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Introduces the Nashville Civic Design Center’s mission and defines the built environment. The speaker then shares Dr. Richard Jackson’s epiphany about how city design affects public health and obesity.
Speaker A
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 parks, and the other things.So that makes 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 that 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 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 into speech, 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, the summer of 1999.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, wow, 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 his epiphany.If she were to 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 vehicular 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 an image that we have taken fairly recently.This is in Nashville, but this is anywhere.And I kind of envision these women being 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 this slide in 1990 to 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.
Describes the speaker’s own epiphany and how it led to research on health and city design in Nashville. It outlines the key built-environment factors that influence health and the main community types people live in.
Speaker A
So after hearing his talk, I mean, I was sitting in the audience like you are, and it was just the quintessential light bulb moment.And I was like, 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 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.This is the same city of Nashville from 100 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 the Nashville Plan.And we looked at what are the built environment 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 are 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 II 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 main offices, the civic institutions are 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.
Contrasts unhealthy, car-oriented environments with healthier, people-centered places. The section also covers the publication of the Nashville healthy city plan and examples of turning vision into built reality.
Speaker A
So as a city, we like to project an image of ourselves.And this could be any city, but this is 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 this is our built environment that we've designed for ourselves, not particularly the healthiest of places 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 ride a bike in that condition, veer onto the freeway, get chugging, and then increasingly 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 Kraling and the mayor of our city, Megan Barry, who our thoughts are 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 is we got a grant pretty quickly from the Robert Wood Johnson foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust.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 that are 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 an existing condition and showing them what it can be through vision, and their participation and involvement in 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 and behold, it was built.
Explains how youth programs at the Design Center empower students to imagine better neighborhoods. It highlights the Design Your Neighborhood camp, Shanice Brown’s story, and the expansion of the educational curriculum.
Speaker A
One of my very first experiences working at the Design center in the early 2000s was being approached by another nonprofit in Nashville, the Oasis center, to ask us.They had a group of youth from high school 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 gets them engaged in the process?So we said, okay, yeah, we can come up with something.And so we had about 40 kids come in and they divided into groups, and they all had to design their own community, design their own neighborhood.
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 it started me thinking, there's a hypothesis here of you youth engagement.If we ask youth 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 youn Neighborhood, for a group of 12 high school students.A really intensive four week summer camp called Design youn Neighborhood.And as a process of that, we actually had a film crew follow 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 these four weeks.In those 52 minutes, I want to draw your attention to the young lady on the left.Her name is Shanice Brown.She was going in to just finished her 10th grade year and was the summer before her 11th grade year.And she's amazing.
She had an epiphany of her own in 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 wanted to do.And she's now a fourth year architecture student at the University of Tennessee.Architecture.I'm so proud of her 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 an 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.
Covers the Turbo volunteer group and a temporary traffic circle project that influenced city permitting. The talk closes with Makarius’s story and a call for civic engagement and optimism.
Speaker A
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 done 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 could transpire to make that process go much smoother.So I want to end my talk on this is from this summer, the Design youn Neighborhood program.And this young man, Makarius, he's equally inspiring and brilliant.All these kids were all the participants.But particularly his story I found impressive because I think he also experienced epiphany.
His was through.He knew what he wanted to do.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 Perhaps you've experienced epiphany today from one of these incredible speakers that we're with.But so 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.