The Surprising Market Potential For Going Mainstream

In this essay I’m going to touch on the proportion of the traveling public that prefers chain stores, which is, coincidentally, the same proportion drawn to mainstream attractions.

This proportion of travelers are the aim of communities that seem bent on surrendering differentiation and sense of place to generic development and mainstream facilities and events.

Surveys have shown repeatedly over the past 20 years that residents of Durham, North Carolina, where I live, identify a museum of local history as the community’s #1 cultural facility need.

In part, this may be due to Durham residents historically placing a higher value on authenticity of sense of place.  Studies show that on the continuum of authenticity, attractions such as history museums rank as among the most authentic.

But here, too, some developers, as they have across the country, often use their considerable clout with local government to push instead for mainstream facilities, which are rated in surveys of the general public as the least authentic on that spectrum.

A majority of communities long ago surrendered distinctiveness driven by a relentless envy to mimic other places and, in doing so, made them indistinguishable as just one of many.

As Seth Godin noted in a recent post entitled, The Average, “Progress is almost always a series of choices, an inexorable move toward mediocrity, or its opposite.”

Even among advocates for proposed local history museums such as Durham’s, it has not been uncommon to even hear some advocates dismissing more authentic aspects such as artifacts and collections while promoting digital alternatives.

Ironically this would, in the view of many, make museums, well, less authentic.

Museologists such as digital specialist Dr. Ross Parry view digital not as the end of older technologies such as display cases and labels, for instance, but as an extension.

In fact, Dr. Parry has contended for at least the last few years that museums are already “post digital,” meaning that this technology is now “normative” or mainstream.

It has become what University of Chicago cultural policy analyst Gwendolyn Rugg terms as “assimilated, embedded, naturalized.”

In fact, I am persuaded by an essay that was posted here in America about the same time as Dr. Parry’s declaration which eloquently makes the case that on the authenticity continuum, which is always relative, artifacts will always be more authentic.

Unfortunately, over the eight decades since a museum of local Durham history was first proposed, many priceless artifacts and even potential collections have vanished.

Communities face forces that likewise see development as the end of one thing and the beginning of another.  This is why they so easily dismiss nearly temporal place-based assets as they replace them with mainstream palaces.

It isn’t just a portion of developers and architects as well as chambers of commerce, destination marketers and officials which have become mainstream sycophants, but especially financial institutions and chains that hedge loans by insisting on cookie-cutter developments.

Ironically, when it comes to appealing to travelers as well as residents who are stayers vs. just boomers, these mainstreamers are forcing a majority of communities now into mediocrity and a future with very limited appeal.

So what do the numbers say about which is most precious and popular, authentic or mainstream, when it comes to positioning a community to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development, which was my now-concluded career?

Is it really just “six of one or half dozen of the other” or do mainstreamers have the advantage they seem to think?

According to studies, about 1/5th of travelers actually prefer to frequent experiences at the less authentic end of the scale such as mainstream events, sports or performing arts.

This compares to 73% who prefer real or authentic experiences such as museums, historic sites and natural areas.

Visitors are also very clear when it comes to what is authentic. 

The data show that destinations and attractions considered real, authentic and genuine have “historical truth.”  These are places that are “original in origin or design,” places that are “natural” and “unique,” “non-commercial.”

Researchers have also found that authenticity is also not a moniker easily attained.  For example, fewer than half perceive the beach or science centers or aquariums to be authentic.

Interestingly, even 74% of those who experience casinos, which are considered the least authentic on the spectrum, preferred real and authentic to fantasy or mainstream experiences.

Another indicator of the relative popularity of communities that have surrendered sense of place and authenticity to emulate mainstream comes from retail studies.

They show that 29.5% of consumers prefer to buy from mainstream national or regional chain stores.

So it appears that surrendering sense of place and authenticity for mainstream means a community has actually narrowed its appeal to somewhere between just 21% and 29% of Americans.

Meanwhile, the few communities that still struggle valiantly to differentiate as well as protect and foster a distinctive sense of place, appeal to between 73% and 80% of Americans.

Developers, architects, financial institutions and politicians should take note. It pays to foster sense of place and authentic and real attributes. In other words, to list only a handful:

On balance, always favor the real and genuine over the mainstream;

Encourage architecture with respect for local settings, neighborhoods and indigenous districts rather than cookie-cutter designs or franchise/ego architecture;

Value an indigenous cultural ecosystem over events and facilities that may be so-called “world class” by mainstreamers, which are certain only to erode differentiation and homogenize sense of place;

Always favor scenic preservation, tree canopy and natural areas over impervious surface; and

Listen to residents who are “stayers” vs. “boomers” when it comes to safeguarding sense of place and community character.  Aim your appeal toward travelers and relocating or expanding businesses who value place based assets.

A Raleigh Best Practice

There are several reasons why a community won’t seem to have or value its distinctive sense of place.

The most common is that its boosters and politicians may place emphasis not on what is unique or distinctive but instead on the promotion of mainstream venues and events, chasing after the appearance of seeming “major league.”

The reference was coined as a way to be distinctive but the reality is that a community then becomes just one of many.  For a classic essay on this, click here for a 1997 essay Garrison Keillor penned for Time Magazine.

But research reveals that even visitors, convention planners and relocating executives who may seem to be enthralled with the ubiquitous are always drawn more to authenticity in a place.

Below the surface though, while at risk of being suffocated, these communities usually have pockets of ardent “stayers” vs. “boomers” who work tirelessly to breathe oxygen into its sense of place before it really is too late.

Communities such as Durham, North Carolina can seem to have more of their sense of place remaining, because their community marketing organization hones in on distinctive ingredients and used them as leverage to outperform counterparts in other communities that don’t.

But even in these communities, sense of place remains at risk if it isn’t also embraced by other boosters and politicians.  In fact, taking it for granted, they may be in greater danger of being complacent.

Raleigh, North Carolina, a metro area distinct from Durham with which it shares a co-owned airport located in a community midway between, is one of those places that to many, has seemed to surrender its sense of place.

But below its “mainstream” hype and veneer, there is a valiant cohort fighting to save its soul and because it is so much more at risk, possibly making up with desperation and determination what the community’s distinctiveness lacks in promotional materials and visibility.

Raleigh may look generic because it often gives promotion emphasis to aspects you can find almost anywhere including mega-facilities, but below this mainstream veneer are some incredible sense of place best practices.

Far ahead of Durham, officials there have steadily funded historic assessments not only inventories by neighborhood but by period.  Of course, having a unique sense of place is about far more than just history or historic structures.

For instance, Raleigh had not done as well when it comes to growing indigenous festivals, seeming more interested in importing them or in the natural elements of sense of place, e.g. its tree canopy, which has now shrunk to just 36%.

Evidently, Raleigh failed to heed the unsolicited observations published by America’s soon-to-be foremost architect of sense of place when in the early 1850s it was a village of only 2,500 souls:

“It is hard to admire what is common; and it is, perhaps, asking too much of the citizens of Raleigh, that they should plant for ornament, or even cause to be retained about such institutions as their Lunatic Asylum, the beautiful evergreens that crowd about the town…”

These things are all emblematic of sense of place, which at its core is about values and traits that while not unique are distinctively manifest.  Unlike Durham, Raleigh has not yet plumbed that deep.

When, or if, it does, it may find that placing the ambitions of “boomers” above the values of “stayers,” to adapt the words of Wendell Berry, has always been one of its near-temporal but fatal values.

But I want to share a study just completed for Raleigh that is the envy of many communities concerned about retaining sense of place.  It is a plan unveiled a few months ago that quantifies the value of its historic assets and its cultural identity as part of its economic development, at least on the traditional supply-side.

The study quantifies the role of its historic districts as havens and magnets for creative class workers (knowledge workers) and enterprises as well as various measures of livability including walkability, property values, ownership, stability, diversity and tax base contribution.

It was conducted by a team of real estate and economic development experts led by Donovan Rypkema at PlaceEconomics.  Click here to review slides from a presentation Rypkema made on this topic a few years ago in Mississippi.

What caught my eye is how much more powerful and effective historic tax credits have been as a self-funding form of economic stimulus.

