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Learning from Titusville
Downtown Titusville Jim Thomas
Mayor Jim Tulley in Titusville captured what our Sustainable & Authentic Florida Conference is all about. He said that for the longest time, he saw the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge as one of his city's great attractions. Then his outlook changed. He re-imagined Titusville as the support system for the great refuge.
"We can change how we look only after we change how we think," the mayor declared.
Every conference speaker echoed the mayor at this recent March forum. Underwriters for the event, that attracted about 150 registrants mostly from north Brevard and from government agencies, included the city, Florida's Space Coast Office of Tourism, the Conservation Fund, and a local restaurant, Dixie Crossroads.
Ecotourism consultant Ted Eubanks of Austin said that in today's communications world, "The experience becomes the brand. It has to be authentic."
Authenticity is one of those mindsets that is helping cities everywhere recapture their identity, said forum keynoter Ed McMahon of the Urban Land Institute. Ed, one of America's clearest voices for how development should correspond with "place," holds an endowed chair at ULI.
His hour-long show-and-tell revealed how in cities small and large, where people rebel against sameness heaped around America by chain companies, they can have their cake and eat it too. If the chains want in, they have to redesign their look to fit with surrounding historical architecture. So, a McDonald's that looks like a city hall in a downtown; ski lodge-style on a western highway, on a riverboat in a mill town; a CVS with an old department store look, another behind a restored Art Deco movie façade with the name of the theater three times larger than CVS.
Ed talked about how trees and landscaping create value far beyond their cost, and quoted Richard Florida about "How people think of a place is less tangible but more important than just about anything else."
Others spoke about Complete Streets, about intensifying Titusville's commitment to walking, bicycling and trails; about likely resumption of passenger rail through the FEC corridor (Titusville has the only remaining historic station north along the route from West Palm Beach).
I spoke about our S&A Florida Conference, for which "Awakening the Possibilities" was an apt overture.
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