Learning From Nashville

Walkable downtowns will save the American city! Except that most of them aren’t really, and won’t.

- Justin Davidson

ON A SPRING EVENING in Nashville, I join the line outside the Station Inn, the venerable joint where grizzled fiddlers and young banjo hotshots converge for the Sunday-night bluegrass jam. A decade ago, the squat stone structure was the only sign of life in an industrial tract down by the rail yards. The beer is still cheap and the music homespun, but outside the metal door is the Gulch, “a hotspot for young urbanites,” as the city’s visitor website puts it. There’s an Urban Outfitters across the street, next to a Lucchese store selling $500 cowboy boots. Down the block, a cluster of high-rise rental buildings sprouts from the vale of parking lots and one-story warehouses. This is what the 21st-century American city is supposed to be, a satisfying and active mix of cultural holdovers, storefronts, and apartment buildings. Except the sidewalks are empty and the streets as wide as rivers. In reality, it’s a lukewarm spot at best.

America is getting cities wrong again. For decades, planners, mayors, and activists have promoted the dense, walkable downtown as the solution to a vast array of problems. Studies and news articles have celebrated the young people who flock to urban centers, live in apartments, walk to school, and bike to work, promoting diversity and tolerance, raising property values and coffee standards, and foretelling an end to sprawl. But as soon as you try walking around Nashville or Phoenix or Louisville, that optimism evaporates. A theoretically walkable neighborhood is often just a tourist strip, or a tiny nugget that you cross in a few minutes on foot, before hitting a multilane road or a strip mall. A shopping district consists of a coffee place, a restaurant, and a boutique or two.