Most of the areas studied in Raleigh have undergone gentrification, yet the analysis documented that historic districts there, at least collectively, have retained a healthy mix of household incomes.

Raleigh is much less diverse than Durham, which no longer has an ethnic or racial majority.  But the historic districts there are more diverse when it comes to whites and African Americans than the Raleigh is as a whole.

For anyone seeking secondary research, a good amount can be gleaned from this report as well.  One reason Raleigh is now the second largest city in North Carolina has been its ability to sprawl out into one of the largest counties in the state, three times larger than Durham County’s footprint.

Before the recession, a friend in economic development there told me that the area surrounding and including Raleigh had been developing at a rate of an acre a minute.

That is far too fast a rate for rational decisions to be made about sense of place.  In fact, in the thirty years prior to the great recession of 2008, The county including Raleigh increased impervious surface by 7.6 acres a day.

Ironically, Durham may owe some of it sense of place to Raleigh.  A third of Durham was set aside in watershed and a huge reservoir that fueled Raleigh’s much-too-rapid growth, while incessant bad-mouthing of Durham may have also helped tap the breaks on Durham growth.

But it was interesting to note in the PlaceEconomics report that a little more than a hundred years ago, Raleigh’s population density was three times what it is today.  Development such as this puts incredible pressure on taxes.

This is not only because residential development does not pay for itself but because with sprawl, while the tax paid by individual units is higher, the tax revenue generated per square foot and per acre plummets.  Meanwhile, the cost of replacing infrastructure is much higher in newer developed areas than it is in historic districts.

Myrick Howard, a native of Durham who lives in Raleigh as head of Preservation North Carolina recently penned a very thoughtful piece entitled Ten Reasons Historic Preservation Matters for North Carolina.

He touches only briefly on tourism.  But I know from the metrics, that communities, such as Durham, that put their authenticity and distinct sense of place forward in their community marketing are outperforming those that focus instead on mainstream facilities and events.

Even more intriguing, those that do the former also outperform or at least hold their own for visitor participation in less authentic areas such as performing arts, sports and conventions.

Want the best of both?  Always lead with what’s distinctive and authentic about a community.

Why Curators and Archivists Make Good Community Marketers

History, it turned out, was the perfect background for community marketing.  Or maybe it was just that community marketing was appealing to a person with a degree in history.

Marketing communities involves leveraging for economic and cultural development the three general types of place-based assets distinct to a particular place:

• Culture and Heritage
• “Built”
• Natural

I don’t just mean the date and event type of history told through documents although that is useful because learning to see patterns and connections - the essence of historical analysis - is also key to marketing innovation and strategy-making.

But also valuable to community marketing are related studies such as:

• Economics:  history viewed through commercial transactions,
• Geology:  history told through rocks and physiography,
• Archeology: history told through artifacts and material remains,
• Anthropology: history told through societies, languages, and values,
• Environment: history told through human interaction with the natural world,
• Genealogy:  history told through family relationships and DNA.

There are others but hopefully these are enough illustration for those who haven’t thought of community marketing as a career or marketers who view it far too narrowly or were taught it only from a commercial perspective.

I’m a little slow.

For all that preliminary background in history, it still took me over half a life-long career to connect those dots.

It also wasn’t until my third startup that I even more formally embedded archives.

Perhaps this is why I was amused to learn recently, the history of my first startup was apparently rewritten exclusive to a much later addition of a word to its name and the second one seems also to have written a revisionist notion of its founding.

Fortunately, should anyone care, I still have personal documents proving my existence there and the roots of each of those organization including their pre-history fingerprints. (smile.)

Frankly, many marketers, even those trained in communications, often seem to play a bit fast and loose with facts and context either because they are too lazy to fact-check using what archives were kept or to make a political statement or even to flatter later executives.

Even more troubling, journalists often pick up these reinterpretations, further contaminating the public record with anecdotal hyperbole.

Thus, the “Research Triangle” is misattributed in a 1957 state brochure as the “brain child” of a later state governor.

And some of us involved in later stages of community turnarounds are flattered with in inaccuracies proclaiming that until our charge these places were a “sleepy backwater,” of that “tumbleweeds blew down empty streets,” or working there was “a death sentence.”

Not true, of course, but that is how history gets polluted.

Part of the problem is that Durham, North Carolina where I finished my career and now live in retirement, while arguably blessed with the deepest, most diverse history of any community, still lacks a full-fledged museum of local history.

This source of resident frustration is indispensable, not just as a cultural amenity but as a touchstone-repository to help newcomers and future generations gain, regain and keep perspective.

Even commercial enterprises, according to Advertising Age, now grasp the importance of “curating, cultivating and preserving the histories of their brands,” not only to inform marketing efforts but because “employees are looking for that heritage and lineage – how they fit into the family tree.”

Many CEOs, according to an article in the Portland Business Journal last summer understand that “the past is a powerful tool in public relations, marketing and branding.”

Or that ultimately they can perpetually “mine the past to recharge the present.”

Dr. Paul Bloom at Yale is often quoted from presentations and papers that “we are obsessed with origin and history…things get value because of their history.”

Consulting archivists at The Winthrop Group, Inc., quote Pendleton’s CEO Mort Bishop as relating “Our heritage is a lot more than a simple matter of using historical materials in marketing…It’s our DNA.”

Others wrote couple of years back in the Harvard Business Review, “A sophisticated understanding of the past is one of the most powerful tools we have for shaping the future.”

A McKinsey executive noted that it is “essential for every one of our partners and colleagues to understand our history and how our values were shaped over time.”

Even Entrepreneur Magazine’s startup-rich content heralds the value this depth can bring to storytelling's role in creating brand value.

So why are so many community marketers pinned under the thumbs of those who don’t get it?

In past essays, I’ve frequently noted research showing that even among visitors who skew more to fantasy activities such as shopping, sports, performing arts or amusement parks, destinations that preserve and cultivate authenticity foremost are by many times over the most appealing.

Yet so many elected officials, enabled by their community’s marketers and propelled by “edifice envy,” have, or are quickly surrendering, the authenticity of their particular places.

Maybe my sense of urgency is because it took half a career to dawn on me, and many places won’t have that luxury.

Weaving and Reweaving the Anchorage Story – Part 1

When writing about “sense of place,” I often focus on the “built” aspect because to those for whom the concept remains illusive, it is just the easiest to illustrate.

At dinner a short while ago, a friend who visited Alaska recently asked me to describe “sense of place” there, particularly around Anchorage, from the almost-decade I lived and worked there in community marketing.

His description is “expansive,” a very astute observation because he otherwise seems to view destinations more through the filter of activities and events.

But even for visitors seeking entertainment, the destination is the first consideration with activities falling fifth.  For those seeking recreation, the destination is first and activities second.

But studies of activity/attractions visitors show that three-fourths prefer real or authentic experiences to themed or fantasy experiences.

Even among the latter, say theme parks or casinos, 7-in-10 prefer real or authentic experiences.

But people who are into fantasy such as Disney are often disappointed in Alaska because they expect the vegetation to be lush and towering like the coastal Pacific Northwest or the mountains to be densely carpeted like the Rockies.

Parts of Alaska, including Anchorage, have those attributes too, but they take a backseat to how incredibly expansive the view shed is.

From Anchorage, in any direction, the views are of towering mountains, including ranges and active volcanoes hundreds of miles away, yet they seem to loom so close.  I never grew habituated to it during my near decade of community marketing there.

And it never leaves you.

When I was recruited there in early 1978 my challenge, though, was to flesh out other equally distinct aspects of Anchorage’s sense of place and weave or reweave them into a more inclusive yet ever-evolving story.

These included the quality of the light there, geology, values, history including built and natural, vegetation and wildlife, as well as the work of simplifying logistics for visitors to be able to explore all of the above.

But different than Durham a decade later where a deep and broadly embraced sense of pride was under external threat from jealous rivals, in Anchorage we had to enlist many Anchorage residents there by giving voice to the passionate corps that already felt that way.

As a legacy theme, the CLIO-winning campaign, “Wild About Anchorage” is still in use today.

