30 Minutes with Carol Coletta
Agile City Partners Co-Founder Julia Nebrija talks pivoting to patience and amplifying change with ACP Brain Trust member Carol Coletta.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Julia Nebrija: I was very excited when I heard you’d be joining our Brain Trust, because I share your passion and interest in public space and creative placemaking. People may already be familiar with your work advancing these important agendas as the head of the Memphis River Parks Partnerships and your leadership in ArtPlace, Civic Commons, and the Knight Foundation. What’s something we don’t already know about you from your LinkedIn profile?
Carol Coletta: I love to dance. I grew up dancing, as a little kid my mom sent me to ballet and tap. Occasionally I’ll take up an African dance class or something new. I also love social dance.
JN: The Memphis River Parks Partnerships aims to “trigger the transformative power of the river.” I love how this is framed. How do you harness this transformative power?
CC: Memphis has been trying to figure out how to connect to its river for 100 years. In Memphis, the Mississippi River is at its widest and wildest. The river rises and falls 50 feet a year. Memphis is also built on a high bluff, so the high bluff and rise and fall prevented Memphis from getting close to its river, but now we’re making great strides.
When I say the transformative power of the river, I think part of it is providing this new progressive front door to the city. Part of it is just connecting the city to the river and unleashing its economic and social value. The other part for me that is core to what we are doing is designing and managing the park as a place where people across the income spectrum can share the same space at the same time. That is very difficult to do. It’s very hard to find those places in America.
The park we are about to undertake is six blocks from the poorest zip code in Tennessee. So everything we do we look at through the lens of — are we able to attract people across the income, age, and race spectrums to this place at the same time? I believe that is the single most transformative thing we can do, because I believe democracy depends on it.
The park we are about to undertake is six blocks from the poorest zip code in Tennessee. So everything we do we look at through the lens of — are we able to attract people across the income, age, and race spectrums to this place at the same time? I believe that is the single most transformative thing we can do, because I believe democracy depends on it.
JN: You’ve worked with dozens of cities across the country in the various roles you’ve held. How do you look at agility and why do you think it is important for cities specifically?
CC: If anyone ever wondered if agility was a necessary quality for successful cities, all we’ve had to do is look at 2020! Talk about agility becoming a factor in demand.
We have to learn how to move much faster. Look at real estate projects that take years for approvals and permits; by the time you think you are at the end of a cycle of engagement, there’s a whole new group of people who say- I was never asked, I was never involved, I never had the opportunity to voice my opinion.
It’s hard to find the proper balance between community engagement and the ability to be agile. I think that’s a challenge for cities everywhere.
It’s hard to find the proper balance between community engagement and the ability to be agile. I think that’s a challenge for cities everywhere.
There’s also an inability to go back to the beginning and really question our ideas.
The policing discussion in America today is a great example. Do you think — crime is on the rise so we need more police to do this same thing? Or do you begin to think — crime is on the rise, maybe we don’t need to do more of what we’re doing, maybe we need to do something different, and what does different look like? Can it be done within the confines of policing or do we need to be thinking more broadly about solutions? Multiply that many, many times to consider the barriers to agility.
I’m listening to Barack Obama’s book “A Promised Land” and he’s talking about the fact that he loves policy. He was always talking about running for office and how he needed policies to run and his handlers were telling him he needed signatures on the petition and a platform with three things people would understand.
In a sound bite world how do you really explain the notion of reimagining anything we’ve lived with so long?
In a sound bite world how do you really explain the notion of reimagining anything we’ve lived with so long?
Our attention spans are very short. Obama talks about having town hall meetings and no one showing up. If you are working in a public, or private, or hybrid sphere like us, it’s such a challenge and we have to keep working to get it right.
JN: You raise a great point- public engagement is very time specific. If you take years to get something off the ground, by the time you implement it people may be hearing about the project for the first time because the previous champions are no longer present.
And with limited attention spans, being able to show people examples in real time so they can believe in an alternative future becomes even more important. More reasons cities benefit from agility!
You’ve worked with so many different officials and urban leaders, what do you think can help take down some of the barriers to agility?
CC: Public officials to me are like any other industry. There’s a herd mentality. If you can find the risk takers who are good communicators and if they want to get a lot of attention and are lifted up and then you have a force like the Bloomberg Foundation that can amplify those voices and efforts to help others gain the initiative to copy them, that’s probably the best way to go.
I’m very sympathetic with public officials. The public gives them no space to make a mistake, no failure room. They want “safe” and I get it. So how do you make the best choice the safest choice?
I’m very sympathetic with public officials. The public gives them no space to make a mistake, no failure room. They want “safe” and I get it. So how do you make the best choice the safest choice?
We’ve also seen that if changes are not codified or captured by commercial interest, they don’t necessarily stick. I think about the great job people in the transportation world have done to codify changes in alternative transportation and then teaching it by embedding it in university curriculums. It’s slow, but at least you have a new crop of people trained and educated in a different way with new codes. There’s an opportunity to make a real difference.
JN: Something we talk a lot about in Agile City Partners is the need to pivot. I’m curious to hear about examples in your projects where you had to respond to a certain challenge in a way that helped you deal with challenges differently in the future.
CC: I typically think things are going to move faster than they do. I’ll set up in my mind that we’ll do something for three years and then the government will respond or philanthropy will take this on in local communities.
Generally my goal with initiatives such as ArtPlace or Civic Commons is that ultimately these should be a public function. We need to do proof of concept and bring government officials and tax payers along so that we then have an appetite for these things.
