Creating Common Ground
A key strategy for revitalizing the riverfront in Memphis
In three short years, Memphis’ Reimagining Civic Commons initiative has transformed a 6-city-block area adjacent to downtown and the Mississippi river called “The Fourth Bluff” into a series of connected, vibrant and dynamic civic spaces. These public spaces have outperformed expectations by breaking down barriers between Memphians, encouraging civic engagement, fostering environmental sustainability and creating new value for Memphis.
Memphis is a city that has long been overlooked and undervalued by outsiders. For decades, the poverty rate has stayed stubbornly high and, even as progress has been made against racial segregation, the separation of people into primarily low-income neighborhoods or primarily high-income neighborhoods remains entrenched.
Compounding these trends, there are too few places where Memphians of different backgrounds can come together and share space as equals. That’s why a focus on creating opportunities for interaction is at the core of the work in the Fourth Bluff. Every design, program or communications decision that is made is interrogated as to whether it appeals across race, income and age.
In 2016, when this work began, the Fourth Bluff was little used and was not on the mental map of most Memphians. Today, there are multiple new sites that are drawing people together: the formerly-overlooked Mississippi River Park is now River Garden, the most popular park on the riverfront; nearby, Memphis Park is now Fourth Bluff Park, reinvigorated as an inclusive space without its monuments to a divided Confederate past. Just to the west of these spaces the formerly unseen and largely unused Memphis Harbor on the Mississippi is welcoming recreational kayakers; a couple of blocks south the historic Cossitt Library is being remade with the help of comprehensive community engagement. And all of these civic commons sites sit at the center of a new, connected five-mile walking and biking trail that connects people to each other and neighborhoods across the city to the riverfront.
Iterate with purpose
This success did not occur by chance, but was instead the product of an intensive focus on achieving defined outcomes coordinated among a cross-sector team. The civic commons team — made up of community members, non-profit leaders, philanthropic funders, parks and recreation staff and local elected officials — began by focusing on programs designed to test what types of activities appealed across age, race and income.
The Fourth Bluff Ice Rink popped-up in the winter of 2016 as a limited time pilot in Mississippi River Park. In its one month of operation, thousands of people came downtown to skate, cook s’mores and have fun. The following summer, the pop-up park RiverPlay brought basketball courts, ping-pong, roller-skating, yard games and more to Riverside Drive just adjacent to the park.
These programs brought Memphians to the river, many for the first time, but they also offered an opportunity to gather data, test ideas and prototype public space management models before making permanent changes. The quick surge of activity in a formerly overlooked and underused site helped to demonstrate the eagerness of Memphians to enjoy these types of activities and to build the appetite for a more permanent park.
That park is River Garden.
It’s become a go-to place in Memphis: the park is successfully attracting more people than ever before and average visitor numbers have increased more than 180 percent. Results of intercept surveys among visitors show that the parks users hail from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and from a diverse geography of more than 40 different zip codes.
Just above River Garden is Memphis Park, long hindered by the looming presence of a Jefferson Davis statue, replica civil war cannons and other Confederate monuments. In 2017, Mayor Jim Strickland’s administration successfully executed a complex legal maneuver that resulted in the statue being removed.
In 2018, Memphis Park experienced a cathartic moment of rebirth with the pop-up Diner-en-Blanc event. Thousands of revelers traveled to the park to break bread and line dance in the newly clean space. Although the monuments were now all gone, the park remained in a compromised state. In 2019, a light-touch remake removed all remaining statue infrastructure, added new trees, furniture and pathways through the site. The newly renamed Fourth Bluff Park is ready to welcome a diversity of Memphis.
As more and more people cross paths at the Fourth Bluff, the civic commons is bolstering a sense of shared identity, creating connections among people of diverse backgrounds, building empathy and advancing a more equitable Memphis.
Connected to the city
The Fourth Bluff sits on Memphis’ historic promenade, a five-block area of riverfront property that the city’s co-founder, John Overton, deeded to the public in perpetuity.
While the Fourth Bluff is equidistant between two major trails: Wolf River Greenway to the north and the Big River Crossing to the south, in the past, walking or biking along the riverfront was difficult with disconnected pathways and little signage. River Line, opened on the same day as River Garden, completed those connections.
The newly connected 5-mile trail sits at the heart of a regionally significant trail system that stretches into neighboring Arkansas and east all the way to the edge of Shelby County. And it has meant a significant and noticeable increase in activity up and down the riverfront. The number of people crossing the Big River Crossing (a mile-long pedestrian and bike bridge over the Mississippi) increased by about 20 percent following completion of the trail. The city’s bike share system sees its biggest user numbers at multiple stations located along the trail.