Anchorage at the time was slightly larger than Spokane, WA where I had been stationed before, but 74,000 people larger at the time than Durham, NC where I would go next, even 24,000 larger at the time than North Carolina’s capital and second largest city, Raleigh.

But at the time, the population of Anchorage represented more than 40% of all Alaskans.

However, half of the population of Anchorage had lived there only six year or less and 20% less than two years.  Only 8%, whom I quickly sought out, had lived there 25 years or more.

About 17% at the time had come there from other parts of Alaska, 30% from the West coast and 14% from the Plains or Rockies.  But 18% had come from the South or border states and 13% from the Northeast including the upper Ohio Valley.

I was among the first to realize this transience when someone made sure I was among the first to receive a copy of new report published in the first few weeks after my arrival there by researchers for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Many moving there seemed either a bit condescending about Anchorage and Alaska’s scenery and sense of place or uncomfortable with their expansiveness. Some 25,000 were projected to move out the year arrived while 32,000 would move there like I did.

My arrival came within months of the first oil to flow down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and only a few years after other transformative changes including unification of the City of Anchorage, then less than 40% of the surrounding Borough’s (akin to a county) population, along with other smaller towns into the Municipality of Anchorage.

It was also only a few years after settlement of Alaska Native claims along with a vote to move the State Capital from remote Juneau to Willow, about 80 miles northwest of Anchorage, which was made moot when four years after my arrival voters rejected the cost.

When I arrived, it had also been less than a decade since the oil discoveries at Prudhoe Bay and just two since its discovery down Cook Inlet to the south and west of Anchorage.

But in 1978, Alaskans were bracing for a loss in population from departing pipeline workers only to be saved by the revolution in Iran the following year and skyrocketing oil prices.

I was just turning 30 years old as I landed there but selected in part to complete start up of Anchorage’s community marketing organization.

But also because my sensibilities were as much or more to integrate tourism into Anchorage’s sense of place as it was to complete the integration of Anchorage into tourism.

Of course, not everyone was a boomer or raider or saw themselves as a transient migrant.

I fell in with a core “stayers” and long-time residents, who in small bands, were already hard at work there preserving historic buildings, local history and culture, open space and trails, nature areas, tree canopy and beautification.

I realize now that when it came to sense of place they were catapulting Anchorage far in advance even today of much older and more established communities in North Carolina where I live in retirement.

My job was to work with these groups to be visitor-ready and weave all of these elements into a coherent Anchorage story that yet preserved other historical identities prior to unification.

Many were rightfully suspicious of tourism interests as being narrow, superficial, stereotypical, short-sighted and overly commercial, which most were and still are across America.

The groundwork laid prior to my arrival, while expert, had largely reinforced this perception.

Bridging those two perspectives is a role far too many DMOs fail to grasp or accept even today.

As was customary at the time, if at all, many in Anchorage only traced sense of place there to establishment of a 1915 tent camp erected by speculators for railroad construction workers less than three years after a couple working for the US Forest Service became the first permanent settlers.

There was both curiosity and disbelief when our fledgling organization quickly enriched the story of Anchorage to include earlier periods.

Dena’ina people who numbered 3,000 there as early as 1650 long before contact with Russian missionaries in the 1830s or even when Captain James Cook’s ship sailed to what is now Anchorage, two hundred years to the month before my arrival.

Soon a historical park organized around a 1830s log Russian Orthodox Church and the colorful Dena’ina burial spirit houses north of downtown, joined midway with the Alaska Native Heritage Center envisioned by several of us during my tenure.

I smiled when just before I retired in Durham, Anchorage officials named a new civic and convention center there after the Dena’ina, a northern relative of the Navaho and the only such group who lived along the coast.

The symbols of Anchorage’s earlier history were still being revealed as we began an inventory, including the still-producing 1896 Crow Creek Mine, dating to when there were only two hundred or fewer Americans beyond southeast Alaska.

For nearly a decade after my arrival, Cynthia Toohey, an emergency room nurse and transplanted New Yorker who eventually became head of my governing board and one of our biggest fans, began an ongoing restoration with her family.

I was astonished at its significance and how little known it had been prior to being added to the National Registry of Historic Places a few weeks after my arrival.

All we had to do was be attentive, curious and willing to reweave it into the emerging Anchorage story.

The illustrated  map shown above as an image in this post dates to 1945.  It was brought back from Alaska by the father of a Durham journalist friend of mine in 1948, the year I was born.

Possibly a place mat used in restaurants, it is precious because it captures the names of the businesses along the bluff above Ship Creek at a time when there were fewer than 30,000 residents.

It also marks a time a decade before Congress would grant Alaska statehood which had been finalized less than two decades before my arrival there in 1978.

It had only been a little more than a decade since the legislature had even organized eight portions of the state into boroughs.

In only the fifth year of my career, less than three since being minted a destination marketing executive, I was too green to realize at the time that our task of illuminating sense of place and weaving a story around what had become Anchorage was as fresh in concept as the new organization we were still polishing as its guardian.

Equidistant during that span since statehood and my arrival would occur a natural event of such magnitude that it would forever shape Anchorage’s sense of urgency about sense of place giving it a unique perspective on what is historical, both long past and near past.

More on that in tomorrow’s post.

Weaving Place Authenticity With Restoration – 2 of 2

This is part two of an essay I posted yesterday attempting to trace sense of place authenticity in my life.  I’m using restored airplanes and their contribution to sense of place as an example.

Conducting a place-based inventory in Spokane, my first community marketing start-up in the mid 1970s, took me a few miles down to the valley below the steep bluff along South Hill and a grass air strip named Ox Meadows.

In his early 50s then, it was my first of many visits with Ed “Skeeter” Carlson, who as contemporary of my dad’s, had also first been intrigued by places when he saw vintage aircraft flying low across ranch and farm land to deliver mail.

Skeeter, who today is over 90 years of age, had already by then been restoring historic airplanes for twenty years. 

That day he took me up in his first restoration, a 1927 Stearman biplane, still today the oldest flying.

He also had several other aircraft in various stages of restoration lined up in an open shed along the path between his farmhouse and Ox Meadows.

In the early stages was a 1917 Curtiss JN-4, the famous “Jenny” that he was bringing back to flying condition, the oldest in America.

Maybe it inspired the huge scale model of the Navy seaplane version of the “Jenny” hanging above the landing between floors of my house.

Skeeter flew that old Stearman for forty years out of Ox Meadows before finally selling it back when he turned 85.

Today I think his old “Jenny” has been passed to a private living historic aircraft museum in north central Pennsylvania about thirty miles northeast of Williamsport.

When I arrived in Durham, North Carolina 25 years ago to begin my third community marketing startup, the initial feature inventory took me to old Farris Field, a grass airfield here similar to Ox Meadows, renamed many year ago as Lake Ridge Aero Park.

Operating since the mid 1940s, it sits on what was made into a peninsula in the early 1980s when Falls Lake was impounded, shown in this spectacular sunset landing there.

Until recently, Mike Ratty, a retired American Airlines pilot, took visitors flightseeing from there each summer and fall over Durham in his restored 1941 Waco UPS 7 biplane (pronounced wah-co,) a 1920s and 1930s contemporary of Stearman.

Speaking of American Airlines, when I arrived in Alaska in 1978 to begin my second community marketing start up, I soon learned of the restoration of a 1936 Stinson A Trimotor the airline had first owned.

It had ultimately been sold in 1942 to the Anchorage-based Ray Peterson Flying Service, a precursor to Wein Air Alaska before it made a forced crash landing and was abandoned in 1947 in the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley a few months before I was born.

When I arrived, Ray was just retiring as the CEO of the state’s largest airline.

The company had pioneered jet landings on remote gravel runways and innovated a moveable bulkhead in Boeing 737s to easily calibrate between cargo space and passenger seating.

Wein folded in the mid 1980s while I was there, a victim of a leveraged buyout and corporate raiding.

In the late 1960s, that Stinson trimotor abandoned in 1947 was saved from an inferno by BLM firefighters.  Then using a Cat, a man from Fairbanks spent eight years pulling the old plane to where it could be reached by road.