But nothing moves as fast as you want it to. And for a lot of people, I’ve learned, that’s really not their goal. So many people do not believe in the power of government. They’ve accepted that the government, particularly local and state governments, have to be starved, so of course they can’t take on anything that is on the margins, like art and parks or anything that contributes to livability that is not “directly” (air quotes) impacting economic development or safety and security.
The odd thing about my career is that I’ve had to learn that things take longer than I expect, so your strategy has to pivot if what you really want to do is develop a public appetite for the things you believe are important.
The odd thing about my career is that I’ve had to learn that things take longer than I expect, so your strategy has to pivot if what you really want to do is develop a public appetite for the things you believe are important.
JN: It’s a bit of a marathon, right?
CC: It is a marathon!
It’s funny because when we’re talking about pivoting, we’re talking about making sudden moves and going in a different direction, whereas my pivot has been to slow down. I’ve pivoted to patience perhaps.
It’s funny because when we’re talking about pivoting, we’re talking about making sudden moves and going in a different direction, whereas my pivot has been to slow down. I’ve pivoted to patience perhaps.
JN: These are good lessons, because we often think things will happen right away but building advocacies or creating the appetite as you put it takes time. So being able to pivot in the strategy while keeping an eye on the goal can be an exercise in patience.
CC: Sometimes I think I’ve gone through life as this person who wants to yell “The emperor has no clothes!”
A woman said something to me the other day that I thought was just priceless “I’ve learned I’m not alone, I’m just in the wrong room,” and I thought yes, that’s my life! You just described my resume. So for some of us it can also be a matter of creating our own room.
JN: What are you excited about these days? What should be on our radar?
CC: I think we should pay more attention to practitioners. I was on a panel earlier. It was run by a think-tank and there were two academicians and one practitioner and it felt so out of touch to me. Practitioners are the people on the ground trying to move things every day. They are trying to move progress while juggling the everyday tasks like in our case, with Memphis River Parks Partnerships, figuring out how to clean up 250 acres of riverfront, trying to change peoples’ behavior, trying to keep it safe, trying keep it green, etc.
The risk takers and innovators have to develop more appreciation for the practitioners and need to be humble enough to learn from them, see what problems they are really trying to solve and understand what has worked, what hasn’t, and how those efforts can be linked together.
The risk takers and innovators have to develop more appreciation for the practitioners and need to be humble enough to learn from them, see what problems they are really trying to solve and understand what has worked, what hasn’t, and how those efforts can be linked together.
JN: What are some of the issues you work with practitioners on that you think deserve more attention?
CC: One issue for us is how to deal more humanely with homelessness. Also, how do we enable the development of familiarity and development of exchange to cause people to speak more to each other or play together? We see people of all shapes, sizes, and ages using the riverfront as their outdoor gym, how can we link up with health providers? Kids of all ages are very untethered- how might we provide opportunities to organize them to gain skills and do something worthwhile? How do we work with police- how can you listen to them and get them to listen to us so we can do something different? Same with transportation. There’s a big fast road that runs between downtown and the riverfront, how do we slow it down, what is reasonable, how can we get people on the same page?
These are things you think about every day when you come to work but finding the time and network to create those relationships that result in something is the challenge. So we have to work with lots of practitioners across the issue spectrum because it all comes to ground in the park.
It takes time, it takes finding the right people who are willing to engage, building the relationships in the midst of the pandemic and finding a little extra money to move it along.
It takes time, it takes finding the right people who are willing to engage, building the relationships in the midst of the pandemic and finding a little extra money to move it along.
JN: What are new ways to have continuing conversations with the people that you serve?
CC: Watch what people do. Watch carefully. Sometimes observing what people do beats conversation.
Watch what people do. Watch carefully. Sometimes observing what people do beats conversation.
We regularly conduct and record informal intercept interviews with users. Our rangers use diaries to record how people use the property. And there’s nothing like having a cute dog to get a conversation started, even behind masks.
Then there is Zoom. Our very best public meetings (and best attended) have occurred over Zoom. It’s a method we will continue to use long after the pandemic is over.
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Carol Coletta is president and CEO of the Memphis River Parks Partnership. She is leading the relaunch of a nonprofit to develop, manage and program six miles of riverfront and five park districts along the Mississippi River.
She leads a $50+ million collaboration of national and local foundations, local nonprofits and governments to Reimagine the Civic Commons in five cities. It is the first comprehensive demonstration of how a connected set of civic assets — a civic commons — can yield increased and more widely share prosperity for cities and neighborhoods.
She was a senior fellow for The Kresge Foundation; vice president of Community and National Initiatives for the Knight Foundation; served as executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design; and, was the host and producer of the nationally syndicated weekly public radio show Smart City.
Julia Nebrija is a Co-Founder of Agile City Partners. She has over a decade of leadership experience advancing urban development agendas in the Philippines across grass roots, government, and international organizations.
She worked as an urban specialist with the World Bank before serving as the Assistant General Manager of Operations for the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, Program Manager in the Office of the Secretary for the Philippines Department of Budget and Management, and most recently, as Chief Operating Officer of the Philippine Japan Initiative for Clark.
She specializes in conceptualizing transformative initiatives through participatory methods and executing with results by building public-private partnerships. She speaks regularly as a resource person on placemaking and inclusive mobility. Her articles have been featured in Design Anthology, CNN Style, Domus, Esquire, and BluPrint.
