The Tulsa Time Blues

Here is the full text of the essay:

the tulsa time blues

BY KEVIN ADAMS

I recently met a woman who had given up her job as a Houston oil company executive to sing full-time in a national touring company. I asked her if she had ever performed in Tulsa, and what she thought of the city. Her response was polite and restrained. After some prodding, she admitted that it was one of the least hospitable cities she had visited. Car-less and trapped in a downtown hotel, she and her fellow performers couldn’t wait to get back on the road.

A mid-sized city most people have heard of but few can place, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is in the midst of an identity crisis. In the late 1990s, Tulsa’s city government proposed a grand building scheme known as the Tulsa Project, hoping to rescue Tulsa from its image void while revitalizing the downtown. The effort resembled countless other so-called urban revitalization schemes that larger cities had employed, with a few twists.

Tulsa’s big idea was to take a failed model and scale it down to Tulsa size. Instead of primary conventions, Tulsa would go after tertiary ones in a new small convention center. Instead of professional sports franchises, we would finance not one but numerous facilities scattered around the city center, to capture amateur sports venues such as high school swim meets or gymnastic competitions.

Voters rejected this plan, but Tulsa’s problems remained, and a group of citizens began a grassroots movement. “Grassroots” seemed much healthier than the city planners’ sugarcoated schemes. Paying homage to the country-western hit and Eric Clapton remake, round two was called “Tulsa Time.” With the planners help these citizens proposed yet another convention center—this time nestled in a green strip, rolling from downtown to the river. This “grassroots” version of the same old idea, however, failed at the ballot box as well.

In the past year, Tulsa has witnessed a “Tulsa Vision Summit” with over 1000 attendees, as well as the launch of a new grassroots website called “Tulsa Now.” In TulsaNow.org’s discussion forum, participants, in a desperate attempt to identify the magic project that will save the city, have been crying out for everything from mask festivals to a downtown public green. Last October even saw a “Battle of the Plans,” in which developers, citizens, and others duked it out over the most visionary project. Beyond proposals from a contingent of New Urbanists, the plans were mostly totems of one local cultural icon or another, the most distracting in the form of a skyscraper-sized downtown oil derrick connected to smaller derricks and laced with cable cars, a sort of downtown Tulsa a la Disney.

While it’s exciting to see community spirit thrive in the face of so many failures, the friction from our collective wheel-spinning is becoming unbearable. I want to scream out to Tulsans to think. If these projects are getting us nowhere, what’s the point of yet another?

Tulsans understandably want an American city to be proud of, but we should slow down and think about the quality urban places we love and why we love them. Is New York just its skyscrapers? Is San Francisco only a bridge? What do these cities, big or small, have that Tulsa does not?

There is a magazine in town oddly named Urban Tulsa. When it interviews influential Tulsans, the publication asks them for a list of their favorite cities. Cities from Boston to Chicago, Savannah to Santa Fe, are often mentioned in the same breath as Tulsa. I suppose there is no place like home, but honestly, which one of these is not like the others? Here is a simple test. Park your car in the heart of any of these places, step onto the sidewalk, then ask yourself where you are. Now try it in Tulsa. The difference should be clear. Those cities are real, definable, urban places. Is Tulsa? Until that issue is addressed head-on, no sports venue, arts festival, or public green space is going to make a difference.

In its present form, all of Tulsa looks suburban. Even downtown is more an office park than an urban village. Cars are used for all trips. Consequently, each element of city life—housing, jobs, stores—is increasingly separated from others by miles of asphalt, creating a city of parking lots, expanding highways, and little else. How can an outmoded, suburban Tulsa compete with a shinier and even less dense suburb on our fringe? We should leave the suburban market to the suburbs and try to develop a new urban market for ourselves, incorporating the time-honored principles of Jane Jacobs’ school of urbanism. We should focus on creating exciting urban streets, which will encourage personal and economic exchange qualitatively different from the social and economic interactions of the suburbs.