He then sold it to a United Airlines Boeing 727 pilot in Illinois who fully restored it.

Aviation in Alaska goes back to 1913 when a Gage-Martin biplane landed in Fairbanks, just two years after the first airplane landed in Durham and three years after the first one landed in Spokane, the latter two both Curtis Pushers.

For Alaska, though, it soon became more than a novelty.

This was only a decade after the first flight took place in Kitty Hawk, NC, but Alaska has always been an extremely aggressive “early adopter” as a means of leapfrogging less remote places, as it did with its own satellite for communications in the 1970s.

In the 1920s, aviation in Alaska took root in Anchorage where biplane pilots used a strip first used as a golf course and park to take off and land.

Today that strip is purely recreational open space running alongside Downtown Anchorage, but aviation, both historic and modern, was a huge part of Anchorage’s sense of place.

The state had become strewn over time with the remains of historic civilian and military aircraft over the five or six decades before I arrived there.

One of the first people to visit my office in Anchorage was Ted Spencer, a fish and game biologist and third generation Alaskan.  In the late 1960s or early 1970s, he had begun cataloguing abandoned but restorable vintage aircraft across the state as a passion.

Ted founded the Alaska Historical Aircraft Society a few months before I arrived and shared with me his a vision for an historic aircraft museum in Anchorage.

He dropped in regularly to give me updates and to get help and ideas and because his stories of surveyed wreck sites resonated with me as an important part of Alaska’s sense of place.

Many of these vintage aircraft were being looted.

This fueled an incredible sense of urgency and intensity in Ted that many people couldn’t understand but because I was involved with community marketing start ups, I could.

Not everyone grasps the fragility of sense of place, and many instead seek to undermine it, some on purpose.

A year after my near decade in Alaska concluded, Ted and others made the museum a reality, cobbling together grants and donations including an old hanger on Lake Hood, a float plane base between downtown and Anchorage International Airport.

A few months later, the museum reclaimed that now restored Stinson Trimotor.

Military units supported the museum by using the rescue and recovery of vintage aircraft around the state as training exercises including a PBY, P-40, a Stearman like Skeeter’s and many others.

Volunteers labored for decades to restore them for display, a few to flying condition.

In 1998, the museum had to part with the old Stinson A, selling it to a collector with a a private museum in Minnesota who freshened it up as shown in this blog.  I understand he uses it in movies and American Airline promotions.

Shortly after its founding as I arrived in Durham, the Alaska Aviation Museum also sold the same collector a 1928 Ford Trimotor 4-AT-B that had taken the first overland commercial flight to Alaska in 1934.

Ironically, the plane had begun its days in Spokane flying out of old Felts Field, today the home of a fleet of flying antique Stearman biplanes inspired in part by Skeeter.

Instead the Alaska Aviation Museum acquired a 1931 Fairchild Pilgrim 100B previously flown by the precursor to today’s Alaska Airlines.  Originally ordered by American Airways too, the 9-passenger aircraft was the first with steam heat, luggage racks and a toilet.

It is flown around the state each summer to promote the museum and the state’s aviation history.

The Ironic Resistance When Communities Reclaim Assets

You’ll never believe where I first encountered the most grief and resistance when starting Durham, North Carolina’s community destination marketing agency 25 years ago next month.

I shouldn’t have been surprised because I had encountered it in Alaska while polishing off a DMO start up there in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The State Division of Tourism, a statewide counterpart, fought me there when I explained to them that they were listing several cross roads/neighborhoods in Anchorage as though they were separate communities and it was not only inaccurate but it was confusing visitors.

A deputy director blew up at me and insisted I prove they were in the Municipality of Anchorage.  This was pre-Internet but this distinction was easily viewable on maps and of course the state’s own records showing the area covered by municipalities.

They eventually corrected their listings but it taught me a lesson.  Often many in destination marketing just don’t grasp what it entails.  And when confronted, no matter how gently, their first reaction is to try and defend their mistakes.

When I arrived in Durham, the problem of misidentification was even worse thanks to a bewildering policy adopted in the 1980s by the United States Postal Service no less, and one of the reasons this institution has become less relevant.

To the consternation of the National League of Cities, the USPS had begun assigning street delivery addresses based not on physical location but based on wherever the mail carrier was based.  So you could live in one city but have as your mailing address another city because the person who delivered your mail was based there.  Yes, go figure.

This was and still is incredibly confusing to visitors but thankfully, GPS only recognizes true locations, not mistaken identities.  But back then GPS, which was fostered by the U.S. military in the 1950s and 1960s, was just that year being made available to private enterprises such as Magellan for commercial use.

So when I arrived in Durham, I found its assets scattered in state publications under two different “R’s”, the “M’s”, two different “B’s”, and the “C’s.  Only a fraction could be found under the “D’s” where they all belonged.

So I dialed up an old friend who was running the Division of Tourism and he had the person over listings call me back.  But again, instead of addressing the situation and immediately consolidating all of Durham under Durham, I was, again, met with incredible resistance.

To be fair, no one back then could understand why the USPS had begun playing fast and loose with physical locations.  Because Durham had an incredibly proactive planning director back then, Paul Norby, together we got the addresses for 5,000 businesses corrected but many remain mis-assigned today.

This is also why a friend and former mayor of Durham was forced to have a Chapel Hill address, meaning his mail came from a post office there.

Snail mail is increasingly irrelevant now.  But back when it was, Durham initiated a collaboration with DMO execs and chamber execs in this region to persuade the regional mail processing center not to stamp “Raleigh” on letters regardless of the origin.

It was not only offensive to other communities but misleading not to mention undermining back when competitive bids for various types of visitor business were submitted by snail mail.

Instead, based on our collective request, the facility agreed to substitute ”Research Triangle Region” as the postmark instead.  But someone new must have come along and added “Raleigh” back in above it.

Even though some of the faces have changed, the agreement was on behalf of organizations not individuals, and I assume someone will soon dust off that agreement and re-connect the dots.

Eventually I was able to get all of Durham’s assets listed under Durham in state publications.  Then came several years of chasing down and correcting hundreds of national directories that had been similarly contaminated.

This also involved explaining that the mail designation Research Triangle Park based here was a Durham postal substation and vanity designation, not a city.

Diligence in this regard is an important part of protecting and shaping community identity, but not one that many DMO counterparts face because they are the beneficiaries of the confusion, having assets in other communities misattributed to theirs.

In my first DMO startup for Spokane, I had benefited from misattribution and quickly gained empathy for other communities whose identities were compromised and for the confusion it caused travelers.

Unfortunately, playing the “ethics” card is often the only way to get communities that benefit from misinformation and misattribution to embrace “truth in addressing.”  In Durham, we even put it in writing in an agreement with surrounding communities but whenever someone comes along who is clueless, it has to be dusted off again.

I also ran into the problem with associations holding state, regional and national conventions in Durham.  One such association represented by someone who was director of the state division of tourism in the decade before I arrived, did everything it could to not reveal that the location of its meeting was in Durham.

I thought, because of his former position, it would be easy to resolve but instead, I had to endure a lot of verbal and email abuse before finally getting the correct location noted.  And this was 16 years after we started Durham’s community marketing agency!

Not a fun part of DMO work but one you can’t walk away from.  No amount of promotion alone can overcome this type of misinformation.  It’s why 2/3rds of community marketing is actually about “lowering barriers.”

A lesson I learned during my career is that just because someone has DMO experience doesn’t mean they don’t harbor resentment, jealousy or even bigotry toward other communities.  It is also why it is more important than ever that DMO execs signs codes of ethics.

Durham is considered “cool” now thanks in large part to the work its DMO did dating back to 1989.  But as illustrated by quotes from more than a few state elected officials in recent years, the job isn’t finished.

My Second Choice – Still Sense of Place

Growing up, my ambitions were tied to sense of place, first as a cowboy on our ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone nook of Idaho, then in grade school as either a uniformed Forest Ranger or a Fish and Wildlife Officer.

Both were easy to spot in Ashton, the small, nearby town where I started school and provided an inspiration to attend college (as though my parents ever gave me a choice (smile.)