As well as facilitating connections to the Fourth Bluff, our collaborative team has also worked to support connections between the assets in the Fourth Bluff. With increased activity generated by the new assets, ensuring that pedestrians are prioritized becomes even more important. Short-, medium- and long-term pedestrian safety interventions on nearby streets have been identified and we are working alongside city engineers to appropriately sequence and phase new connections.
Nature at the center
Both River Garden and Fourth Bluff Park focus on bringing nature back to the heart of the city. The resilient meadows that surround River Garden include more than 30 different types of plants, grasses and wildflowers chosen to ensure blooms throughout the year. The park’s landscaping serves as an example of how to integrate low-maintenance native plantings for resiliency and sustainability, and to support ecosystem development.
River Garden is also home to a diversity of species (a hawk and a bobcat have been spotted in the park). Free field guides to the flora and fauna of the park allow visitors to take a self-guided tour. Regular programs are designed to bring Memphians closer to nature. “Nature Weeks” are hosted during school vacations and welcome families to the park each day for educational games and crafts focused on different natural aspects of the park.
The Fourth Bluff has given Memphians an opportunity to access a natural asset that wasn’t so much overlooked as unknown. Despite Memphis’ location on the Mississippi River, access to the city’s harbor was limited to those able to afford boats, though the harbor is shielded from the Mississippi’s strong currents by nearby Mud Island and offers a slack-water harbor suitable for beginners and ideal for exploration by canoe and kayak.
As part of civic commons programming, daily kayak rentals from the Fourth Cup in River Garden, as well as monthly Full Moon Kayak events and periodic harbor cleanups have given thousands of people an opportunity to get on the water for the first time. During the summer of 2019, more than 2,000 people went out to paddle on the harbor.
Built by community
Deep community engagement runs through the work of the Fourth Bluff. Cossitt library staff asked users for their vision of the future. While traditional users’ feedback was valuable, they quickly realized that to attract new visitors, they also needed to hear from potential visitors. The team reached outside the library’s four walls and showed up at food truck rodeos, farmers markets and more.
Even though the library is under construction, library staff have maintained a “pop-up” physical location to give constituents an opportunity to continue to engage with the future of the library — and to become volunteers. When the library re-opens later this year, Cossitt staff will have a lengthy list of excited volunteer advocates, stewards and community members who can lead programming onsite.
Likewise, Memphis River Parks Partnership counts more than 60 Ambassadors who donate their time and talent to activate and steward all riverfront assets. For RiverPlay 2.0, more than 200 volunteers came together to move the installation from Riverside Drive to a new location half a mile away.
A new standard
In a city like Memphis, resources are scarce. The civic commons project marked a watershed moment for those of us who care about public space, giving organizations a new way of working together that was collaborative rather than adversarial. Instead of competing for funds, partner organizations asked together how to deliver the best assets for Memphis. This allowed organizations to set ambitious goals, and to test and iterate strategies towards those goals. The collaborative approach meant that the organizations were able to leverage additional partners and resources to stretch and sustain civic commons investments.
One of the key shifts from traditional thinking is a commitment to the highest quality design and the creation of a new staff-led model for management and stewardship.
High-quality design is essential to attracting people to a space. River Garden uses spectacular design in a way that considers how different groups of people use it, all while facilitating mixing by clustering key amenities. More than 50 percent of the park’s visitors are within conversational distance of each other.
Managing a public space can mean much more than keeping it well maintained and free of litter and graffiti — it’s also about providing great experiences. River Garden’s maintenance staff became River Garden Rangers. All rangers collaborated to build a set of norms — a playbook for what they needed to do, what they needed to know, and how they could interact with visitors at the park.
As a result of the norms, not only do rangers pick up litter and perform required daily maintenance tasks, but they also welcome visitors, pro-actively ask if they can improve visitors experience and are knowledgeable about programs, events and surrounding downtown businesses. They are front-line staff committed to not just maintaining the space, but providing an excellent experience for all visitors.
A new future
The Fourth Bluff’s renaissance is mirrored in a broader downtown renaissance nearby. The Downtown Memphis Commission estimates that there are currently more than $4 billion worth of development projects currently underway.
The work of the civic commons has elevated the importance of civic assets and public space to building demand for these developments. Increasingly, developers are integrating public space amenities into their projects and choosing to sequence investments adjacent to existing nodes of activity.
The riverfront itself is also midway through a transformation that has drawn national media attention and even been featured on Good Morning America as a booster for tourism as well as an asset for locals. The riverfront’s biggest and most accessible park, Tom Lee Park, is being re-designed and built with key learnings from the civic commons baked in.
As Memphis continues to change and see more commercial and private investment, the work of the civic commons is ensuring that the needs of the public are kept to the forefront. A focus on key community assets as “anchors” in Memphis’ first comprehensive plan for 40 years is an encouraging start, but unlocking the power of our collective commons will require a sustained focus and a commitment to collaboration and innovation.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, William Penn Foundation and local partners.
