It’s a quiet story in the making. Two historic, predominantly African American neighborhoods (Laney Walker/Bethlehem) coming together to regenerate not only their community but, in the process, transforming Augusta’s entire urban core into a place few people ever imagined was possible.

It’s a story that should resonate among most cities in the U.S., which, like Augusta, are trying to reinvent themselves in the wake of a half-century or more of blight and disinvestment. And it’s a story that is timely, given various studies by ULI, the Brookings Institute, Harvard, Gallup, and others that project a large-scale movement back into cities over the coming generation.

First, the bad shit?. The revitalization of Laney Walker/Bethlehem could not have begun more inauspiciously. Back in 2008, city leaders were trying to push funding for a new Convention Center downtown through a hotel/motel fee. It was largely viewed as a “white” project. And the black community wanted funding to revitalize some of its blighted neighborhoods. And so a “split-the-baby” proposal made its way through the Commission, with half of the hotel/motel fee going to the Convention Center, half to Laney Walker/Bethlehem. A few in town still refer to that moment as “the great extortion.”

From that unpromising beginning, however, a visionary program has emerged. The hotel/motel fee was used to create 50-year bond financing for the community. A 16-month-long community charrette process ensued to inform an overall master plan, which was then created. A Pattern Book, linking historic designs to new construction was developed, as were Green Strategies guidelines. Over two dozen private firms (architects, engineers, builders, realtors, etc.) were selected to work collaboratively on key priority areas within this 1100 acre revitalization area. Key social programs were teed up around public safety, health, transportation, and heritage tourism, all of which helped knit together various stakeholders in the city.

William Sankey, writing in the Spring 2011 issue of the Harvard University Student Journal of Real Estate, described this effort as a “game-changing” national model for public-private redevelopment. The AIA Foundation has highlighted Augusta’s revitalization effort at several of its workshops over the past year. More recently, the Georgia Planning Association at its annual conference awarded Heritage Pine, the City’s flagship development in Laney Walker/Bethlehem, with its annual Outstanding Plan Implementation award.

I’m desperately in need of an intervention. It’s not what you think: I’m not binging on harmful practices or anything like that (unless you count going to family get-togethers on Thanksgiving and the like). But I do need help. Maybe the readership here can provide a guiding hand.

Here’s the situation. This past week, I was invited by the AIA Principals Roundtable  in Atlantato discuss change management in the design profession. Talk about a great gig. By formal accounts, over a third of all architects in the US today are out of a job – and that number is probably a lot higher than that, given the war stories I’m hearing from this group.

If there were ever an opportunity to re-think how we approach planning, design, and building to be more in harmony with nature and people, this is it. As Dana Meadows rightly pointed out in a seminal essay on ten ways to intervene in a system, one of the key strategies is to focus efforts on those groups who are most likely to “get it.” And with the full-scale decimation of the design profession, this group — so talented, so creative, so passionate — should clearly be motivated to re-design its business model, right?  Add to this the fact that those in the room were largely executives and leaders from architecture firms in Atlanta. They had the power to call the shots. And 75% of the room identified themselves as being on the earlier end of innovative, change management practices. This was going to be a cake walk, right? Think again.

The discussion got off to a promising start. Asked to think about how they would re-design an architectural curriculum for graduate students, the group rained down suggestions:  training in cross-disciplines, from business management to sociology and psychology, hands-on training in process management, approach a project more holistically, etc.

Then, the roadblock: Here’s a blank piece of paper. Design the type of architectural firm you would like to create from scratch, one that would be poised to address the challenges of the decades to come.

To the group’s credit, there were a few innovative stabs at this charge: “We need a different name for ourselves than architects,” suggested one. Or this: “We need to shift from seeing ourselves as creators of buildings to simply creators, creators of community, of social organization.” But our blank piece of paper was mostly getting filled out with all the reasons why this whole re-engineering wouldn’t work:

We need to wait until the market sorts itself out and tells us where we need to go.

• We’re at the bottom end of the food chain and are simply at the mercy of executing what our clients want.
• We’re trained to design buildings, that’s all. And that’s what we should be doing.
• We’ve got all these mouths to feed, people to take care of, jobs to protect.

And so on. And of course I get it, having watched my own firm go through similar antacid thinking over several decades. But one thing I feel fairly certain about: the current design paradigm is not viable, nor is it conducive to the moves we need to make if we are going to regenerate our urban centers. Our company has seen that first hand in, of all places, Augusta, Georgia, where there is a whole paradigm change in motion to revitalize the city. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

So why not an architectural firm that selects its projects based on what it feels truly needs to be built (and says “no thank you” to a whole bunch of buildings that aren’t necessary)? And why not a firm that designs in terms of broad systems such as transportation, green-collar job creation, recharging our groundwater, and energy generation? And why not a firm that is composed of professionals knowledgeable about community viability and not just the components of a building?