Some may complain that there isn’t much fine print in this prescription, but we must make a mental detour before there can be details. Tulsans must insist that our civic leaders, urban planners and developers refocus on the traditional street, and establish a real reason for people to live in Tulsa instead of the surrounding suburbs. In the past decade, we’ve seen developers building projects in sight of big cash flows, architects designing big, inspirational complexes, and planners focused on the community’s big picture. Nobody promotes the traditional street, or the little connections that tie all these larger goals together.

For cities that—like Tulsa—either no longer have truly urban spaces, or never had them, the path to an authentically urban future is not obvious. Unlike the well-worn message of traditional urbanism, alien buzzwords like smart growth and infill mean little to most people.We must deal with the mental landscape of Middle America before we have any hope of changing its physical form. Focusing on the urban street will have the greatest resonance and the greatest success. Let’s stick to it. Perhaps it will then finally be Tulsa’s time to stop singing the city project blues.

Here is the addendum Kevin Adams sent along, with his policy prescriptions for Tulsa:

In my article I recommended we focus on traditional urbanism, but once Tulsans decide that’s a good idea, how do we do it? Here are three recommendations.

1) Form Based Zoning: we must get the momentum behind a new look for Tulsa. Developers and business people will make the changes over the years. We just need to get rid of some of the rules and change some of the others, about how they build. Rather than “use” we need to focus on “look”, because that’s what will differentiate our city in the market. For specific form based zoning prescriptions lookup Architect Andres Duany.

2) Comprehensive Multi-modalism: we must make large sections of our city and region less auto-dependant. One of the key differences between cities and suburbs is how you get around town. If Tulsa’s future is the urban market then Tulsa can no longer exclusively operate like a suburb in its transportation. Moreover, competitive, world-class cities, regardless of their size, have these kinds of transportation options. It’s considered part of the lifestyle.

In the past I was for transit, not buses but rail. I still think that might be a good idea in the city’s future, but more recently I have shifted to walking and biking. Whatever system we choose, we must make it comprehensive and capable of picking up the slack for the traffic that is created in a dense urban environment.

Why not make Tulsa Bike City USA? I’m not talking about just a few white lines on the pavement here and there or a solitary rails to trails path, but rather dedicated and quality bike lanes placed all over the city—IN A BIG WAY. To get noticed anything we do will have to be above and beyond the norm. Bikes are good for our health, would make a great park system and could be done right now for a lot less than other big transportation projects. After we get the system we should then market it big time as well. Bike Tulsa matches; Family biking days; etc. It would appeal to so many groups. If you don’t want to sweat you could even use one of those new fangled Segways on these bike paths; and someday the whole system could be integrated with an inter-modal mass transit system.

3) Build Local Examples of Traditional Urbanism: we must jump-start the process and build some urban streets and neighborhoods, at least two of them, somewhere in the city, perhaps one in downtown and one outside the loop. These should be the best examples of traditional urban places we Tulsans can muster. Unfortunately projects to date such as Renaissance Uptown and the Village at Central Park, although steps in the right direction, have not been designed well enough to pass the urban test. (For a critique of these sites lookup the Tulsa architect Don Glass.)

The problem is that we have been waiting for the market and private developers to do it for us, but getting something of quality started is very difficult. Initial projects that meet most criteria for good urbanism are usually complex and short-term financial losers. Even if they do have great long-term returns, nobody wants to be first. Because these types of signature urban streets or neighborhoods are critical to our future, the city should do it first, even at a loss. We should see it as a public amenity and as an economic development investment. Then once these places are a success, which I’m convinced they will be if they are top quality, other developers will have a local model to follow. Since one and two will be in place (formed based zoning and some kind of multi-modal plan) Tulsa can begin regenerating into a great urban destination, serving both residents and visitors.

My picks for this plan are a large-scale rehab of Cherry Street and a new neighborhood in the parking lots of the downtown TCC. Tulsa’s Brady I would leave to the developers and artists, since something more organic and funky is already (although its painfully slow) emerging there. For nearby examples of what these neighborhoods could be, take a stroll through the new Villages in Uptown Dallas. My locations for these projects are not the final word. This kind of development could happen any where in our city or region. Wherever we put it, let’s make sure it happens in Tulsa soon.