Held for the 62nd year – this time in Atlanta, Georgia, in the USA – from 7 to 9 September, this event is considered to be the leading annual gathering of downtown thought leaders. It had a theme this year focusing on “progress through partnerships”. Attending on behalf of the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID) were the organisation’s CEO, Tasso Evangelinos, and Communications manager, Carola Koblitz.
Explains Tasso: “Since last year, we’ve been sending two delegates to attend this event, as there is so much going on and so much of it happens at the same time. Carola and I were able to ‘divide and conquer’, with me attending the sessions and tours that dealt largely with operational issues around urban management and safety and security, and Carola attending those dealing with social development challenges and the theory of placemaking.”
Speaking about the venue, Carola notes: “The downtown of Atlanta, where the conference was held, received an urban ‘makeover’ 20 years ago when the 1996 Centennial Olympics were held, and this downtown is therefore inspiringly beautiful. But is also incredibly empty! Hundreds of thousands of office workers arrive here each day in their single-occupancy vehicles, drive straight into their parking lots, and never seem to come down to street level at all. We have so much more vibrancy and life in our own Cape Town Central City. It was the biggest thing I learnt from this year’s event: you can have a really lovely downtown, but if you don’t have people at street level, moving through public spaces, you actually just have a ghost town, even if you are a CBD.”
Atlanta is also spatially a very divided city, existing primarily of cluster CBDs linked through thick forested areas by highways and a railway line. Adds Tasso: “As part of the IDA offering, I visited a number of these clusters – in particular the 'uptown' Buckhead district and the Midtown district, where Atlanta’s singular largest problem is how to join them back together to form a cohesive whole.
“The city has enormous and very ambitious projects on the go – creating beautiful urban spaces from disused railway lines and placing enormous amounts of interactive art in public spaces – but these areas really seem very underutilised and the urban sprawl in Atlanta is vast. Even though there is a good public transport network known as the Marta (rail- and bus-based) between the different clusters, the car is still king. Atlanta’s entire economy thrives on it being home to over a thousand large international corporates, including Coca-Cola, CNN and Delta Airlines, so the economy is strong. But it does lack a certain feeling of community.”
Talks attended by the CCID team ranged from the challenges of nighttime economies (“Something we are really needing to strategise on in our own CBD”, notes Tasso), the role of residential in managing downtowns, community policing, effective research gathering and strategies, models for affordable housing and even to why downtowns and retailers need to pay attention to Pokémon GO.
Says Carola: “It’s also a key opportunity for us to hear what some of the most competitive city improvement districts in the USA and Canada are doing: there are more than 2 500 organisations such as ours in North American alone, employing some 100 000 people.”
“The networking and exchange of ideas that goes on at an event like this is incredibly inspiring,” says Tasso, “but it also makes us back in Cape Town really appreciate how much we are able to achieve and how proud we can be of what we do.”