to address this so I
imagine this is a an image that we have
taken fairly recently this is in
Nashville but this is anywhere and I
kind of envisioned these women being the
the people that dr. Jackson saw but all
of this is based on the foundation of
this hugely alarming spike in obesity
rates that we’ve experienced in the
country just over a very short period of
time in 20 years going from the slide in
1992 up to in the southern part of the
United States over 30% obesity rates in
our population in just a very short
period of time so after hearing his talk
I mean I was sitting in the audience
like you are and it was just the
quintessential lightbulb moment whoa
everything that I do and that we do at
the Civic Design Center has a
relationship to health
we’d never thought about it explicitly
like that before
and so almost instantly I left and I
started working on a grant proposal to
our public health department to study
this and to look into from the from the
built environment side how we can design
cities to make them healthier and
specifically focused in this instance on
Nashville
I love this quote the shape that we give
our city in turn shapes us look at that
image you can see how we’ve shaped a
healthier city and how we’ve done this
in cities all across the country how
public health officials worked with
planners and designers and architects to
transform this dirty city of the late
1800s and early 1900s very unhealthy
places due to infectious diseases that
were caused by dirty conditions unclean
water unclean air and we’ve transformed
those into much more beautiful cities is
the same city of Nashville from early in
the from a hundred years ago to now but
we’re facing much different issues now
and so we did this study we did this
book released a book called shaping the
healthy community the Nashville plan and
we looked at what are the built
environments factors that play a role in
impacting our health what actually are
they so we identified the access that we
have to transportation our walkability
and pedestrian safety issues that we
face what are our access to housing
resources what our access to food and
what are our access to open spaces and
parks and then the sixth one was what
are the community types that we live in
and I think this is pretty fascinating
that people all over the country live in
essentially five different community
types and those are rural areas low
density often farmland suburban areas
these are post World War two development
patterns largely based on the automobile
then we have our urban neighborhoods
that are much denser have a grid of
streets and sidewalks and alleys we have
centers which is the density level
between an urban neighborhood and our
densest area that we live in the
downtown core where all of the you know
the the main offices the civic
institutions will
located in those areas so those five
different areas there’s some outliers
but those make up the main areas that we
all live in anywhere across the country
you can kind of classify those so as a
city we like to project an image of
ourselves and this could be any city but
this is the what we want people to think
we look like from the outside people who
are coming to visit us but the reality
of the situation is these are this is
our built environment that we’ve
designed for ourselves not particularly
the healthiest of places to to inhabit
to live who wants to walk who wants to
ride a bicycle in these areas and this
is not specific to this city this is how
we’ve done things all across the country
not particularly promoting getting to
know your neighbor if you live in a
house like this there’s no front door on
this home and this is one of my
favorites who wants to buy it right a
bike in that condition right
veer onto the freeway get chugging and
then of crusing lee traffic congestion
but contrast that with environments that
we can build that promote health this
just makes you feel better you want to
walk you have a place to sit you can get
some relief from the Sun you can sit in
the shade you can see what’s happening
in the buildings you can interact with
people you can live above or work above
this building and you’re insulated from
the cars of the street passing by and if
given the chance and people are given
the infrastructure they will use it they
will walk so this is one of my proudest
and happiest days this is the day that
our book was published and standing here
with co-author christine cradling and
the mayor of our city megan berry who
our thoughts were with and our love for
her right now
not only was this an amazing day for me
personally because we finished such a
long book but it was a testament to the
leader of our city coming and being
there and committing to wanting to
implement this to make our city a better
place I’ll just say and following up on
the book this has now been published for
about a year
we’ve been out implementing the work of
this and one of the coolest things we’ve
got a grant pretty quickly from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the
Pew Charitable Trusts and so we’re
continuing the work that went into this
and I’ll talk about a couple projects
that I’m really proud of they’re helping
make this work so just to give you some
ideas here are some images from this
publication we find at the design center
