Tanzer: Gainesville’s invisible cities

OPINION

BY KIM TANZER

Some years ago, accomplished author, Italo Calvino, published a short book titled Invisible Cities. It described, in exquisite detail, dozens of strange, very particular cities. In the end (spoiler alert), the entire book was a description of Venice, Italy, written from different perspectives.

Taking this concept as a point of departure, in preparation for developing the Depot Area Master Plan, my colleague, Brad Guy, and I invited Gainesville residents to join us during their lunch hour to make maps of Gainesville’s “invisible cities.” Over the summer, following an announcement in a Gainesville newspaper, random Gainesvillians joined us to create maps one day each week.

I learned a great deal about the city I had lived in for more than a decade. People created maps they titled, “city of children,” “city of neighborhoods,” or, more sardonically, “city of waste.” Each map showed Gainesville from a particular point of view, and I was surprised to learn all these invisible cities co-existed within the one I inhabited.

I have thought of this project again recently, for several reasons. First, continuing the trajectory of my recent writings, I hope to help my neighbors envision Gainesville’s physical form—a necessary beginning for community-supported planning decisions. Second, recent City budget challenges have left me reflecting on the various “pots” of money available to public decision-makers, and how these funds are used. The recent changes in GRU governance, and the reliance on UF students’ activity fees to fund the City’s bus service, are two cases in point.

While we used the poetic framework of “invisible cities” to learn about our city’s assets, this process is also called “asset mapping.” It is a common part of city planning processes. Whether you prefer to imagine invisible cities or inventory community assets, I hope you will follow along as I identify some of our collective public resources. These resources are paid for, and maintained by, members of the community using public and private funds, along with abundant “sweat equity.” As we think about our future, they reflect our historic priorities and our financial commitments.

Let’s start with the obvious assets—those managed by individual governing bodies using dedicated tax increments. These include City and County entities, the Alachua County School Board properties and programs, the Alachua County Library district, as well as special projects managed by the Wild Spaces/Public Places supervisory board. These dedicated funding streams pay for our public schools, libraries, local roads, public safety, fire protection, potable and wastewater, stormwater management, parks, etc. Each of these services takes place in a physical “asset” like a library or fire station, or on a campus, like a park or utility site. 

There are also significant community assets that do not pay local taxes but equally are part of our shared spatial maps of the city. The University of Florida, Santa Fe College, North Florida Regional Medical Center, UF Health, and our community’s hundreds of places of worship pay no local taxes. Leaving aside, for now, the age-old arguments about their lack of tax contributions, they are major assets to the community. Their libraries, sports facilities, and museums, along with the many public meeting spaces in places of worship, are all part of our daily lives. Most keep us physically and mentally healthy, and some help when we are ill. Decisions about their facilities and programming are made by their various independent boards of trustees, all responsible to their own stakeholders.

We also have hundreds of commercial enterprises—restaurants, breweries, gyms, clothing, shoe, book, hardware, and pet supplies stores—each playing important roles in the lives of their constituents. In these cases, private owners and workers created each physical asset and its continuing value, with no outlay of public funds.

We also have ephemeral assets, in the form of annual community-wide festivals. The Santa Fe Spring Arts Festival, the Fifth Avenue Festival, the Friends of the Library Booksale, the Kanapaha Spring Garden Festival, The Fest Music Festival, and hundreds of athletic events where residents participate or watch from the audience, come quickly to mind. Each of these requires financial resources, a physical location, and huge teams of volunteers to accomplish, at virtually no cost to our larger community.

Now, imagine a map layer for each of the community assets I’ve just described. So far, that map does not exist, and in most cases decisions about each system of assets are made within a silo (for example, decisions about libraries vs. schools vs. fire stations). How might we recognize and value the collective contribution these assets make today? How can we begin to imagine them as a dense interconnected network, rather than individual entities vying for apparently scarce resources?

My key point is that, for a town our size, Gainesville has extraordinary resources, but too often we duplicate efforts rather than sharing assets. I have two suggestions to change this unhelpful dynamic.

First, we can make ONE community map, with dozens of layers. Alachua County and the City of Gainesville both have functional interactive maps, but both miss some basic information. Plus, between them we effectively have two competing interactive map systems. We can combine resources (personnel, IT costs) and create one exhaustive interactive map. We might begin by adding new layers for public schools, libraries, emergency services, and parks.

Second, let’s imagine our community both pragmatically and poetically. The “city of children” would include all public and private schools, plus afterschool opportunities and daycare centers. The “city of readers” would include all public libraries, but also bookstores, the Civic Media Center, and the libraries in public schools, colleges, and universities. The “city of food” would include grocery stores, farmers’ markets, food banks, restaurants, the East Side Culinary Institute, and the UF Field & Fork project. The “city of health” would include hospitals, doctors’ offices, affiliated therapies like acupuncture, martial arts studios, and walking and biking trails, among other things.

This poetic re-visioning focuses on how our community uses our assets, rather than on who controls them. It also might help us consider “all sources” of our community’s budget, allowing us to see where we have financial redundancies, as well as gaps in funding.

These maps would help us all envision our community-wide “budget” spatially. Along with other basic layers—terrain, roadways, iconic places, built fabric—we could begin to share a common understanding of Gainesville. Then we could begin to collectively envision our future and take steps to plan for it.

We could imagine future scenarios: how does the “city of children” interact with the “city of sports” or the “city of parks” with the “city of music”? The vibrant community we all desire may be within our grasp. We just need to make it visible to ourselves and to each other.

Kim Tanzer lives in Gainesville. She is a former UF architecture professor, who was also dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

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