I have always loved wildlife, so running up Ashton-Flag Ranch Road and veering off into the remote Idaho corner of Yellowstone Park was always a spectacular option.

In the early 1900s, my paternal grandfather, Mel Bowman, then 22 years old, helped pioneer the 40-mile route that slices between Yellowstone and the north end of the Tetons.

During the dead of winter between 1910 and 1911, while my grandparent’s ranch lay buried in snow drifts, my grandfather and his brother ran wagon loads of cement along the dirt and gravel road using teams of four draught horses each.

Each trip took four days over and two days back in below freezing weather.  In return they received $80 each not including provisions, horse feed or overnight stays in tepees along the way.

The objective was construction of a concrete dam in order to raise Jackson Lake by thirty feet for the purposes of supplying irrigation water, and eventually along with six other dams along both sides of the Tetons, a source of hydroelectric power.

A view down the Tetons from a ridgeline at the beginning of the road is one of my favorite views of the 40-mile Teton Range.  But this was only one option for viewing wildlife during my early years.

Two other favorite trips including going a mile or two across the Henry’s Fork to the hatchery to see native Cutthroat trout fingerlings and riding horseback into the Sand Creek Elk Refuge that ran down the west side of the ranch including Moose in the wetlands down near Chester.

Less than fifty miles due west of the ranch, the 10,000-acre historic Camas National Wildlife Refuge (shown in this image) is one of nearly 600 nationwide.

Filled each spring and fall with tens of thousands of migratory waterfowl including Trumpeter Swans, the Camas NWR is now at risk.

Center-pivot irrigation technology (the circular farm land you see from an airplane) not only pushed farming out that way in the 1960s and 1970s but it soon began to deplete ground water that kept the refuge’s wetlands wet.

So ironically, the refuge has had to also pump water from the aquifer in order to sustain places for the big birds to stop for rest flying south and returning north.

Probably gone are the days when we could see more than 50,000 ducks and geese in flight all at the same time.  Now the Refuge must be selective about what habitat it can keep viable.

Thinking I might want to be a lawyer, I didn’t turn back to my love of sense of place until part way through law school in Spokane, Washington.

In the 1970s, when I was helping to start the community-destination marketing organization there, we included the huge Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge which was 25 miles southwest in our inventory of nearby things to see and do.

Spectacular flights of huge Trumpeter Swans is what I remember there.  The largest of North American native waterfowl, Trumpeters (for the sound they make) stand about four feet tall but stretched out in flight they measure 6 feet from bill to feet and another 6 to 8 feet in wingspan.

They had become almost extinct before I turned six years old in the 1950s.

When I was recruited to Anchorage to complete another start up, I lived on a steep bluff along the southern edge of the city between Kincaid Park and Discovery Bay overlooking Turnagain Arm, with a spectacular view down Cook Inlet.

The glass wall and front door of my ground floor condo was less than a dozen steps from the bluff’s mid-point along the 33,000-acre Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge that runs along the south side of the municipality from the airport to Potter Marsh, a wildlife area created in 1917 when construction of the Alaska Railroad isolated a wetland.

Our organization lobbied successfully for the bird refuge at Potter Marsh to be interpreted for visitors along a 1,500 foot boardwalk, now one of Alaska’s most popular wildlife viewing areas.

Potter Marsh isn’t just for the birds, including an occasional Trumpeter.  When I lived there in the 1980s, more than 1,100 Moose in Anchorage used the mountain to sea greenways as their highways.

In the spring, the Marsh is where they calved just a few miles from where I lived and worked.

Just around a corner, while still in the municipality of Anchorage you can see Dall sheep (which look similar to mountain goats) climbing a rocky slope just above the roadway, and a bit further, a lookout to see Beluga whales.

There are ten wildlife refuges in North Carolina including Roanoke River which was created the year I moved here, but most are a good ride east from Durham where I finished my career after building yet another community start up with natural place based assets included.

A friend and I may visit one refuge in particular the next time we take the Harley Crossbones to visit friends in Charlotte.  As we cut down across the “heart” of North Carolina and under Uwharrie National Forest this time, the Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge is on our way just outside Wadesboro.

We forget how much tourism overall relies on infrastructure, including green infrastructure such as the National Wildlife Refuges.  They weren’t created for the sake of tourism, but like much of the nation’s green infrastructure, that is a huge economic byproduct.

Even in cities, natural assets are among the most productive of place-based assets essential to both quality of life and quality of place.

Appeal is All About Pull not Push

Waiting for the doors to open for a matinee performance of an acclaimed Broadway musical on tour at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC,) several things ran through my mind as I looked from the lobby out at the downtown skyline.

One was that as remarkable as the building is, you can just feel that we don’t build things to last anymore.  Different than the historic structures in the skyline, according to officials at the Urban Land Institute we only build things to last 20-30 years now or less.

Another fleeting thought was how ironic it was that one of the organizations advertising in the program was inferring that the remarkably successful theater, now in its sixth year, was due in part to its vision.

I was on its board at the time and support was mixed with several concerns weighing heavily.  The vote in favor hinged on the snarky comment by one board member who proclaimed, “what do we care, we don’t have to pay for it.”

It seems a prerequisite for any claim of vision should be having “skin in the game.”

My third fleeting observation that day was that but for the Mayor’s letter in the program, not one welcome or announcement leveraged awareness to 70% of the attendees from out of town that they were in Durham.

Communities build cultural facilities in part to leverage awareness and to reap not only visitor spending but also to further stimulate the economy in which the facility costs are born when facilities hire local residents and use local vendors.

Far too many communities take these returns on investment for granted and fail to lace their expectation into operating agreements.

I may have just missed further mentions of Durham that day but this kind of oversight is one far too many cultural facilities and events make, some falling victim to the false notion that they have to blur location in order to be appealing to non-residents on day-trip visits.

This is an outdated mid-20th-century notion perpetuated by some media.  They hoped it will sell more advertising by homogenizing identities with the promise that they could push consumers past businesses in their hometown to buy the same things several cities, towns and counties away.

The further away they could make the claim, the more they could charge for advertising.

This fallacy may have been the reason that when two private fortunes built on such advertising both bought Minor League baseball teams in the 1990s, pushing and shoving ensued.

One was in Durham and the other destined for Raleigh.  But one invoked a territorial clause to push the other to locate instead several towns further east into the far reaches of Wake County.

Symbolic is that the one claiming to be the region’s team draws the same proportion of day-trip visitors from throughout the region to games now as it did back before making that claim.  Not coincidentally, it’s the same percentage drawn by Durham venues overall without that claim.

Drawing attendance from nearby communities and allegiance from visitors, day trip or overnight is earned by pull not push, it is about distinctiveness and sense of place, not hegemony.

It is won, not pandered too, by being somewhere, not anywhere.

Another sports comparison is that two of the major league sports franchises in North Carolina bypassed the identities of the cities in which they play and whose residents paid to build the palaces in which they play.

Instead, they chose the over-reaching identity “Carolina,” hoping not only to claim hegemony over one state, but two.

Lost was the fact nearly 6-in-10 professional sports fans today are loyal to a team that is not near where they live.  Allegiance must be won, not monopolized.

Successful sports franchises such as Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks understand this.  While honoring the city where they play, they have managed to win allegiance throughout the three-state Pacific Northwest and a province of Canada

Appeal is about pull, not push.

I lobbied for Durham to remain in the name of the Durham Performing Arts Center and first coined the the acronym DPAC based on the success of DBAP for the nearby baseball stadium.

But it never occurred to me that the acronym works so well for DBAP only because its where the Durham Bulls play.

Even now that views of the downtown skyline are entirely blocked by office buildings, the community for whom the team is named and whose residents and officials built the stadium is referenced repeatedly during games in announcements heard by visitors from out of town who make up the majority in attendance.

Greensboro, sixty miles west is planning to open a theater similar to Durham’s DPAC in 2016 and it is doing several things better and some not as well as Durham (photo below courtesy of City of Greensboro.)

Officials there plan to make it at least a few seats larger for bragging rights, but DPAC’s accolades long ago transcended mere size.  The question is can Greensboro draw the A-list tour companies that Durham’s contract-management does.

