Erin Byers
Honors Sociology
Dr. Bobby Jones
Dec. 3, 2002
The Knoxville Transformation
How Our City Planners and Residents Encounter Population Changes
Of all the topics to choose from for this project, population and
urbanization was definitely the hardest to see in an empirical way. It
seems that population changes cannot be seen except for in the affects
they have on a community, economy or society. It has been called a
catalyst, and not a cause, for many problems. In Knoxville and the
surrounding areas, the problem seems mainly to be poor planning for the
growth and movement of its people. In part, these changes may be viewed
as a natural occurrence any city has problems with, impossible to reverse,
or simply not a big deal. However, in our generation, the ever-present
threat of "six-billion" emphasizes our need to correct problems that have
arisen. In this project I have concluded that any problem-solving we are
to do regarding population issues is to be done at a local level in
creative ways.
It may be impossible for the citizens and urban planners of this
city to localize agriculture and streamline transportation throughout the
entire country, but among things in our control are westward spreading,
reliance on the automobile, pollution and environment control, and
efficient use of energy. I believe it is both impossible to try and
reduce births, and largely unnecessary in this setting, because the
developed world generally practices birth control and is below the
fertility replacement level, which I will soon discuss further.
My first phase of research, concentrating on very general, global
problems of population, was pretty straightforward-checking out tons of
books at the library. I tried to avoid information that was obvious and
redundant, such as "the population of Earth will soon reach 7 billion." I
focused on details of why the population boom of these two centuries
occurred, how these trends are moving now, and the real relation this has
to social problems. Though environmental problems are often the most
obvious consequences of growth, I was more interested in problems of
community, infrastructure and economy.
In beginning my second phase of research, I spent hours online,
determining what local aspects I was actually looking for. I tended
towards local planning and zoning boards, as well as some utility and
transportation providers. Soon I began getting leads. Dr. Jones
mentioned John Nolt, who mentioned Mary English. Both are scholarly,
environmentally-aware types who have studied mainly our lifestyle and its
affects on the area we live in. They have both been involved in writing
the book What Have We Done, which discusses some of these affects. I read
the chapter involving population before getting in touch with Mary
English. Dennis Yankee was referred to me after I emailed the TVA Natural
Heritage Group, a department I helped with some a few summers ago. They
monitor TVA lands and the species living there. Jack Neely, journalist at
the Metro Pulse, wrote an article about early Knoxville politics I ran
across online. I have had some contact with the Metro Pulse before, and
besides liking everyone I have met from the paper, I knew Jack Neely was
familiar with Knoxville history. I also looked up a lot of local fact
sheets, statistics and charts, as well as public meeting calendars. I
found out about a meeting held by T-DOT on the subject of passenger rail-a
great way for me to see city planning in the works.
Some sources I tried to get in touch with but never heard back
from were Planned Parenthood, the Clinch-Powell Resource Conservation and
Development Council, and the East Tennessee chapter of Zero Population
Growth. Still, I think I learned a lot about this city's population
dynamics throughout the project. From the reasons people chose to spread
westward to the main ways we waste energy, and from problem-solving to
interesting bits of Knoxville history, this has been some of the most
interesting research I've done.
Early in the semester, when I was checking out books for my
initial research, I wanted to get the most modern books the library had.
I went very early, and everything I had looked up was checked in.
A lot of controversy surrounds the question of whether our booming
population has a cause within our control, or is just a natural problem of
exponential growth. I did find that some major world changes in the
1800's caused an unnatural growth spurt. In this time, most women would
have around five children in their lives, because childhood diseases would
kill many of them. However, with the Industrial Revolution, medicine and
living conditions improved and these children began to survive more often,
and most would reach adulthood.
Still, family trends would take generations to alter. In the
meantime, women kept having around five children, and all of them grew up
to have more large families. The result was not only a few extra people,
but a population that had a higher ratio of young people to older people.
This caused "population momentum"-since younger people are more likely to
reproduce, the ratio of those reproducing to those not reproducing jumped
significantly.
It was not until the 1960's that families started getting smaller
in the developed world: women began having families of more like two
children. There were a couple of reasons for this. First of all, the
role of women in society was changing through various feminist movements.
