The Chattanooga process
Spending four weeks in Chattanooga, a city in the South of America, in the state of Tennessee, left me with a lot more knowledge on the city’s history than I would ever come to need, but also a lot more faith on what the citizens of a city can achieve if they join forces for the improvement of their hometown than I could ever gather, had I been stationed in a different place.
In October of 1969, Walter Cronkite, an American broadcast journalist, announced to the rest of the country that Chattanooga, Tennessee had been named the “Dirtiest City in America” by the Environmental Protection Agency.Since then a lot has changed.
In 2015, the city got first place in “The 16 Best Places to Live in the U.S.: 2015” by Outside magazine, one of the top 10 family vacation destinations (“Family Fun” magazine); one of the world’s great cities (NPR’s “Morning Edition”); and was named one of America’s most walkable cities (“Walking” magazine).
Spending a month there, visiting organisations and meeting locals, it was obvious that change was not a simple process.
Locals tell me that the transformation started in 2010, when Chattanooga got the Gig — one-gigabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service that’s tax-payer owned and available to every home and business at affordable rates. That’s around 50 times faster than most of the rest of the Western Hemisphere. — Outside magazine
However, the foundation for the revitalization of the downtown area had been laid a few years back, in particular on 1992 with the opening of the Chattanooga aquarium that connected, once again, the city with the Tennessee river. The need for a change was a seed planted a long time ago in the heads of the citizens, who were searching for a way to reclaim their city. However, until a a group of architectural students from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, suggested the idea of an aquarium near the downtown waterfront, no major action had been taken.
Its opening spurred an unprecedented growth and projects such as the renovation of the Walnut walking bridge and the opening of Coolidge Park begun taking place. Those initiatives transformed the look of he city, helped the tourism, boosted the economy and helped the people of Chattanooga come of their houses and take advantage of what their city had to offer.
A very important lesson in this achievement can be found in the story of the funding of the aquarium, a part of which, was scheduled to be publicly funded by donations from the citizens. When after a point, the donations dropped and it seemed impossible that the necessary funds would be gathered for the construction of the aquarium, tthe director of the project decided that the best course of action would be to just start the construction and make people see their resolve to create and ensure a better future for the city. As soon as the people saw the setting up of the construction they believed in the vision and they started donating again.
When it comes to projects, we can’t always wait for people to believe in us and for circumstances to be ideal. Sometimes we should just storm ahead and hope that we will blow away the people and their doubts. The correct time is an unrealistic concept and major impacts can’t wait for the world to be ready for them. We just got to do, what we got to do and hope it will work.