Architect as community creator, not order-taker? As I said, I’m in need of an intervention. Some help here. Please.

Martin Melaver is a principal and founder of Melaver McIntosh, a sustainable development and consulting firm focused on transformative approaches to regenerating communities and businesses. He is former CEO of Melaver, Inc…..He is the author of Living Above the Story: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change, and Restores Land and Community, foreword by Ray Anderson. (http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/living_above_the_store:hardcover)

By Martin Melaver

Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, Inc., author of two books on sustainability and a tireless champion for re-inventing business to service the environment, passed away this past Monday at the age of 77.

He was also vice-chairman of my company for eight years, a mentor, a guide, and a dear friend. I write this in the hours leading up to his memorial service, a bittersweet time for so many of us, whose sadness at his passing is mixed with a celebration of a life that helped launch the sustainability movement globally.

For Ray was one of those rare individuals who somehow touched the core of what human-ness is all about – a blend of ambition and selflessness. He would begin most every talk he gave with the statement that he was as driven and as competitive as any businessman you would ever meet. And yet somehow, he would “flip” this all-so-common human trait, one most of his audience identified with, into something filled with a higher purpose: stewardship of planet earth. He was a self-proclaimed plunderer of natural capital, a sinner – but then by implication so weren’t we all? And his hope and undiminished optimism gave us all a clear path toward redemption.

Ray never said a lot at our quarterly board meetings. But when he did, you sat up and took notice. At one of our last board meetings together, several years ago, Ray came up with this pronouncement: “Wouldn’t it be something,” he said, “if as a real estate development company, we would be profitable as a result of what we didn’t build instead of what we did.”

I thought he was crazy. Well, to be more accurate, what I really thought at the time was more along the lines of it sure must be nice to sit back and make these Yoda-like oracular pronouncements. He’s Ray Anderson. Everything he says is wise, right? How in the hell are we supposed to reinvent a real estate company that profits more by building less?

But like a true radical industrialist, Ray was on to something. It’s just taken a lag time of several years for me to figure that out and launch a new business based on his premise.

In 2010, the World Wildlife Federation, in conjunction with the Global Footprint Network, published its Living Planet Report (http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/2010_lpr/). It’s a document chockfull of data on the dimishment of our home, one that we all need to keep close by. But it’s a chart on page 73 that gets to the heart of it all, a chart that looks at Human Development around the globe as it relates to consumption. The message is as clear as it is known to many of us already: We in the first world are consuming more and more resources, but not getting much more from that consumption: not much more in the way of longevity, or reasonable healthcare or educational access, or economic well-being or downright happiness. I don’t know if Ray would have expressed it this way, but our consumption has become both a cause and symptom of our increasing lack of community, our lack of connection to one another.

But Ray knew this intuitively. He knew that we needed to utilize better all that we already have, rather than discard and replace with some new thing. He knew that a sustainability movement was not about technology – despite his engineering background – but about people. It was about changing one mind at a time, one mindset at a time, one business at a time, one community at a time, one law at a time. One of his best aphorisms went like this: “Every time a person embraces the environment, that’s one more of us and one less of them.”

I feel blessed to be one of the many thousands whom Ray embraced as one of his own.

I had the opportunity recently to participate in a 3-day workshop in Washington, DC, sponsored by the American Architectural Foundation (http://www.archfoundation.org/aaf/aaf/index.htm), on the design of sustainable cities. The workshop, put on three times during the year, focuses on three case studies particular cities are currently focusing on.

In the event I participated in, the projects showcased were: Brattleboro, VT and its efforts to redevelop a sliver of brownfield land on the edge of Main Street, fronting the Connecticut River; Prince George’s County, MD and its efforts to create a multi-modal corridor in what is currently an asphalt speedway; and the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, LA and its efforts to prioritize a monumental list of revitalization projects and create a clearly-defined implementation program. Brownfield mixed-use development, multi-modal transportation, restoration of community through restoring affordable housing and catalyzing economic development: it’s a heady mix of issues most cities looking to restore their urban core areas are all facing today.