Women were beginning to work and leave the home, giving them less time
with their children. Fewer children was less stressful for them.
Secondly, as women began seeking the same education as men, they moved
their marriages back many years. Again, age distribution helped slow
growth: as generation gaps grew, overall growth decreased. While this
finally brought fertility back down to its replacement level-the level
required to sustain humans without growth-it also suddenly left us with an
aging population, which would cause problems of its own. The developing
world is lowering its fertility at a slightly slower pace than we; women
are still having around three children per family. They are above the
replacement level and we are slightly below. Still, the trends suggest
that soon actual births will not be too rapid, and the growth curve of our
planet will flatten out again. Still, we are left with some problematic
factors, such as the aging population, to deal with in the meantime.
Having identified the reason there is such a major concern about
population, I looked at its major effects. I came across a lot of
different issues, many of which had several causes and couldn't be blamed
entirely on growth. There are issues surrounding immigration, the
environment, crime, and everything else under the sun. What I finally
decided to focus on was planning-the way our leaders and committees shape
our cities, and why. It is also worth looking, I found, at the actions of
the citizen himself-how he lives and reacts to the structure of his
environment.
One book I read, The Malthus Factor, criticized the 18th-century
thinker Thomas Malthus, whose ideas about the rich and the poor negatively
affected social planning in the shaping of modern Western life. He called
poverty a "law of nature," caused mainly by poor people over-breeding and
creating more people than there was demand for their work. He believed
the rules applied differently to the rich and the poor: the rich had no
obligation to spend their hard-earned money helping the poor in any way,
and the poor should never have families until they can provide for them
financially. This snobbish social Darwinism is certainly an attitude we
still see in society today, and the question of whether to provide for the
poor is one of the major political battlefields Republicans and Democrats
struggle over.
One of the first places I contacted in my second phase of research
was TVA. I had gone on a field research trip with their Natural Heritage
Office-a group of biologists who monitor endangered species on TVA land-a
few summers before. They referred me to Dennis Yankee, Projects Manager
at the TVA Public Power Institute. A little before noon on November 8, I
spoke with him on the phone. I asked first of all for a general idea of
how the land has been affected in TVA's time, as it has to serve more and
more people. He said that the main positive thing was reforestation of
agricultural land since the 1920's. He says there is way more forest now
than there has been in the past. The dams have had some adverse affects
on the diversity of aquatic life, especially mussels and darters. I asked
him how large of a role population growth plays in TVA's day to day
planning. As expected, he said it was "hugely important." He said TVA
was learning that it is very expensive to build power plants, and create
jobs to run them. There is a group, he said, called the Forecasting Group
which deals with this sort of planning. He also mentioned that TVA
invests about 1 million dollars a day on projects such as using
"scrubbers" which clean the air. He didn't talk to me for too long, and
said there were some other people who could help me out a little more,
such as someone in the Forecasting Group. He said he would email me their
names, though I never heard back from him.
I had also tried to get Jack Neely, journalist for the Metro
Pulse, on the phone several times, and he seemed to be away from his desk
a lot. So later that afternoon on November 8, I decided to write him an
email instead, as he had originally suggested this as an alternate way to
contact him. Instead of listing questions in a dry manner, I started out
with a discussion of the specific topic of westward sprawl. I wrote about
a paragraph about some things I had read in John Nolt's book about
downtown deterioration marking serious problems and even irreversibility
of sprawl. Only then did I ask a handful of questions, regarding city
planning and the origins of suburbs in Knoxville, as he is somewhat of a
historian of this area. I hoped that this conversational introduction to
the topic would spur some good information, and it certainly did. Mr.
Neely wrote me back later that day with three pages of information. I'm
certain I could not have absorbed this much on the phone unless I had
recorded the conversation.
On the subject of downtown revitalization, Neely said that
downtown really wasn't as bad off as some people make it sound. Some
areas have higher population densities than suburbs, and the concentration
of offices, restaurants, venues and clubs is higher than anywhere else in
town. The main things downtown lack are shops and storefronts.
