KCCI: Tallahassee

6 Comments Add your own

• 1. Gabriel  |  April 16, 2007 at 9:14 am

  Hey would just like to comment on the results from the group.

  1. Green Town: I am a believer. It is important to recognize that FSU is the big player in Tallahassee when it comes to greenovation and research. I truly think that Leon County and Tallahassee should team up a build a first class Research Park like that of the Research Triangle in North Carolina.

  2. Arts: The performing arts center is just as important as the film festival. Having a film festival in FSU’s backyard is an amazing idea. I say take it a step further. Work with FSU to get more arts downtown, whether it is theatre in the park or music recitals. Also encourage FSU students to play downtown, like they do in Aspen, CO in the summertime. Throughout the town young performers in groups of 4 and 5 play in the open air and it is quite amazing. Also, encourage FSU to move classrooms with regard to the arts in building spaces downtown. Savannah College of Art and Design have done wonders with rejuvenating Savannah and it’s core. FSU could have art openings, theatre, dance, and musical performances, along with the film festival downtown making our core vibrant and desirable! Get FSU downtown!

  3. Gaines St.: Great vision, get the students, artist, cafes, bookstores, restaurants, and housing in and keep the corporations out.

  4. Business Incubators: no need to look any further than Gainesville and UF. They have a biotech incubator. FSU and Tallahassee need to create an incubator based in a world class research park and research hospital.

  Think Big!

• 2. Chris Whitt  |  April 21, 2007 at 11:47 am

  When I see the idea for Gaines St, I think of places like Collegetown in Ithaca, NY, Guadalupe St in Austin, State Street in Madison, even University Avenue in Gainesville (as much as it pains me to admit it). With 60,000 plus students in town, on certain fall Saturdays over 100,000 football fans in Tallahassee, plus the lure of the capital of a growing state 4 blocks away, Gaines Street should be a slam dunk as far as an attractor. Yet so far, other than the mom and pop shops in All Saints (which would probably be displaced at the first hint of success) all we’ve seen or heard from is Wal-Mart and a mid range commuter hotel for government officials. Where is the push for places for people to live, to congregate, to be a community?

• 3. Thorbjoern Mann  |  May 4, 2007 at 11:04 am

  About making a ‘vibrant’ urban environment (or business environment, or arts environment…)

  The notion underlying the recurrent debates about revitalizing downtown or making the city more vibrant, attractive to business — high-tech business, clean business, green business, small business — or tourists, seems to be that some place or constellation, or environment can be put together much like a machine, one which can then be ‘jumpstarted’ and will then run to everybody’s satisfaction. An artifact, in other words. The problem with this is that artifacts, by definition, are not alive, that they will at best be able to imitate life to some extent, but cannot sustain themselves like living organisms to be able to adapt, to change with changing conditions, even to grow, — (growth being an avowed goal of most such efforts which deserves some scrutiny on its own.)

  Words such as ‘revitalization’ suggest that what we are really looking for, or should be looking for, is the emergence of something more like a living organism, something more associated with notions like homeostasis, adaptation, sustainablility, stable or adaptable equilibrium. And the magic awe and beauty of life. At the very least, given the many efforts of questionable success we have seen in the past, it may be worthwhile looking at the problem from this somewhat different perspective.

  What distinguishes life forms from artefacts? Remarkable levels of organization, structure, order, form and purpose-efficiency can be observed in both. But these are achieved in artefacts by the application of external forces to the material they consist of, while life forms generate that order from internal forces, tendencies, principles. Sometimes — consider the example of supersaturated chemical solutions that don’t start the expected crystallizing process until some actual starter crystals are thrown into them as catalysts — ‘life processes’ depend and can be influenced by knowing the proper solution and putting the right catalysts in place. So if we want to create — or better, let processes like urban life or vital business economies emerge, it follows that we should understand those internal forces, the internal principles of organization that underlie each process, and the kinds of catalysts needed to let each one begin and evolve into self-sustaining organisms.

  So what are the inherent driving forces of, say, vibrant urban life? And the ‘primordial soup’ conditions in which they can begin to act?

  Some candidates:

  Buyers, sellers (marketplace) — of goods, services (the business perspective)

  Individuals looking for food and mating partners (the life/procreation view of life)

  A more general view: Individuals looking for opportunities — both above perspectives but expanded to all kinds of other activities: playing, creating, learning, getting information, entertainment, or simply opportunities to become somebody new, more exciting, more attractive, more successful. Or even just looking for interesting, enjoyable occasions their lives might consist of. This has three components: occasions, the places where they occur, and image (who do we want to become?) Urban places must offer places where occasions might occur, but also the backdrop — the formal design — that allows the desired image of place, occasion and participant to emerge (in the individual’s and others’ minds).

  Places must allow people to engage occasions, even invite them (by signaling in some understandable way) to such occasions. More: they must allow people to create new occasions. The forms of invitations for this are more difficult to understand and have not been studied nearly as much as the means to prevent undesirable occasions (crime, muggings, accidents etc.) So there’s a lot of work to do. Similarly, the way the design of places can signal and invite the emergence of certain desirable images, even invite people to construct new imagery out of the forms, shapes, colors, arrangements that are there, are not yet well enough understood. The current accepted stance is pretty much restricted to two opposing positions: to resort to ‘traditional’ imagery for comfort and reassurance, and the call for ‘new’ visual imagery. Both do not even begin to address the question of whe we really ought to be (like) and what kind of world and urban environment we want to construct for ourselves to live in.

  These questions may seem somewhat remote from the current business-plan concerns of the KCCI initiatives that laudably aim at ‘getting something done’ and for some groups so far seem to prove quite successful. But if we are to take the challenge of the ‘creative town’ (which I would prefer over the ever so slightly elitist-sounding ‘class’) seriously, it is questions like these that we should identify and work on.

• 4. Robyn  |  October 1, 2007 at 3:32 pm

  I’d like to see FSU step forward and offer buses to pick up FSU football fans. The buses could pick up at different locations around town (the mall, the library etc.) and give rides to the big games, keeping cars off campus and cut down on expenses for traffic control and save gas!!! Go Green FSU.

• 5. Andrea  |  February 22, 2008 at 3:54 pm

  Where are any recylcing plants in Tallahassee?

• 6. Anonymous  |  May 21, 2008 at 12:50 pm

  I appreciate the efforts. Our town needs help. We are economically depressed compared to towns our size. Out city government has few funds to incent industry to relocate here. We need to issue economic development bonds or else we become a big retail center and home for retirees.

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