Raleigh didn’t fold its touring Broadway in the face of Durham’s new theater because of the new facility.  It folded because it knew it couldn’t compete with the programming power of Durham’s operator.

To their credit, according to a WUNC news radio report, “supporters there stress the Greensboro facility isn't a money-making venture. It's a cultural addition to the community,” a lesson Durham officials could use.

A local official there signaled that Greensboro must realize that its sense of place has eroded noting that the proposed DPAC-like theater there will "provide a specific identity…” for Greensboro.

You know you’re in trouble if being one of 500 communities with a  theater that hosts touring Broadway shows is your claim to being distinctive.  Researchers long ago concluded that sense of place is about what you have, not what you don’t have, about being distinctive rather than emulative or covetous.

But Greensboro’s project is an improvement on Durham’s in two ways.

Private interests have pledged half the cost rather than pushing for someone else to pay the tab. Second, barring any bait and switch by elected officials, a dollar from every ticket sold will go to increase financial viability for local arts there, especially the indigenous arts that do help make a community distinct.

Officials there lectured surrounding communities for not being regional but people don’t go out on a day trip visit to another community because they are pushed or persuaded by homogeneity.

Appeal is about the pull of being distinctive and worthy.

Only 1-in-10 people who live in the Triangle region anchored by Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh think of where they live by a region.  They relish living in distinct cities, towns, neighborhoods and counties and being motivated to visit others is about their distinctive sense of place.

Durham’s prowess at drawing day-trip visitors from other parts of the Triangle and beyond didn’t come from guilt trips or by minimizing differences and blurring distinctions.

Visitor are pulled--not pushed--to places like Durham by the community’s relentless fostering and promotion of its distinctiveness.

More than two decades ago when new owners threatened to move the Durham Bulls to an out of town venue so it would be more convenient to out of town fans, a survey by researchers at NC State found that a majority would no longer attend without the Durham ambiance and sense of place.

Greensboro would be well advised not to lecture other communities in the Triad region but to instead work to be the kind of distinctive place worthy of a day trip visit.

That kind of identity will also be much more holistically reliant than any one facility. 

Beyond cross town trips, day-trip excursions to another community are drawn by differences, not sameness.

Similarly, DPAC, which is impeccably managed and programmed, should re-embrace its Durham-ness wherever possible as part of fully leveraging its impact on the community that built it.

The visitors who make up 70% or more of its attendees are drawn as much by the community as the theater, including a small share of the 20% of Durham’s overnight visitors who are shouldering the vast majority of the tab to pay for it.

In fact, for at least two decades now visitors have made up 70% of Durham’s overall live theater, festival, sports event and restaurant patrons.

Being distinctive as a place to live and visit, when leveraged by community branding and cooperation, pays a huge economic dividend.

By the way, once the doors opened, the performance that afternoon was fantastic.  It was like being transported to New York City for a few hours.

Leapfrogging To A Sense Of Place Inventory

In 1987, shortly before I was recruited to jump start the community’s marketing arm, Durham conducted its first inventory of natural assets focused on natural areas and rare plant species.

This was prescient because Durham is the fourth largest city in North Carolina shoehorned into the 17th smallest county by the same name.  Over the next decade it was the fastest growing in the state.

An inventory was completed on wildlife habitats, corridors and rare animal populations in 1995.  In 1999 the two inventories were deepened, broadened and combined into the “Durham County Inventory of Important Natural Areas, Plants and Wildlife.”

It seems desperately in need of an update because analysts in a collaboration between RENCI and UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute computed that between 1976 and 2005, Durham converted 2.5 acres per day into development including impervious surface, a pace eight times faster than population growth.

The researchers also modeled that Durham will develop another 3.91 acres a day between 2006 and 2040, increasing the human footprint in this 299 square mile land area by another 46% and outpacing the surrounding 16-county Triangle area.

As Durham was one of the first to do, natural asset inventories are development tools and they assist communities and developers who care about communities in making informed decisions about the natural aspect of why people are drawn to live there.

While the 1999 Durham natural inventory linked above is static, the state continues to update that inventory not in document form or in as much depth, but searchable format using GIS.

To see how the natural asset data is useful, anyone can visit the website of the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program (NHP) where it is stitched together statewide or searchable by county or by a radius from a specific address.

Officials from the NHP will provide training on how to inventory and utilize the results at a day-long workshop next Wednesday in Pittsboro, North Carolina, less than 30 miles southwest of Durham.  The event is sponsored by the North Carolina Urban Forestry Council.

In Durham, urban forestry falls under General Services and under separate ordinances from those governing trees and vegetation as part of community planning.  To its credit, Durham City-County Planning maintains a through 194-page “Landscape Manual for Durham, North Carolina.”

The manual is a resource to guide residents, developers, commercial locations and ostensibly other Durham City and County agencies on appropriate trees, plants and horticultural practices for this community including detailed lists of native vs. non-native species.

Durham urban forestry and landscape officials are an odd fit in some ways for City’s General Services Department which try as it may, is tradition bound to on focus building and maintaining public facilities.

Even a long overdue inventory of its facilities is reportedly neglecting to also evaluate the status of surrounding grounds and green infrastructure which includes overall appearance and curb appeal, signaling a low priority to residents who overwhelmingly view it otherwise.

If anyone can successfully integrate these areas, it is the extremely capable director Joel Reitzer, but overall appearance touches so many parts of both the City and County strategic plans it begs a much more overarching approach.

For some time now, Durham urban foresters have voiced the need for an urban forest inventory.  By that they don’t mean a best practice inventory of urban forest on both public and private land but just the trees along public right-of-ways, in parks and around public facilities.

However, according to the 2010 report “Sustaining America’s Urban Trees and Forests” - “the term urban forest refers to all publicly and
privately owned trees within an urban area—including individual trees along streets and in backyards, as well as stands of remnant forest.”

When and if a more holistic approach ever evolves for Durham resource experts will find a fascinating and useful tree inventory, broken down specifies by species in the 1999 Durham County inventory of natural areas and corridors.

Lending a sense of urgency should be the fact that tree canopy in Durham’s urban tier (basically the area where it is feasible to run sewer and water) has shrunk to just 30%.

To me this hints that urban forests should have been inventoried back in the 1990s along with Durham’s other natural assets.  The fact that there is still debate over a narrow vs. holistic interpretation shows how much this element of green infrastructure has been shorted.

Hopefully, part of the solution will be found in a new multi-agency initiative called “Trees Across Durham” which is being spearheaded by the joint City-County Office of Sustainability.  Duke University is participating with an eye to carbon offsets to meet its own goals.

When Durham does get back on top of its natural assets and green infrastructure, it could become a leader as it is in so many areas by expanding such an inventory to also include scenic assets such as viewsheds and others valuable attributes threatened by blight.

Sense of place must be nurtured and protected as much from generic development as from blight.  It involves gardening natural assets as well as built assets and cultural assets.

Maybe an overarching approach then would be a “sense-of-place inventory” that identifies not only areas for preservation but aspects at risk.

The one advantage of coming from behind is that you get to take a leap forward.

Organic Sense of Place and Power Brokers

Standing in the rain last week at a ribbon-cutting, I surveyed the crowd for the handful of people who fashion themselves as “power brokers.”  None were there, which is a sign the project is a natural fit, more filling in than wedging in, a “win-win” vs. zero sum and complimentary vs. silo.

Dignitaries were there to show support along with many others who truly have power.  But they were sprinkled among a far more abundant number of just regular folks who are passionate about Durham, North Carolina.

Durham has always had one or two power-brokers, fortunately just not the kind who think they are.  I’ve had the pleasure to know and work with three generations here going back to Mary Duke Biddle Semans and George Watts Hill.

Rather than bullying or superimposing their will through heavy-handedness, Durham’s true power-brokers have been patient with process.  Sense of place is about “gardening,” not “big game” hunting.   It is something organic that can’t be stamped out factory-style.

Two weeks ago I attended a dinner to honor one true power broker, Tallman Trask, and tonight I’ll raise a glass to toast the retirement of another, Wib Gulley, both of whom I am also honored to have as friends.