I was curious to know how Knoxville began spreading westward in
the first place. It had many of the same reasons other cities in this
area have-wind blows all the factory smoke eastward, so the richer people
move west to avoid it. Beyond this, though, the University and the
beginnings of Kingston Pike provided an ideal setting for nicer
neighborhoods. After World War II, he said, the westward sprawl increased
for several reasons, and I'll mention a few here. Oak Ridge had brought
in a lot of scientists, who wanted to live near Knoxville. They generally
lived in between the two towns, in West Knoxville. Also, the Ft. Loudoun
Dam created stable shoreline all along the Northshore area, which
developers quickly built on. Thirdly, as I-40 was built along the
now-extensive Kingston Pike, with many exits, a "synergy" of ideal
commercial property was created. The area around West Town Mall is a good
example of this development.
I had asked Jack Neely what he thought of city planning decisions
made in our time. He mentioned our lack of "impact fees," a program held
by a few progressive cities that charges more for basic services like
trash disposal for those living farther away from the city. This would
ideally curb urban sprawl. So could more strict development boundaries
imposed by the city to protect agricultural land from being turned into
cheap neighborhoods. And, of course, there is always the controversy over
Turkey Creek's recent development, including a new Super Wal-Mart, which
arguably destroyed some of the last significant wetlands between Cedar
Bluff and Farragut. Neely was surprised that more people didn't object to
this project.
Dr. John Nolt is my philosophy professor here at UT, and was
mentioned to me by Dr. Jones. His book What Have We Done includes a
chapter on population issues in our bioregion. It gives some basic facts
about numbers of people over the past few decades in different counties.
Our metropolitan area, which includes Knox, Anderson, Blount Sevier,
Grainger and Jefferson counties, grew 44.3 percent from 1970 to 1992.
Some consequences of this growth are inevitable, such as building new
houses and roads. The problems this book chooses to focus on are specific
and environmental, and some of the solutions to these problems are quite
clever.
One such issue is that of urban streams. Knoxville has a few of
these, and if managed properly, they can serve many functions. They can
control flooding, provide aesthetically pleasing greenways and bring
people out into public, and they serve a wide variety of biological
functions if the shorelines are properly kept clean and allowed to grow
up. Third Creek has great potential to be such a multi-purpose stream,
with bike trails and wide waterways, but parts of the shoreline lack
significant vegetation, leaving the habitat of any animals living there
fragmented. The water is also incredibly dirty from dumping and trash
from water grates and neighborhoods the water passes through. With just a
little more effort from the city to enforce dumping regulations and
develop plant life, and the continued efforts of citizen-organized river
clean-ups, Nolt thinks Third Creek could be transformed.
The book also touches on the revitalization of downtown. While it
praises the waterfront development, it laments that much of the shoreline
of the Tennessee River was damaged biologically by the park and
restaurants. Nolt also thinks that in bringing people downtown, more
accommodations need to be made for bicyclers, especially in construction
zones. This is the least polluting form of travel and should be
encouraged. Another main traffic issue for downtown is that of delivery
trucks, which Nolt thinks should be discouraged.
An excellent idea for managing delivery truck traffic is
mentioned-"transportation parks." This would be like a truck stop
combined with warehouses and all the local distributors' equipment. By
centralizing the place where all these different companies transfer goods,
less truck traffic would run through the city, ideally. If implemented
correctly, I think this idea could really improve pollution and noise
downtown, and keep truck traffic in the suburbs minimal. It would be
difficult, however, to get all these companies to agree to use the same
facilities; they only do that now if they have made big contracts. The
city government would have to get involved.
Dr. Nolt told me about Mary English when I asked him about the
chapter on population. He said Mary was the current author of that
chapter, and that he had not done the original research. I emailed Mary a
few times to try and set up an interview. She preferred a group meeting
since another student had contacted her, so I coordinated with the other
students and set a time with Mary to meet at the EERC, where she works.
On November 12, 3:45, I met Mary, who is a Research Leader at the EERC,
with two other students from class. It was interesting because she was of
a strong opinion that growth and overpopulation were not problems in our
area, but that the way we lived was. The other students with me asked a
lot of literal questions such as "how does population growth affect the
economy," to which she reiterated her view that this was pretty
irrelevant.
