By Billy Bruce
VALDOSTA — World renowned urban planner and author Charles Landry knows one thing for sure: When it comes to deciding what qualities and amenities a community wants to protect and enhance during periods of growth, everyone’s ideas are important. Everyone’s a player.
That fact, included with the healthy existence of a forward-looking leadership puts Valdosta in a good position to manage the anticipated growth in population the area is experiencing and should experience for the next several years, Landry told a gathering of local leaders during a Valdosta-Lowndes County Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Rainwater Conference and Convention Center Monday.
A who’s who of leaders in local government, business, development and other fields filled the limited seating meeting room to hear Landry, a British man who is known around the world for helping communities figure out the best ways to clean up existing blight and bring out the diverse qualities that will attract new residents and business without destroying the historic character and other features of a city.
He is considered an international authority and leading expert on innovation-inspired urban design. Terms like “innovative,” “creative,” and “imagination” frequented Landry’s vocabulary during his 30-minute, often witty, humorous presentation, accompanied by a slide show that offered a look at cities all over the globe.
“Every city of every size is at a crossroads, whether it’s New York City for Valdosta,” Landry said. “These transformations that are taking place around the world can be quite frightening. But there’s a conversation that starts, and no one who cares about the future of their community should be turned away from the table where ideas are gathered, Landry reiterated throughout his talk.
Instead of the “worn out word creativity,” Landry suggested using “imagination” when trying to reach a consensus on what the image and identity of Valdosta should be, while also adapting to a new hi-tech world that is smaller as a result.
While Europe and the U.S. formerly were considered the driving forces behind worldwide economic growth, much of that emphasis has shifted to China and India. And when “a butterfly flies in Beijing (China), the idea is something happens as a result in say, Tampa,” Landry noted.
“We know the old way of producing things, with one producer and one distributor. But now it’s more small companies networking together. Sometimes it feels incredibly chaotic, so finding a balance to bring a little order to the planning progress is very important,” he said.
The Chamber of Commerce’s Impact 2012 campaign sorely impressed Landry because he said it showed how the area has already made major strides to bring about a diverse representation of leaders from across the community to get that important “conversation” going.
“The good thing about Valdosta is people are looking ahead to the future,” he said.
As slides of scenes in cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Seoul, Berlin, Boston, Chicago and many others scrolled across the screen, Landry explained how Valdosta is not separated from the same types of decisions leaders in those cities have to make when managing urban growth.
He showed a slide of some rather typical yet awful looking concrete overpass pylons and bridges look in one city, and how that city redesigned the bridge to have an artistic appeal. Even a sewer station in Japan looked more like a multi-storied art exhibit than anything resembling a place where sewage arrives, Landry said.
How the redesign of a building in Paris took three years for local officials there to decide presents a lesson Valdostans can learn from and avoid, he explained.
But again — everyone needs to be allowed to express ideas, not just the art crowd or the military crowd or the academic college crowd, Landry said.
“Surely the arts cannot be the totality of a city because it would leave out the majority of people who are doing ordinary things that are very important contributions as well,” he said. “Artistic contributions are important because they do help attract people, though.”
Visionary, creative types are important to the process, but still, that doesn’t mean they get privilege in the process, Landry said.
“It’s more about encouraging people to feel more confident in a world that is so diverse and overwhelmingly insecure, rather than limiting to a small class of creative people,” he said.
Valdosta, on first look after just a few hours in town, seems to be stretched between its defining sections of the I-75 corridor, VSU, downtown, Moody AFB, etc.
“Just being here at the Rainwater center is a universe away from where we were downtown this morning,” he said. “It’s a small place but it is very stretched. Everything is so spread out. It was made for the car, as most U.S. cities are. You want to tighten things up and pull them together.”
Because he has seen so many places that are in decline in the world, and because the world has become such a fragile place to maintain or sustain a community, having creative thinkers who are not afraid to take risks to achieve sound planning goals is essential in today’s world for a city to survive and change for the better, Landry said.
“Fifteen years ago, 80 percent of people said they chose the company before the city,” he noted. “Today, 64 percent choose the city before they choose the company or the job. If that is indeed true, that is very, very significant.”
Urban engineers may draw up the infrastructure plans, “and only think of the hardware — the old way of doing things, but they rarely mention how their plans will make people feel,” Landry said.
“Emotions, feeling, the senses all should be brought into the conversation,” he said. “I’ve rarely seen a planning committee which talks about feelings or how something makes you feel. No one asks whether it will make people feel happy. The things that often are most important are those invisible things, like emotions. If a city were a person, what sort of personality would you prefer that person have? Think of it that way. Don’t treat the city like a machine. Treat it as a living organism or a human being.”
