Continued from Page 1 of our Urbanophile Interview:
BW: You also talked about the culture of the city – being a place where young people feel like they can come in and their ideas will be listened to and they can accomplish stuff. There was a recent program here called “Good Ideas Columbus,” where a team of young professionals was paired with someone at the top of their field – a developer, the mayor – and they’re given a challenge to work on.
AR: I like that idea a lot because what you often find is, it’s not just about young people, it really takes two kinds of profiles of people to get things done. One is kind of the visionary or the ideas person, and the second is the power broker. Usually those are two distinct people. It’s not like Jesus and the hypostatic union there… usually we have completely separate individuals.
BW: And they don’t know each other.
AR: And they don’t know each other. I come to cities and sometimes I’ll meet some young creative type and they’ll tell me an idea that blows me away and it’s clear nobody in that town is going to do anything with it. And then you’ve got some of your power broker guys who are like, “I’ve got this big gun, I need somebody to put ammunition in it and tell me where to point it.” So a guy like a Daniel Burnham in Chicago combined the two things, and he was one of the rare ones. This idea of how do you combine the idea people with the power broker people in a way that they take each other seriously is a great thing, not just for young people but in general.
BW: When you came here before, and talked about how Columbus does the basics pretty well in terms of urban development and planning, but we’re not taking the big step, we’re not ambitious enough, we’re not doing something big enough. Do you think the plans for the river downtown fall into that category, or is that still not ambitious enough?
AR: You know, I don’t think that project is going to move the needle, candidly. I mean, if I went to a place like Cincinnati, they would talk about their river. Part of the problem is, everybody and their brother who has a ditch in their city is going to tell you about what they’ve done with their river. It’s like one of the things people do. And so I think, kind of what I’m talking about would be something like the High Line, where this idea of turning abandoned elevated rail –
BW: Nobody had ever done that before.
AR: Nobody had really done it before in that way. Now of course, part of it is, when you’re Columbus, you can’t just do something that’s really cool, it has to be so overwhelmingly cool that people pay attention to it. So for example, Chicago did that cow exhibit, the art cows. And they didn’t even invent that, they stole that from a town in Switzerland, but the point being, if Columbus had done the art cows, people wouldn’t have really paid attention to it. Chicago, New York, San Francisco are going to instantly get extra credit for what they do. Because you’re not in the cool kids club yet, it’s going to be more challenging, so you really have to be willing to up the ante.
And how do you do the thing that everybody else feels like they’ve got to do tomorrow? I use Indianapolis and Columbus as the twin city examples. They’re alike in a lot, but they’re inverted when it comes to this, because Indianapolis does the basics very poorly, but they’ve really continuously innovated in what they’ve done. So for example, they’ve got the sports hosting strategy, they really invented the idea of using sports as an economic, city development platform.
Their Indiana Sports Corporation, which is this non-profit created to pursue and put on these kinds of events, was the first of its kind, and now everybody’s got one. Now, it doesn’t always pay off. They just bid on the Super Bowl again and they lost, which probably means they’re never going to get another Super Bowl. But you know what? They got to host one, and if you don’t lay it on the line, you’re never going to hit the big points. Sometimes you’ve just got to put it out there.
BW: In the last few years have you seen any cities the size of Columbus or smaller that are just kind of blowing you away, that you think are doing things to get themselves to the next level?
AR: I think that Salt Lake City has really been going off — quite a transformation there. My favorite one in the region though, is Nashville. I mean, there’s just a vibe there, there’s an excitement there, there’s an energy there. I recently pulled the migration stats, and you know, places like Columbus and Indy pull overwhelmingly from in-state. Columbus actually has a negative balance of migration with out-of-state.
Nashville is just the opposite, it’s drawing almost all of it’s people from out of town, out of state. And it’s easy to say “oh, music industry.” Well, you know what? I bet you could talk a good game about Columbus and what you’ve got. And guess what, they don’t have Nationwide Realty pumping billions into their city. They don’t have Ohio State University. They’ve got Vanderbilt, but it’s not the scale that you’ve got here. They don’t have the Battelle Institute.
So for everything that they’ve got, you can say we’ve got. So I don’t think Nashville has stellar assets either. Of course, obviously, country music is big, that’s important — I’m not taking that away from them. But they had that for a long time and they were like, a nothing. Now, their trajectory is like a hockey stick up. So I’m a huge fan of Nashville, and candidly, their industries are healthcare and music, so I don’t really think there’s a role for me in that city, but I would live in Nashville in a heartbeat. I really love Nashville, I go there every year. I’m just always impressed.
Continued on Page 3 of our Urbanophile Interview…