showing people in existing condition and
showing them what it can be through
vision and their participation in
involvement of that is a very powerful
tool because once they see it they want
to make it happen but if they couldn’t
see it it’s hard for them to realize
what it could be or what it can be
here’s a real-life real-world example of
that taking place this is an image at
the top was a street about six years ago
we showed what it could be and then lo
behold it was built one of my very first
experiences working at the design center
in the early 2000s was being approached
by another nonprofit Nashville the Oasis
Center to ask us they were they had a
group of youth from high schools all
across the county and they were doing
different programs with them they said
could we bring them to the Design Center
and do something there that shows them
what you do and get some engaged in the
process so we said okay yeah we can come
up with something and so we had about
forty kids come in and they divided into
groups and they all had to design their
own community design their own
neighborhood what our how can they
design an ideal neighborhood that
represents things that they want to do
and the feedback that we got from that
program was it was of all the things
they did in that course of that program
over the year that that was the most
important powerful thing that they
experienced so started me thinking
there’s a hypothesis here of youth
engagement if we ask you to what they
want to see happen in their communities
it’s an empowering experience for them
and it can help it can change their
lives so we applied for a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts and in
the summer of 2011 we were able to offer
this summer camp design your
neighborhood for a group of 12 high
school students a really intensive four
week summer camp called
in your neighborhood and as a process of
that we actually had a film crew fall of
us around the whole time and we created
a 52 minute documentary film of that
whole process and you can see the high
school students transform over the
course of his four weeks in those 52
minutes I want to draw your attention to
the young lady on the left her name is
shanece Brown she was going into just
finished her tenth grade year and was
the summer before her 11th grade year
and she’s amazing she had an epiphany of
her own and that process she talked
about how that really did change her
life she never really knew anything
about design was not exposed to it
didn’t know what it meant
and through this program she decided
what she want to do and she’s now a
fourth-year architecture student at the
University of Tennessee architecture I’m
so proud of her I and what she’s done
and what she continues to do and she
comes back and she works in Nashville
she works with kids now because of this
we were able to get a ongoing grant so
that was the summer of 2011 we skipped a
few years and now we have a grant to
actually continue this program we
started in 2016 we did it again this
summer we just finished a couple weeks
ago but we also added an educational
curriculum to this so we just finished
the pilot phase we’ve actually had about
400 high school students in Davidson
County go through this pilot program and
now we’re launching it much broader into
the school system this coming academic
year and this too is an incredible thing
for I’m so excited about this this is
some of the students from last summer
and a little bit more about that another
thing that we do at the Design Center we
have a group called turbo which stands
for tactical urbanism organizers and
that’s the active arm of the Design
Center it’s a group of motivated
citizens that want to be engaged and
want to be involved in making a
difference happen in their communities
and they’re out there working they’re
doing projects over the weekend they’re
making change happen in neighborhoods
across Nashville here’s an example of a
project
that was John a few weeks ago we did a
temporary installation of a traffic
circle just to show people what it could
be to how to slow down traffic and make
it safer for the communities and that’s
now informing through working with the
city how a permit process can could
transpire to make that process go much
smoother so when I end my talk on this
is from this summer the design your
neighborhood program and this young man
macarius he’s equally inspiring and
brilliant all these kids were all the
participants but particularly his story
I found impressive because he I think he
also experienced epiphany his was
through he knew what he wanted to do he
he’s very methodical and he wants to be
a structural engineer but his epiphany
was that the citizens and the people and
the design process needs to be brought
into that and he can reflect that in the
work that he knows he wants to do in the
future so I say that these students
inspire me continually they give me
optimism for the future which I think we
all need right now and I’ll just end on
you perhaps you’ve experienced epiphany
today from one of these incredible
speakers that were with but there is a
way for you to get engaged and make a
difference in your communities and I
would just challenge you all to take
advantage of that thank you
you
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