Tuesday, July 06, 2010 -

BILL DRIES | The Daily News -

Charles “Chooch” Pickard is executive director and chief design officer of The Memphis Regional Design Center.

The center promotes excellence in urban design and planning practices. Its latest project is a Midtown overlay for future development of the area. The overlay is an outgrowth of the controversy generated by the now-abandoned plan to build a supermarket on the south side of Overton Square.

Meanwhile, a new Unified Development Code (UDC) for Memphis and Shelby County – the first in 25 years – is working its way through the City Council and County Commission.

We talked with Pickard after one of the three public hearings on the overlay.

What is the short term goal of the overlay?

“The Overton Square issue is kind of where this whole thing developed. We just felt right now there is no predictability. Those developers came in and everyone was arguing about what they wanted to see. We need to get together and decide: What do we want to see? That’s good urban design. … The three principles of urban design that we kind of promote are: pulling buildings up to the street, providing transparency to make them pedestrian-friendly and putting the parking in the back. All of that is to create a walkable, livable, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. We feel Midtown already has a lot of that going on. We can’t let it keep slipping in the other direction. We need to put a stop to the automobile-oriented development.”

How is Memphis when it comes to mixed use with retail on the ground and residential above?

“Downtown, we’re there. It’s been happening for years. It’s legal there. But it has not been legal for it to happen in Midtown or the rest of the city and county. You have to get a planned development (permit) for it to happen, and it’s just not encouraged. The unified development code and the Midtown overlay will actually encourage development that we’re seeing in a lot of other cities. … We just need to get our developers to open up their eyes a little bit and see it’s happening in other cities. We need to raise the bar and demand better development.”

How much of this is set in stone?

“With both the overlay and the UDC, the intention is it’s going to be in place for a little while. We use it, see how it works. Where it needs tweaking, we can tweak it through text amendments to the ordinance. It’s something that’s expected, particularly the UDC –that’s definitely going to happen. We’ve already got a list of things we want to change six months from now.”