The Fiery Soldier For Sense of Place

He walked unsteadily into the room using two canes but still with the grace of a former soldier.  More than 30 years after I first began to benefit from his wisdom as a national sense-of-place reformer, I recently found myself meeting him face to face in a room that was immediately filled with his passion and his intellect.

I first became aware of Edward T. McMahon when I was just a decade into my now-concluded 40-year career in community-destination marketing and a little full of myself after receiving a 1982 CLIO Award in the television/cinema category as producer for the still evident Wild About Anchorage campaign which was created in part by Bob Kurtz who, by the way, gave me the nick name I use on Twitter, Topbull, as in the bull moose mascot “Seymour of Anchorage” which was part of the campaign.

Some jump to the plausible, but inaccurate, conclusion that the handle relates to my time as head of the community marketing agency for Durham which is known as “The Bull City,” but I had it long before I arrived here.

While sense-of-place was just emerging for me as a concept back then, it had always been in my subconscious approach to my work.

Back then Ed was teaching law and public policy at Georgetown University Law Center after earning a law degree there subsequent to receiving an M.A. in Urban Studies from the University of Alabama.

At the time, Charlie Floyd, a friend of mine now in North Carolina and Ed were part of a group resurrecting a national roadside reform movement much like the National Roadside Council had been from the 1920s-1960s.  Initially it was called the Coalition for Scenic Beauty which morphed into Scenic America in 1989 just as I was arriving in Durham NC, where I still live, to jumpstart community marketing here.

Rivaled only by Dr. Scott Russell Sanders and his seminal essay entitled The Geography of Somewhere, Ed’s prolific writing, both when he worked at The Conservation Fund and also since 2004 at the Urban Land Institute where he currently holds the Charles E. Fraser Chair for Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy, has shaped my understanding of the central importance of sense-of-place.

When my friend Tania Dautlick recently turned me onto The Sustainable Cities Institute, I wasn’t at all surprised to see Ed on the advisory board there.

Favorite Edward T. McMahon essays of mine include his most recent entitled The Distinctive City where he poses the thought provoking question: “Do you want the character of your city to shape the new development, or do you want the new development to shape the character of the city?”

Another of my favorites of his is The Place Making Dividend which is filled with observations about the economic importance of being different such as “…many American communities are suffering the social, economic, and environmental consequences of being places that simply aren’t worth caring about. The more one place (one location) comes to be just like every other place, the less reason there is to visit or invest.”

Another is Lessons In Community Development Learned from Traveling where he writes “Travel teaches us that those communities that have retained their unique character are places that use vision, planning, and design to preserve the features that make them special. It also teaches us that progress does not demand degraded surroundings.”

In an essay entitled Tourism and the Environment, Ed put his finger on why sense of place is about so much more than facilities and activities when he writes, “… anyplace can create a tourist attraction, but it is those places that are attractions in and of themselves that people most want to visit.”

I feel so blessed to hold the many perspectives I learned from Ed and then to finally meet him in person and be able to tell him so.  I credit him for much of the success I enjoyed in my career and and also for the passion I have as a roadside reformer in retirement.

If you are involved in community-destination marketing or you want the destination marketing organization in your community to assume its customary responsibility of serving as guardian of sense of place where you live, you can do no better than to relish and share this one last “Edism”:

“Place is more than just a location or a spot on a map. A sense of place is a unique collection of qualities and characteristics – visual, cultural, social, and environmental – that provides meaning to a location.

Sense of place is what makes one location (e.g., your hometown) different from another location (e.g., my hometown), but sense of place is also that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about.”

Channeling O. Max Gardner

He is the only person to have starred on both the NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill football teams and maybe that feat gave O. Max Gardner the foresight as Governor of North Carolina from 1929 to 1933 to combine the state’s public universities into a single system.

But, unlike many today in the legislature and at least one current Democratic candidate for Governor, Gardner was also a “roadside reformer,” famously advocating the use of highway funds to plant trees along roadsides as a “sound business investment” even during the Great Depression.

Governor Gardner envisioned North Carolina as a “tourism state” and commissioned a report on how to beautify its roadsides and curb blight such as billboards.  The state was already earning a reputation for a great system of roadbeds but for roadsides, not so much.

Back then, where roadside trees hadn’t already been ravaged by poor road construction practices, they were being desecrated and destroyed or blighted by outdoor billboards.

A statewide survey commissioned in 1930 and co-conducted by a highway engineer reported a billboard every half mile on the road between Durham, where I live now, and Raleigh; and where trees hadn’t been stripped away for nearly 350 of these monstrosities, they were cut down or obscured to reveal hundreds more signs wallpapering barns, tobacco buildings and filling stations.

Back then Old (State) Route 10, a fragment of which I now often enjoy riding my Harley Crossbones, was the first central highway through the state and known as the “Main Street of North Carolina” in the years before it was soon replaced by US 70.

