Is it Stew Yet?

Time for a little recap: we've completed 20 posts, and looked into a number of different elements that make downtown tick (or not...)  Are we getting anywhere? We're stirring the pot and we are finding ingredients– a lot of ingredients!

Cooking up a city is like cooking up any recipe: any two different chefs will get two different results. And that's the beauty of it in terms of developing a unique downtown with a sense of place. We may use the same ingredients as many other cities, but with luck, our result will be perfectly suited to us.

Historically, downtowns started with the physical layout, and we are still enabled by, and hindered by, our infrastructure. But we've learned that by adding a big dollop of community and mixing well, we get an entirely different dish; one which holds together much better. However,  community won't set up unless you sweeten it with teamwork, an elusive ingredient which must be carefully hand-milled. And you have to cook the whole thing in a vessel of vision, or the ingredients will never get the chance to reach their full potential.

So this recipe is a far cry from what might be easiest: take a two-lane street with a median and turn lanes, add lights, seating and flower pots every 50 feet (or is it 25?), be sure the business windows are clean, and run a nice advertising campaign. Those are all tangible items, while everything we are finding important is intangible, and nobody can tell us how much is enough or too much. It's even hard to describe where to get some of these ingredients.

There does seem to be a commonality, though. All of these ingredients–community, teamwork, vision– only grow in a bed of strong communication. We'll need to know our market (tangible) and we'll need to decide who (City, Merchants, Chamber, Partners–tangible) is in charge of what (physical infrastructure, web site, recruiting, marketing–tangible). We'll need to decide who will nurture, grow and distribute the different kinds of information that we need (tangible). And we need to agree where we want to go (yes, tangible.) And at that point, we might be able to whip up those intangible ingredients and celebrate a culinary success.