In one respect, the challenges each of these three municipalities are facing seem quite distinct. Brattleboro’s big challenge is to persuade town leadership into playing an active role as at least a quasi-developer of the site. Prince George’s County’s key issue is to have its planning commission and the state’s transit authority working collaboratively from the get-go so that a shared vision and shared strategies facilitate ease of planning, financing, and implementation. The Lower Ninth Ward’s daunting challenge is to tunnel its way out of mounds of planning efforts from the five years following Hurricane Katrina, execute on some low-hanging fruit projects, and start the monumental work of rebuilding a community that once housed 18,000 residents (now about 2500).

But the differences among the three projects and locales mask a few larger, shared challenges or opportunities that reflect a common landscape throughout the country. Each project underscores market forces highlighting 1) the growing in-fill of neglected urban areas, 2) the need to shape development projects through systemic thinking (transportation, housing, economic development, etc.), and 3) the need for innovative financing structures through various public/private partnerships. And the intersection of these three market forces brings us to three game changes in American life today. These changes are in some ways subtle, in other ways obvious. But they are revolutionizing the way we will be thinking about rebuilding our cities in the decades to come.

Game-changer #1: The shift back to urbanization. We are not only an urban culture for the first time in US, history, but we are in the early stages of seeing a rebound from over a half century of suburbanization. A ULI study back in 2004 noted that over the next 20 years, 50 million Americans—or about 40% of the current non-urban dwelling public—will be moving into cities with dynamic work/live/play environments. A more recent study (May, 2010) by the Brookings Institute on the status of metropolitan America (http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0509_metro_america.aspx) provides a more thorough-going analysis of the same phenomenon: basically, greater growth within urban core areas, although with the caveat that a significant portion of that growth is happening on the fringes of these urban areas. The significance for anyone concerned about the future viability of his or her town could not sharper: There are going to be winners and losers in this migration back to urban environments. Get it right—like Portland or Austin—and you are likely to ride a wave of livability for decades to come. Get it wrong—maybe Detroit is the whipping boy here—and you’ll find yourself having to downsize your extensive environs significantly.

Game-changer #2: Shaping urban development systemically. This past year has seen an unprecedented level of collaboration among three of the most important federal agencies around: DOT, HUD, and EPA. The three agencies, forming a Partnership for Sustainable Communities, has basically come to the right-headed conclusions 1) that housing, transportation, and environmental issues are all interrelated, and 2) that their respective funding of projects really ought to leverage each other. And so out of such basic, obvious, and desperately needed collaborative thinking came the decision to agree upon Six Livability Principles (more transportation options; economic competitiveness, equitable, affordable housing, supporting existing communities, value communities and neighborhoods, leverage policies and investment) which would then be the basis upon which the three agencies would allocate federal grant monies. Again, the message could not be clearer to any municipality looking for largesse: Following the money means planning systemically. As the August 23 deadline looms for community and regional planning grants under the Sustainable Communities Partnership, every city in the country is scrambling to figure out how to tell its own story of how it is working collaboratively across historically-siloed lines to plan for systemic urban revitalization. It’s creating a sea-change in how governments are suddenly having to function.

Game-Changer #3: The vacuum created by the collapse of the conventional capital marketplace. Most anyone involved in real estate development these days is painfully aware that the conventional capital marketplace has dried up. There’s virtually nowhere to go for either debt or equity. Dead. Kaput. So if you are involved in development today, one of a handful of things is happening: you are trying to dig yourself out of negatively-leveraged holdings; you are sitting on a boatload of cash and hoping to cash in on hugely discounted sales and foreclosures; you are devoting your time to planning until the next up-cycle occurs. OR, you are looking at creative financing schemes to help move projects forward. And those creative schemes invariably involve some form of public/private partnership. These various PPPs come in a whole slew of shapes and guises, but they invariably involve the following paradigm shifts:

¨      The public is weighing in with its own interests, as the price of admission for helping source the capital (on either debt or equity side or both). Which means that most development occurring these days has a strong social/public component.

¨      There is a strong push not only to develop projects with a public interest, but to structure these deals in ways that extend the time-frame of investment. Instead of having private capital invest with a typical short-term exit strategy (money enters then exits a community), public/private ventures mean that the length of investment in a community is likely to be extended.

¨      There is also a strong push for deals to result in a type of revolving loan structure. Typically, private investment capital exits the community after a short period of time. Private/public ventures can result in a tendency to have at least a portion of investment returns re-invested in future community projects.

So: paradigm shifts in population demographics, in governance, and in capital structure are all happening simultaneously, a perfect storm for shaping long-term investment in projects that integrate housing, transportation, economic development, and environmental stewardship within urban core areas. This perfect storm could not have happened at a more opportune moment, just when we need to design cities that are more livable while also being more benign on our larger natural habitat.

- Martin Melaver