Finally paved end to end, there were already more than 2,500 billboards along the 383 miles of State Route 10 from Beaufort on the coast to Asheville in the mountains or as the report notes, “one every 13 1/2 seconds” even at the 35-45 mile per hour speeds permitted in 1930.

Gateways into Charlotte and Asheville, at the time, featured an outdoor billboard every 4 1/2 seconds and 5 seconds respectively.  Then as now, both the public and companies led by Standard Oil were rebelling against the exploitation and degradation of publicly-owned roadsides.

Standard Oil was sponsoring essay contests across the nation the year North Carolina roadsides were being surveyed, entitled “Scen-ic,” a pejorative word-play on the word scenic.  Billboards had already become the butt of editorial cartoonists.

The essays generated ideas on how to end the erection of “objectionable advertising signs along highways” and “why signs that obscured scenic beauty should be removed.”

Many generated photographs and slogans such as “Why Sign Away Beauty,” “A Sign Removed is a Scene Improved,” “Landmarks – Not Trademarks,” and “Roadside Beauty – A Roadside Duty.”

Today, trees are once again fair game in North Carolina:

• The legislature is permitting outdoor billboard companies to clear cut nearly the length of a football field in either direction while overriding local restrictions, thanks to a bill ramrodded through by a Republican lawmaker who owns billboards and seems to have been given a free pass when it comes to ethics, helping to earn the state only a “C” for integrity.

 

• Co-dependent NCDOT maintenance crews, except where public outrage made them stop, have been illegally slashing the tree line along Interstates, ten feet further than policy and up to 100 feet up some hillsides, sacrificing hardwood trees that were just as large when the roads were built and using public funds to cut down redbuds and dogwoods that had been planted in the tree line at public expense. (And you wonder why some people want to shrink government?)

 

• NCDOT officials have also been blowing off local officials with claims the agency doesn’t recognize local zoning, local tree ordinances or local water standards.

 

• And finally, Lt. Governor and now candidate for Governor, Walter Dalton, long one of the largest beneficiaries of campaign contributions from billboard interests and who proudly sponsored legislation to deny local communities use of amortization as a tool to remove billboards, now writes that he “understands their value to our economy?”

Apparently he isn’t yet plugged into the 9 out of 10 North Carolinians who oppose cutting any more trees for billboards and considers trading trees for billboards good for tourism, now one of the state’s largest economic sectors.

Governor Gardner lost his first bid for Governor in 1920 to Cameron Morrison (because he stood up for voting rights for women and Blacks) but was successful when he ran again in 1928 and after he was sworn into office in 1929 was famously quoted in the Raleigh News And Observer as saying:

"They expect you to kiss the ass of everybody in North Carolina with the understanding that when you become governor, they will all have to kiss yours.

My problem has always been that I only kiss my wife, my children and my dogs and I have never let any living soul kiss my ass.”

I don’t know Lt. Governor Dalton and he seems honorable but he’s apparently no Governor O. Max Gardner.

Engaging The Soul That Empowers Sense Of Place

It was an honor to finally meet and speak briefly with Marc Gobé!

Ironically, living and working in Durham, North Carolina I learned one of his most important lessons on branding 7 or 8 years before he coined it as a “best practice” and a decade before he was to write the seminal book which was updated and revised as Emotional Branding 2.0 just as I was retiring a couple of years ago.

When I arrived in Durham in 1989 to jumpstart the organization responsible for being the “heart, soul, and energy of the community as a destination” and “defender of it’s image and brand” as well as “guardian of its unique sense of place” – Durham was soon to receive recognition as “the city with a soul.”

While all of my previous decades of experience at community marketing and branding involved engaging the head, as nearly all marketing did until it was revolutionized by Marc, I turned out to be a good match for a community with already unparalleled levels of community pride and passion.

Marc Gobe’s brilliant contribution to branding a few years later was was to point out that a brand or product personality (in my expertise, a community) must engage not only the head but the heart and the soul.

Durham at the time I arrived was and had always been big on heart and soul, but these were masked by both unpretentiousness and double-density press coverage which our market intelligence revealed was fueled by incredible levels of negative word of mouth among residents of nearby communities.

So I was able to skip the much harder job of generating community pride and do what I could do best: give that existing pride and passion voice by empowering residents with facts and information, often in the form of statistics and then working systematically to facing down inaccuracies point by point and day by day.

From day one, a couple of people who should have been helping out were critical instead, criticizing the amount of research it took to empower residents and correct inaccuracies even undermining me by “carrying water” for a few in nearby Raleigh who were threatened by our efforts to calmly address what were affectionately termed “water-cooler” myths.

Ironically, even the few trying to undermine the effort were always among the first to call for data to overcome misinformation that was tripping up consultants, threatening loans, dissuading tenants and home buyers or undermining credit ratings or reappraisals.

I smile when, ironically, one of those naysayers will now and then try to claim credit for the turn-around.