The key to visitor-centric cultural and economic development is only revealed and fueled by good place-marketing.  An indispensible pre-requisite is the existence of an authentic sense of place.

Beyond a mere jumble of culture, sense of place, to adapt the words of another longtime Durhamster, relies on a genuine community personality.

Power-broker “wanna bees” are often betrayed by their impatience with process and frequent use of force, including not-so-veiled threats sometimes.

Deep down, these folks are petrified that the true process of place-shaping will result in “anyone being able to say no, but no one being able to say yes.”

The “wanna bees” have a point, but while they may love Durham, it isn’t for what it is now nor how it came to be.  This makes them puzzled by data and vulnerable to decision-making by hunch, and in extreme cases cannibalistic, because their worldview is zero sum, winners or losers.

Often disparaged as DINOs (Durham In Name Only) even by those from whom they seek admiration, to me they are just afraid…and deeply suspicious of the organic nature of place evolution.

I feel sorry for them, but they certainly aren’t exclusive to Durham, they just stand out more here as an anomaly.

At least ten times that I am aware of over the span of my four-decade career marketing three different communities, power-broker “wanna bees” tried to get me fired.  I learned to respond by seeking to understand them.

In each of these cities I even helped one or two get on my governing board but they soon resigned, impatient with the process of governance or their inability to control a table of equals.  I never let any of their attempts to “get” me affect working with them wherever and whenever possible. 

A friend of mine who is a journalist and historian, who first approached me nearly 25-years ago about the need for such a facility is not being disrespectful when he refers to the herculean step taken last week as “a brick and glass avatar” of the one day Museum of Durham History (MoDH.)

At the time he and I first met, I was jumpstarting Durham’s official community destination marketing agency, an organization charged with telling the community’s story and safeguarding its sense of place, a position from which I retired many years ago.

Part of that mission included a thorough on-going analysis of Durham’s strengths and opportunities as a visitor destination.

As it has repeatedly since, that first analysis revealed that the need for a museum of local history is, and continues to be, Durham’s most glaring cultural deficit, something also confirmed separately a few years ago by consultants conducting a cultural master plan.

Analysis such as that conducted by Durham’s arm for visitor centric cultural and economic development is triangulated by:

1. Comparing our community by facility-type and category, with the average of similar communities in the state, across the region and nationwide.
2. Conducting research to determine a community’s visitor volume and participation in various activities to then compare against benchmarks nationwide.
3. Scientifically surveying a community’s residents and opinion leaders to identify and generalize the cultural priorities of internal stakeholders.

The analysis also ventured to suggest a self-funding mechanism to reinvest what would today be 1.6% of the local tax revenue reaped collectively by the city and county each year from visitors spending into development of a Museum of Durham History.

Including operation and upkeep, that’s less than 2% which would be easily recouped by Durham’s ability to harvest its full share of visitor participation at historic sites and monuments from its annual visitor base, which is now 9 million.

But as it has since first proposed in 1934, the idea of a Durham history museum continues to be leapfrogged by other needs, often disparaged during the process.  In the meantime, Durham historic treasures have been lost when discarded by three subsequent generations who failed to understand their value.

This may include the steam calliope that signaled shift-change atop “Old Bull,” a part of the national landmark which can’t be found.  Appropriately, It imitated the sound of a bull, something I know from growing up on a ranch would certainly get your attention.

All of this makes the “avatar” that opened last week even more impressive, but all has not been lost by the almost 80-year delay.  Many overlapping working groups of determined residents have continued to discuss the project over this span.

Undetected by impatient “list checkers,” each time these discussions have seemed to recycle, the concept has been re-informed along the route by more and more of what will ultimately make the real Museum of Durham History seamless and enduring when it becomes a reality.

Sense of place is not about having a jumble of “palaces,” but a mosaic of natural, cultural and “built” place-based assets forming an overall and distinctive community appeal.  It isn’t about being “world class” or “major league.”  It is about having a distinctive “there” there.

One thing that makes a local history museum similar to other types of cultural facilities is the proportion visitor-related admissions each year.

What truly distinguishes this type of facility from others is that instead of going there to watch the outside world pass by, residents, newcomers and visitors go to a history museum to explore the soul of a community and to appreciate and perpetuate the temporal values and traits that make a community unique and distinct.

In this respect, a local history museum is more a “cathedral” than a “palace,”  a place to glean ideas for the future by understanding the innovations of the past.

History museums are also participative and interactive, fulfilling the increasing need of Americans to modulate the amount recreational resources used at any given time.

Durham is justifiably proud of the board of directors, staff, volunteers and donors for the MoDH and its new hub.   This milestone is incredible and stands on the shoulders of Durham residents who have worked hard over the past eight decades to see it take this step.

They are genuine power-brokers, Durham-style.  Below are just four of the many additional reasons this tile in the mosaic of Durham’s sense of place is so important:

• Story Telling . it will give children, students, newcomers and relocating executives a place to get in touch with Durham’s story. People who grasp that story are more inclined to be engaged as activists, volunteers and philanthropy.
• Synergy. It will augment Durham’s historic sites by providing exhibition space to stir interest in those locations, making them more sustainable. It will complement rather than undermine other cultural facilities and programming.
• Preservation. It will be a vigilant testimony to what makes the community distinct and unique and insulate its character and personality from the pressures of development and generica.
• Future Generations. As a repository of innovations and artifact, it will inspire future generations to build on the temporal qualities that make Durham, well, Durham…creative, entrepreneurial, caring, innovative, accepting etc.

Planting Place-Based Assets

I’m blessed to be surrounded by more than 110 trees on my tiny lot near downtown Durham, North Carolina but as of last Thursday there are two less.  That’s right, I “clear cut” two trees.

It is called “thinning,” and  I do this once a year to keep my private forest healthy.  At the same time, four or five new tree naturally regenerate and on average, I plant one or two new trees each year.

The ones that were thinned last week were trash trees crowding out a healthier specimen while making the shade too dense for understory shrubs and trees.  Thinning is as important to an urban forest such as Durham’s as tree planting is and even more essential in an urbanized environment.

With a friend, I try to walk an extra 10 miles each week.  I also motorcycle on various routes through both the city and county.   This gives me a leisurely opportunity to observe Durham’s urban forest and how it works.

The terrain in my neighborhood is particularly hilly and forested.  In fact, the tree canopy in Durham, which is 40% citywide and 51% countywide, is a pivotal part of the community’s unique sense of place and appeal.

By  comparison, only 62.6% of the entire State of North Carolina remains forested.

A community’s unique sense of place is comprised of a distinct blend of three categories of place-based assets.  One category of assets are nature-related including a community’s rocks and geology, wildlife and parks, trees and vegetation, rivers and lakes and overall terrain.

Another category of place-based assets is cultural including the heritage, history and socio-economic make-up of a place.  The third category is “built” including architectural character, use of building materials such as brickwork, neighborhood personalities and public spaces.

Every community or state has these general categories, so sense of place isn’t about being unique as much as it is about weaving, preserving and blending these three categories of place-based assets into a distinctive whole.

This isn’t about replicating other places or emulation or erecting palaces.  It is all about working within the inherent place-based assets of a community to reveal and amplify its almost temporal personality as it has evolved over time.

The objective isn’t to achieve universal appeal but to seek to be genuine, indigenous and authentic.  Durham has had numerous caretakers who understood this over the over nearly 200 years.

Communities that make the effort have a shot of having a “there, there.”  Those that dismiss the importance of place or fail to guard it end up in the words of Dr. Scott Russell Sanders, “feeling more like jumbles than communities.”

The former have more appeal and potential for visitors, newcomers and economic vitality.  For the latter, “tourism devolves into only a form of shopping.”

I spent two decades of my now-concluded career in visitor-centric cultural and economic development, protecting, preserving and promoting Durham’s sense of place.  So I step softly while noting that overall, it seems some here are much too complacent - if not inconsistent - about protecting and fostering its sense of place.

And in no area does this show more than in upkeep and preservation of its urban forest, although through no fault of those directly involved day-to-day.

