Fumbling Towards Renaissance

Where to start? Perhaps with the basics. As things currently stand, commerce is a complicated thing from the urban POV. It seems so many of the folks who've chosen to live in inner/center cities look down upon the crass commercialism of suburbia. And are highly suspect of its intrusion into the inner-city (particularly if it is brought by "developers"). Which makes me wonder, sometimes, how much some people grasp the crucial role commerce has always played in urban life. It is, essentially, the key ingredient, as I consider in this piece originally published in Knoxville's Metro Pulse

Revival, then Renaissance
From the Dark Ages to Downtown Knoxville

Read a little about downtown redevelopment and you’ll stumble across the word “Renaissance” a lot (remember “Renaissance Knoxville?”). No mystery why. An age of great art, great architecture and, most of all, great cities, it’s easy to see why writers are anxious to paste images of the European Renaissance onto efforts at injecting new life into American downtowns that, like Knoxville’s, have been moribund for much too long. But I’m starting to think that, by invoking the era of Da Vinci and Michelangelo, we may be reaching for the wrong metaphor, or at least getting ahead of ourselves.
As dead as many of America’s urban centers supposedly are, it’s not the first time in Western history that the cities have hit rock bottom. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, most of Europe’s cities were a hollow shell of their former selves. Populations shrank, cattle grazed among the ruins of the Roman Forum (history’s first brownfield was, oddly, a pasture…), and cities would have died altogether if not for the presence of institutions such as the court, the church and monasteries. “In short,” writes Sydney Painter in A History of the Middle Ages, “...although the ancient towns lacked real urban life, they were centers of both lay and ecclesiastical administration.”

The missing ingredient was, largely, commerce. It is no coincidence that the primary centers of the Renaissance were also the medieval world’s principal centers of trade and industry: northern Italy and the Flemish and Dutch low country. The Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries was grand, producing profound works of art and science, but it would never have occurred but for what scholars call the “Commercial Revolution” of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.

What does any of this have to do with Knoxville? Well, consider those dying cities of the dark ages that were mere “centers of administration” and take their institutions of court, church and monastery and replace them with government, hospitals, social services and the university—sound familiar? Sure, downtown’s residential market is booming, and a select few inner-city neighborhoods are becoming gentrified, but without an accompanying revival of commerce, those efforts will eventually prove futile (even somewhat feudal if they remain protected enclaves of wealth among overwhelming poverty).

That’s one reason why I was encouraged by the recent announcement that Mast General Stores, a regional chain that’s participated in several—dare I say, downtown renaissances—is opening a location on Gay Street. But as difficult as reviving Gay Street retail will be, it’s hardly the toughest challenge Knoxville faces. Downtown may have been dead from a retail standpoint, but it has never totally disappeared off the community’s radarscope in the way that much of the center city has—thought of, if at all, as a domesticated third-world that’s part charity case, part crime scene.

Yet there’s hope for commerce of the legal sort, even in the inner city. Consider this month’s issue of Inc. magazine, which features the street-smart magazine’s annual profile of “The Inner City 100,” a list of 100 thriving companies located in some of the nation’s most struggling neighborhoods. And I do mean thriving. Compiled by the Harvard Business School’s Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, the 100 companies on this year’s list—in industries as diverse as manufacturing, software development, retail, data storage and management, even charter schools—boast four-year revenue growth ranging from 151 percent to more than 7,000 percent, and revenues of as much as $227 million (for The Piston Group, a 370-employee auto-parts manufacturer founded in 1996 in one of Detroit’s toughest neighborhoods).

But don’t let those numbers fool you. Sure, inner-city companies may enjoy advantages such as the availability of labor and unmet local market demands, but business isn’t always easy. Not only are there perceptions of crime and an under-skilled workforce to overcome, there are issues with bureaucratic red tape and the occasional bit of misguided activism from those still stuck viewing the inner-city through third-world lenses. For example, a 45-employee development and construction firm in Cleveland (No. 92 on the list), had to forego expanding its offices onto the vacant lot next door after it encountered fierce opposition from a charity seeking to build a homeless shelter on the same site.

So, I guess I’m saying that while it may not be as sexy as the Mona Lisa, or as good for the soul as the Sistine Chapel, when dreaming of downtown Knoxville’s renaissance, let’s not forget the crucial role of commerce.