While meetings with consultants and appraisers and loan officers often took much of my time, legions of residents empowered now with information to speak up around the water-cooler, created what Marc terms “social voice” both before and after the term social media and related technology became widely available.

They deserve the credit!

Together, we cleared away the clouds of neighboring negativity that were obscuring Durham’s unparalleled but always unpretentious sense of community pride and passion and replaced it with positive word of mouth that in turn has fueled a resurgence that has made things possible that are far more tangible.

In 2005, using a template that Marc Gobé espoused four years earlier in the 1.0 edition of Emotional Branding and a two-year process brilliantly executed by city brand thought- leader Bill Baker and his team, Durham was able to distill an overarching Durham brand anchored in its soulful and temporal values and personality traits.

Adopted in various forms now by nearly 400 disparate Durham stakeholder organizations and in hundreds of thousands of applications, the overarching Durham brand thrives because it engages head, heart and soul.

Marc is a legend among marketers for many reasons the least of which is not only because he co-founded and built up what was known then as Desgrippes Gobé into one of the top five branding firms globally after coming to the United States as a 24 year old immigrant.

He is even more of a legend now because his understanding and passion are focused on promoting the concept that in order for product brands to have a soul, they must be good stewards of the environment and embrace sustainability as more than a buzz word.

He is also one of a growing number of marketers with the courage to once again speak out against the desecration created by huge outdoor billboards that scar roadsides, clear cut green infrastructure and blight communities.  Here Marc stands on the shoulders of Mad Men giants such as Ogilvy and Gossage.

To inform others and engage their head, heart and soul about the desecration wrought by the outdoor billboard advertising industry, Marc personally financed an incredible documentary that is being screened around the country called This Space Available.

A Stewardship Credit On Taxes

Ironically, I recently found myself in a conference room at the headquarters of the National Historic Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington D.C. within 40 hours of having witnessed Durham, North Carolina's Annual Tribute Luncheon last week in Bay 7 of the incredible American Tobacco Complex.

While placemaking is about much more than buildings, using several metrics, arguably no place has taken better advantage than Durham of their share of the $90 billion in federal historic tax credits that have been injected into local economies over the last 32 years to help invigorate the built environment’s contribution to sense of place across the country.

Of course, the Trust which was established back when I was born, is about much more than buildings just as “protecting and preserving scenic character,” the purpose for which I was visiting Trust headquarters is about much more than preserving trees or fighting things like outdoor billboards that blight scenic character along roadways and destroy sense of place in communities.

The Brookings Institution which is located just one building further down Massachusetts Avenue from the Trust estimates that between the time when the American Tobacco factories reopened in 2004 as a creative class center and 2030, 82 billion square feet of existing buildings in this nation will be demolished and replaced with new construction, fully 25% of the nation’s current building stock.

The projections have been slowed slightly by the Great Recession, but there appears to be little or no evidence that we’ve learned our collective lesson from the burst of the housing and commercial real estate bubble.

Hopefully, the rapid and broad-based embrace of sustainability as an American value will be enough to slow the churn and transform the ways we see land use and respond to growth as we understand how to incorporate both negative and positive externalities into free market decisions.

But every year, approximately 1 billion square feet of buildings are demolished and replaced with new construction even though buildings built prior to 1945 are far more energy efficient.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine who lives down in Raleigh, North Carolina confided that Wake County which includes a dozen or so separate communities there was burning an acre an hour in development which seemed to me far too fast to enable good land use decisions.

By 2030 84% of the built landscape in the South will have been constructed or adaptively reused and, 54% will be new construction built since the year 2000.  If we insist that new construction carry the true cost, maybe we can make growth far more sustainable while being better stewards of historic structures.

Until new development carries its true cost, it is crucial that Congress level the playing field by passing the “Creating American Prosperity Through Preservation Act” CAPP) which was introduced in February by Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland and Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican from Maine to invigorate tax credits.

The CAPP Act will:

• Drive development and job creation into smaller “Main Street” communities by increasing the tax credit amount to 30% for projects under $5 million.
• Promote energy-efficiency and cost-savings by encouraging the use of energy efficient technologies.
• Enhance the impact of the historic tax credit in low-income areas by eliminating barriers to nonprofit community-based developers.
• Expand the 10% credit for the rehabilitation of non-historic buildings to include structures “fifty years or older.”
• Improve to efficiency of state tax credits by eliminating the federal taxation of the state credits.

Fast Company writing, in part, this month about Durham’s adaptive reuse of several million feet of the city’s historic tobacco and textile factories using historic tax credits notes:

“One hundred fifty years ago, Durham-based entrepreneurs Washington Duke and W.T. Blackwell battled for tobacco sovereignty...Today, Durham’s innovation scene is kindled by tech giants like IBM, Lenovo, and about 140 other companies with stakes in the ground at the 7,000-acre Research Triangle Park...

Though Big Tobacco’s heyday has come and gone, Durham, you could say, is still smoking!"

Infographic - US Population by Ancestry