We had an interesting conversation on the areas around the Smokies
such as Sevierville, Kodak and Cosby. She told us that more people shop
on the way to the Smokies in areas like Pigeon Forge than actually visit
the Park. Josh, who is from Sevierville, added that the growth has hurt
some of the older merchants-the Red Roof Outlet Mall has gone bankrupt
because there is too much competition. Mary Distinguished between several
types of people influxes that affected the region. Tourists, of course,
go to hike and to visit amusement parks. Shoppers, however, were a little
different because they often came from larger urban areas such as
Knoxville, seeking a bargain. A third type is people with second homes,
either their own or on timeshares. There are cabins and chalets now, she
said, in places that were previously considered unbuildable because they
were too steep. Advances in construction have changed that.
As we began discussing Knoxville itself more, she noted that the
population center, or where the most people were living in a given radius
of land, had moved out to Cedar Bluff. That's about 15 miles away from
downtown. This really points to developers' and residents' dependence on
I-40 to get anywhere in town. Jack Neely in fact described Cedar Bluff as
"a classic postwar interstate-exit suburb." Certainly sprawl is a problem
in Knoxville, but when we pulled out the recent News-Sentinel article
claiming Knoxville was the 8th worst in the country for sprawl, she was
skeptical. She explained that just because our population density is low
for such a large space, there are geographical features and farmland that
keep a lot of land sparsely populated and could skew results.
She also showed us this chart from the website of the ERA-Economics
Research Service of the USDA. Though use of land for urban purposes is
small, she said, depending on "what's going on" there, the amounts of land
used for other purposes, and how they are used, can vary wildly.
Graphic Source:
http://ers.usda.gov/Briefing/LandUse/majorlandusechapter.htm
Mary really wanted to emphasize that the problem was more our use
of resources than how many people live in this region. She left us with
the thought, "A lot more people could live in Knoxville and have a lot
less impact on the environment if they lived differently. They wouldn't
like living with that many people or differently, but they could."
Looking at the Metropolitan Planning Commission's website, I
checked a few facts on local population and urban patterns discussed with
Mary English. The 2000 center of population in Knox County hadn't in fact
reached Cedar Bluff, but was around where Western Avenue turns off to I-75
and 640. Still, this is further West than Lonsdale, the center of
population in 1980 (http://www.knoxmpc.org/locldata/cenpop00.htm). As for
current population growth, the city and county averaged to 13.8% over the
past 10 years. As one might expect, the city itself was only growing at
5.3% while the county had grown at 22%
(http://www.knoxmpc.org/locldata/demo01.pdf). Still, while 14% doesn't
seem outrageous, according to the website of an organization called
FAIR-Federation for American Immigration Reform, Tennessee was above the
median among states in numbers and percentages of growth
(http://www.fairus.org/html/07273062.htm). Most likely, there is no clear
answer as to how much growth is too much growth.
At 6:00 in the evening November 14, I sat in on a T-DOT meeting on a
statewide passenger rail system. Going to this meeting was mostly
interesting because I saw some ways urban planners consider population
dynamics in their plans. The spokesman started out listing some reasons
the rail system was being considered. Traffic has grown significantly on
I-40 and some other major veins, tourism to our area has been on the rise
and connecting our rails with neighboring states could bring more rail
traffic, particularly a main rail line running North-South in
mid-Kentucky.
The four lines they found most feasible are as shown: This didn't
surprise me, as they simply seem to be the routes most people drive.
Still, T-DOT's representatives explained many more detailed methods they
used to investigate these routes. Most of these areas have existing
commercial rail that could be used for a fee instead of building new.
Some routes were ruled out because rail land had been purchased by
developers, and would be hard to reacquire. I believe this was the main
cause for not considering a Chattanooga-Atlanta line. They showed three
different tables comparing the four lines in terms of capital required to
start it, cost recovery and cost-benefit ratio, or if the cost was worth
it in terms of public service. The latter analysis, cost-benefit, was
important to T-DOT moreso than a commercial company because they are a
government agency and not a corporation. Some financial loss would be
justifiable if a service was being done to Tennesseans. The Bristol to
Chattanooga line didn't perform well in the analyses but the others were
all deemed feasible.
