The U.S. city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, has received international attention for progress in cleaning up its urban environment. Citizen participation and partnership have been crucial to this success.

Alton Park needs help desperately. The school where the meeting is held is surrounded by blocks of bleak, aging, public housing. The area is pockmarked with shuttered businesses, abandoned industries, and hazardous waste sites, and is rimmed by Chattanooga Creek, considered one of the most polluted waterways in the Southeastern United States.

A consultant makes a presentation of what the community envisions for itself -- new housing, new businesses and restaurants, a park along the creek, linked to a network of "greenways" that wind through the city, connecting to Chattanooga's Riverwalk, a 12-kilometer recreational trail that follows the winding river on its course through forested mountains.

The plan seems ambitious, if not unachievable, for a neighborhood where poverty and desperation seem to line the streets. But Chattanooga is a city that has learned "opportunity thinking," a city that has already proven a riverfront industrial wasteland can be transformed into a public place of such elegance and innovation that visitors from around the world come to wonder at the achievement of urban renewal. Considering the transformation that Chattanooga has made in the last 30 years, revitalization of an inner-city neighborhood like Alton Park seems like a goal within reach.

History

In 1969, the federal government conducted a national air quality survey and found Chattanooga, Tennessee, had the most polluted air of any city in America. The particulate matter in the air was three times the level designated safe by federal health standards. Chattanoogans who remember those days still talk about how drivers had to use their automobile lights in daylight hours, how businessmen would change their shirts at midday after a morning exposed to soot in the air.

"You couldn't see Lookout Mountain (elevation 600 meters) just standing a quarter mile away from it," recalled Bobby Davenport, a businessman-turned-land preservationist whose family has been in the city since the 1860s. "We had a reputation of being a lousy place with dirty air and dirty water and no vision for its future."

"People were embarrassed," remembered Elizabeth Bryant, development director for the Tennessee River Gorge Trust. Chattanoogans began to mobilize for environmental improvement, Bryant believes, because of self-pride.

Robert Colby is the director of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau, which is the chief regulatory authority in the area. After the findings about the city's poor air quality became national news, Chattanoogans quickly took action, he said in an interview. "So the community pretty much came together. Civic groups, government, the medical community, and industry came together to do something."

New air quality standards were adopted and new monitoring techniques were instituted. Industrial leaders began to set the example by cleaning up their emissions. Within only a few years the efforts paid off, and Chattanooga again rose to national attention for its progress in reversing air pollution.

But other forces were at work in this mid-size southern city at the same time. It was besieged by many of the same problems that troubled American cities from coast-to-coast through the 1970s and 1980s. Heavy industry fell on hard times. Plants closed and left abandoned, polluted sites behind. A population move toward the suburbs resulted in a decline of the downtown district.

Those trends brought Chattanoogans to another realization, Davenport said. "In order to create a place, an environment for attracting new activity, new jobs, new wealth, we had to remake Chattanooga."

Through the 1980s, a process began that involved citizens in their city's makeover in a way that was rare for a community in which power had been closely held by a small circle of people. The leaders began to reach out and involve the public in decision-making. Rather than turn to consultants and experts for new ideas, Chattanooga city officials sought public opinion on how to remake the city, how to create a new vision for its future.

"The people were the think tank," said City Councilman David Crockett, who first became involved in the city's transformation as a community activist and has served in government since 1990. He credits these public outreach sessions as being the initial source for ideas that ultimately became projects now recognized as the linchpins of downtown Chattanooga's renaissance: a riverside aquarium, a big-screen theater, the Riverwalk, a pedestrian bridge spanning the Tennessee River.

"One of the reasons that the stuff we've done is so well loved is because a lot of people had a role in making it have that shape and form," Davenport said. "And that was a big shift in how things were done."

Virtually every American city has had similar urban problems during the last 30 years, and struggled for solutions. But what sets Chattanooga apart is the degree of consideration given to environmental preservation throughout these efforts, and the degree to which the environment itself has been a key to the city's renewal, and is now a critical part of its future.

Connections

Councilman Crockett takes a visitor to one of the parks constructed along the meandering Riverwalk route, and points out the blue herons that have returned to the area in the years since environmental cleanup began. He greets other visitors to the water's edge -- the joggers, the walkers, the cyclers, the fishermen -- people who come from every class, color, profession, and neighborhood in Chattanooga, the urban core of a metropolitan region with a population of about 450,000.

"The Riverwalk has done more to bring people together than anything else," he said. Not only has this outdoor recreational resource brought together people who may otherwise have little social contact, he believes, but it has also reconnected people to the river, and reawakened them to their personal responsibility for their city, captured by the slogan, "It takes us all; it takes forever."

Descended from the legendary American frontiersman Davy Crockett, Councilman Crockett insists that urban Americans have lost touch with the natural world. They believe their water source is the kitchen faucet, and don't connect their own lives and well-being with the natural sources of water that supply their cities. The Riverwalk has reestablished that connection for Chattanoogans, Crockett said, and in turn, has helped to create an ever-growing awareness for the importance of preserving water quality and other environmental protections.

"Connections are what it's all about," Crockett said, and in his mind such connections should be a foremost concern in any innovation that the city undertakes. "The greenways are about connections."

The current 12-kilometer Riverwalk is slated for expansion to become more than a 35-kilometer trail. It is also part of a larger plan to preserve green space and create parks throughout the metropolitan region, all linked by a network of greenways that will be a source of recreation, but also a commuting route for cyclists who might leave their cars at home and bike to work.