I don’t just mean street trees that line the roadways that make up 80% of its public space or its 2,700 acres of forested parkland or the tree “deserts” revealed on images via Google Earth.  I am also  referring to much-needed thinning of understory growth on public and private property forestland, where it remains.

Within the city limits, Durham has less than 1.4 acres of trees remaining for every acre of impervious surface.  County-wide, Durham desperately needs to get serious about a program to compensate for the covering over in development of an average of 2.5 acres a day since 1976. (source: RENCI Growth Mapping)

That average is forecast to be increasing to 3.91 acres a day between now and 2040, and a far greater proportion than that is cleared of trees for each development.

The fact that Durham’s ratio of acreage of tree canopy to acreage of impervious surface will soon be barely 1 to 1 must become of great concern to more than just those charged slowing storm run-off.

Durham was recently selected to host one of seven Google for Entrepreneurs Tech Hub Networks, and I’m sure officials are pouring over the TED report released last week entitled 7 Ways Our Cities Will Change.

Meanwhile, a crucial element of our sense of place is quietly disappearing.

I was born in 1948, during a 10-year lull between two incredible national tree-planting initiatives.  From the mid-1930s until the mid-1940s, Americans planted 2.3 million trees a year.  Then from 1956 to 1961, they planted another 2.2 million trees a year.

According to Dr. Neil Maher’s book entitled Nature’s New Deal, many on the ideological right were opposed to such programs because they feared the places the workers stayed while planting the trees would be a haven for Communists to infiltrate the working class.

Privately, the fear on the right, as it is today over the Affordable Care Act may have been more that the success of these problems would foster dependencies and fatten constituencies for Democrats.  Reasonable but as it is today, a bit paranoid.

Instead, these encampments turned out to not only provide a strategic solution to some big over-arching problems at the time by providing a “hand up” instead of a “hand out,” but as Maher documents, they simultaneously aided the Americanization of millions of immigrants.

Many of Durham’s street trees were planted in the 1930s as part of those programs.

Another national tree planting program was initiated under President Reagan in 1985 to return highly erodible land back into forestland, stream buffers, wildlife habitat, wetland preservation and ground cover after farmers had begun harmful “fence to fence” cultivation of marginal lands.

In 1988, the year before I was recruited to Durham, it resulted in the planting of 3.4 million acres of trees, the highest ever recorded.  In 1990, President H.W. Bush proposed planting a billion trees over a ten year period.

A few years ago, it was estimated that tripling this number annually would be a way to sequester a billion tons of carbon gasses but it would require reforestation or afforestation of a quarter of all undeveloped land in the US.

More than 4-in-10 of the trees planted today are by private property owners but they are often incentivized to do so by state and local officials who plant 7% and National Forests, which are responsible for planting another 6%.

New York City, which is roughly the same land area as Durham County but with thirty times the population, plants 8,000 trees a year, 2,000 street trees alone, and is on its way to planting 1 million new trees.  To date, private partners have planted 250,000 of those trees.

For some, it may seem Durham is doing pretty good to plant 1,000 trees a year but keep in mind how hard it is for New York, compared to Durham, to find places to plant 8,000 new trees each year.  The goal shouldn’t be calibrated to keep up but for Durham to plant enough trees here to replace several acres being lost each day.

But part of any goal should be thinning and improving the tree canopy we have.  Trees offer an incredible array of benefits to public health, property values, economic development, crime reduction, air and water quality, soil conservation and many others, but they also must be put in balance.

It isn’t just a question of more trees but needing tall trees with a wide canopy, placed strategically to minimize fragmentation and promote biodiversity with properly spaced clearings to maximize health and regeneration, as well as efforts to efficiently reforest.

A good goal for Durham, broken down into planting on public property, incentivizing and zoning planting of trees on private property along with facilitating natural regeneration would be 100,000 trees a year for a minimum of 10 years but better still, as an ongoing practice.

Sounds like a lot until you realize it will just barely hold the community harmless for tree loss due to development.

Safeguarding Community Sense-of-Place

Last week, a headline appeared in Durham, North Carolina’s The Herald Sun using a quote attributed to long-time Mayor Bill Bell.  It noted that the Mayor said the skyline of the community shouldn’t be the concern of the Historic Preservation Commission.

In the article Mayor Bell is quoted as saying that this element of the community’s sense of place should be reserved for elected officials rather than the commissions they appoint to review developments.  Some members of the City Council have been under pressure from a private group it funds in part to lobby local government on behalf of downtown development.

I can understand these points of view but both the City and the downtown advocacy group obviously didn’t value the skyline enough back in 1997 when the City sold a strip of land along the left field wall of the then-new city-owned Durham Bulls Athletic Park to the team’s Raleigh owner.

Until now, the dramatic view of the Durham skyline over that wall has served as a reminder to the 60%-70% who are non-residents at the games that they are enjoying themselves in Downtown Durham.  That is now all but disappearing behind a new office building that fills nearly all of the remaining gap shown in the image in this blog.

Having won a hard-fought battle to keep the Bulls in Durham which included an agreement to erect the award-winning ballpark, apparently no one in City government at the time - administrative, appointed or elected - nor the downtown group lobbying on behalf of the developer nor even “yours truly” appeared to think to protect the inspiring view-shed.

Elements of sense-of-place are fragile and to adapt an African proverb, they take the vigilance of an entire village to safeguard.

Similarly, when it was transferred to private owners no guarantees were embedded in property that runs in front of the Durham Performing Arts Center, another source of pride.  Only the Great Recession has delayed a development that will make the beautiful, huge-glass-walled view of downtown from the theater lobby mute.

As Marcia McNally, a downtown Durham resident, professor emeritus in landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC-Berkley and urban ecology pioneer cautioned in an op-ed for the Durham paper this past weekend about the proposed 26-story tower that spurred the Mayor’s comment:

• “It must look like Durham and respond to our history, climate, and public spirit.”

 

• “Durham is an integral part of the Research Triangle [home to RTP, located four miles from Downtown] where significant advances on energy efficiency are being made.

Duke University is a leader in climate change research. Durham must demand progressive, top quality engineering for a project this size.”

 

• “…word on the street is that the community needs to bury criticism – that we somehow can’t afford to offend the developers because this project is important for Durham.

Well of course it is. But I want to know what will be done to ensure the above and other issues the public has are heard and met?”

The appeal of Downtown Durham is its historic appearance and its scalability to pedestrians, rare in mid-sized communities these days.  Exceptions finagled over the years are readily apparent.  I know and trust the sensibilities of current elected officials but even they have proven vulnerable to the push and shove of back-room lobbyists.

Those impatient with design review are well advised to read the Urban Land Institute’s Ed McMahon whose most recent essay appears in the April issue of Birmingham magazine under the headline Design Matters.

For the reasons Ed notes, I too favor a system of checks and balances that helps remind generations to come about sense-of-place which includes scale. I also agree with the Mayor that the reviews need to be timely but it should be no surprise to developers that in a community with an incredibly high sense of community pride and passion, people will take interest and expect to be involved.

It is far too common, as illustrated in this video about a special tree in Fort Lauderdale, that community values about place are forgotten when money is involved.

Unfortunately distinctive sense of place in communities is under a full attack in the North Carolina General Assembly, as evidenced by new bills such the one at this link introduced by Senator Harry Brown.

Accountable only to the citizens of Onslow County, he is also the architect of the give-away a few years ago to out-of-state billboard companies, including an over-ride of local tree ordinances along state highways and the wanton sacrifice of one of the state’s signature assets.

This new and equally bad bill now seeks to strip local governments of all authority to regulate any activity where there are state regulations on that activity, e.g. billboards, landfills and homebuilding etc.

Apparently, the Republican-controlled legislature, while adamantly defiant of federal laws now ironically wants to superimpose its will on local governments.  This subverts the community sense of place so crucial to economic development and what makes North Carolina worthy of love from so many North Carolinians and tourists.

Rather than trying to intimidate the Historic Preservation Commission, Durham officials and advocates need to celebrate that reviews such as this are in the community’s best interest.

They also need to do everything possible to make sure Governor McCrory, a long-time former Charlotte mayor, is prepared to veto bills such as Brown’s and protect the right of communities to set higher standards.