Some advantages T-DOT cited of a passenger rail system include:
lower cost transportation, energy savings, opening state-traversing travel
to people who have never had the opportunity before, and economic
development (as happens with any new form of transportation). I worry
that a project like this handled by an organization as notorious as T-DOT
might not live up to its fancy power point presentation. Still, if the
rail system were cheap and efficient enough to work out, I think Tennessee
will have taken a great step in managing its population progressively.
I think Knoxville planners have done some progressive things to
manage population and urbanization, but like any city in the country,
Knoxville has its own set of problems. If the world were an ideal place,
I would want to see our public transportation become widely available, and
for people to use it. I would like to see even more people moving to
downtown lofts and big-name retail to move into the abandoned storefronts
on Gay Street. I think these things in turn would bring more art, music
and drama to Knoxville-I am always shocked when I go to Asheville, a town
smaller than ours, and finding much more interesting things to do in their
newspaper than I would here.
Aside from making this city less of an isolating place to live,
there are a few environmental issues I've come across that I would also
have addressed in an ideal world. I would adopt the ideas mentioned in
What Have We Done, renovating Third Creek and trying to alleviate that
area of crime, and building a state-funded "transportation park,"
encouraging all other local operations to relocate there. I would
certainly set firm zoning boundaries on our suburban borders, because
having lived in both South Knoxville and Cedar Bluff, I know the
disappointment of finding your favorite field turned into mud, and then
vinyl siding. I sympathize with those who want to buy a few acres in the
country, but cannot because competition and skyrocketing land value have
driven simple lots to costs only developers can afford.
I thought at first that my main limitation in this research was
the fact that no activist groups seem to exist for population and
urbanization. It took me a while to determine what was even meant by the
topic. At first, I was trying to concentrate on overpopulation,
overcrowding, and the like. As soon as I realized Knoxville was no worse
off than the rest of the world, I began to look at the ways we deal with
this inevitable force of growth. Although I did not get in touch with as
many people as I intended to, I got a lot of help from those I talked to,
and learned a lot about this town I did not know, even though I've lived
here all my life. I do feel that I have a better perspective of the
limitations city governments and planning organizations face when trying
to manage the movement of the people residing there. Once a population
trend starts, it is nearly impossible to curb development away from where
people want to live.
Still, I think it is important for the city to stay on top of this
issue, because while the worldwide population boom may taper off this
century, we are still left with a lot of people to house, transport and
employ. Knoxville may not have the greatest track record of working in
creative and progressive ways, but sometimes the city surprises me. The
revitalization plan for Market Square, which finally seems to have begun,
could very well enhance that corner of downtown further than the Tomato
Head and free concerts could. I love this city, I want to stay here and
look forward to downtown's possible new life, and from now on, I will try
to get jobs I can walk to.
Works Cited
Coward, Harold, ed. Population, Consumption, and the
Environment-Religious and Secular Responses. Albany: Statue University
of New York Press, 1995.
Economic Research Service. US Department of Agriculture. 19 Nov. 2002
.
English, Mary, PhD. Research Leader: UT Energy, Environment and
Resources Center. Personal interview. 12 Nov. 2002.
FAIR Home Page. The Federation for American Immigration Reform. 17 Oct.
2002 .
Jacobson, Willard J. Population Education-A Knowledge Base. New York:
Teachers College, Columbia University, 1979.
Knoxville. Knox County Metropolitan Planning Commission. 17 Oct. 2002
.
National Research Council. Beyond Six Billion-Forecasting the World's
Population. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000.
Neely, Jack. Journalist: The Metro Pulse. 522-5399 ext. 13.
"RE: Population Growth." 8 Nov. 2002. Personal
e-mail.
Newbold, Bruce K. Six Billion Plus-Population Issues in the Twenty-First
Century. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002.
Nolt, John, PhD. What Have We Done? Washburn, TN: Earth Knows
Publications, 1997.
Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Tennessee Department of Transportation. Public Hearing. City County
Building, Knoxville, TN. 14 Nov. 2002.
Yankee, Dennis. Projects Manager: TVA Public Power Institute. 632-1541.
Telephone interview. 8 Nov. 2002.
.