Greenway Park is 200 hectares of green space, a farm within the city limits, acquired by the city government for public use. A creek, tinted blue by the native limestone, winds under arching trees; a grassy bank stretches off to a wooded hillside. Calling the green space endeavor the most important of all the projects the city has built, Crockett sweeps his arm across the scene saying, "You can't build this."

"The thing that fascinated me about the greenway concept was the ability to connect all the public and private land conservation initiatives around the periphery of the city to the city center," said Davenport, who is director of the Trust for Private Land, a non-profit organization that is active in the acquisition and preservation of green space for public use.

Supplementing the city's work, private organizations have been key players in the green space effort. "A great number of people have come together over the last decade to say these are really important places and they are worthy of our affection and they're worth preserving," Davenport said.

The Tennessee River Gorge Trust is another private group, working to protect a unique river canyon that borders the city. Since it was founded in 1986, the group has assured protection of more than half of the 10,000 hectares in the gorge. Like many of the efforts that have contributed to Chattanooga's revival, the River Gorge Trust was an ad hoc creation, by citizens who felt a love for the land, and a responsibility to their community. Director James Brown said, "We didn't need the government to tell us how to do these things. We did it ourselves, and we kind of did it in this amorphous, non-organizational way."

Partnering

The private sector and the public sector -- business and city government -- have an unusual record for successful partnerships throughout the history of Chattanooga's renaissance. Many who have been involved in the process through the years cite those arrangements as key to the city's success.

"It's this catalytic thing.... The government is there to partner with the private sector," according to Stroud Watson, the director of the Riverfront/Downtown Planning and Design Center. He discusses Chattanooga's progress in an office cluttered with models, drawings, and photographs of the city during various stages of this urban transformation.

The Design Center itself provides further testament to the importance of partnership in Chattanooga. It serves as a resource for planning and design of urban development projects, whether proposed by private or government interests. Its very existence is the result of a cooperative vision and funding arrangement between the regional planning agency, the University of Tennessee, and a private foundation.

Perhaps the single-most successful example of creative partnership is the effort that has made Chattanooga an international trailblazer in the use and manufacture of hybrid electric vehicles. Electric passenger buses provide transportation service in the downtown area, as part of the Chattagnooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) system.

The buses are manufactured by local company Advanced Vehicle Services (AVS), which was founded to fulfill CARTA's order for a non-polluting transportation alternative for the downtown area. AVS, CARTA, and other groups interested in electric vehicle technology are partners in what they call a "living laboratory," the real-world operation of these innovative vehicles on city streets each day. The buses are carefully monitored in their performance, and AVS is able to use that information to modify its manufacturing processes.

"We take the thing and we make it, we break it, we fix it, and we try again," said Rick Hitchcock, president of AVS. He also praises CARTA for its willingness to accept an ever-evolving fleet of vehicles, and to work with the private company in an ongoing experiment with a cutting-edge technology

AVS has built just over 110 hybrid-electric buses since production began seven years ago. About a million riders a year are on the buses, instead of in personal cars, according to local estimates, keeping air pollution levels down and easing city traffic congestion. AVS is building a market for the vehicles outside Chattanooga, and its buses are now on the streets in a number of cities also concerned with reducing air pollution, including Los Angeles, California; Tempe, Arizona; and Miami and Tampa, Florida.

But the electric-hybrid buses that cruise quietly up and down the main street from morning till night have done one more thing in Chattanooga's effort to become one of America's greenest cities. "The electric bus program has been the most visible and most successful element of this broad palate of sustainable ideas," Hitchcock said. As the clean buses have become a fixture of daily life in Chattanooga, people have become more familiar with the broader concepts of environmental preservation and sustainable living.

"We don't just carry people who know how to spell sustainable.... We carry everybody. And they all take pride in knowing that they're riding in a unique transportation system," Hitchcock said in an interview at the AVS manufacturing plant.

The Future

Hitchcock is now president of a company pursuing a cutting-edge technology, but he's played various roles in city government, as a community activist, and as a member of the CARTA board. The city has followed a multi-pronged strategy for change in the last 20 years, he said, a strategy that will also shape its future. "One of the things that has made it go well is that instead of focusing on one thing, we have put in play 20 things. Then when 11 succeed, four get delayed, five are abject failures, we still have a net that is positive."

Expansion of the greenway network, enhancement of the riverfront, and further urban renewal projects are ongoing priorities for the city. But the most comprehensive plan now in play seeks to further revitalize the downtown business district at the same time it establishes Chattanooga as a center for innovation in environmental design and technology.

Councilman Crockett drives past the vacant lots and abandoned warehouses in the area known as Southside, and describes the city's vision for what's to come. With construction of a trade center, a conference center, and an array of other facilities in this area, Crockett describes a project that will be "pushing the envelope on building, energy, and transportation systems."

In construction of these facilities, the city will employ the most advanced techniques and technology to recycle water, generate energy, and create virtually self-sustaining buildings according to the plans now underway. The city will work to make the area an international center for conferences and meetings on environmentalism and sustainability.

The "living laboratory" is a tag initially hung on Chattanooga's experiment with hybrid-electric buses, but Crockett envisions a time when the whole city is involved in the laboratory concept. "The goal is to be a defining place for breakthroughs in sustainability," he concludes.

Further information on Chattanooga is available at
http://www.chattanooga-chamber.com.

Charlene Porter writes on global issues for the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State