According to some of Chattanooga’s most prominent entrepreneurial and technological leaders, this city isn’t a “Sleepy little town in the South anymore.”
Changing times call for changed thinking about how to develop on all fronts, and the Enterprise Center is helping to lead the charge on developing the city’s transition in the 21st century.
As president of the Enterprise Center, Ken Hays told the City Council on Tuesday, modern innovation and city engineering is now fundamentally different than it was even a few short years ago.
Now it isn’t enough to have capable companies developing their own ideas and pushing the city forward, what is needed now are what he calls “collision spaces” that will lead to collaborative efforts and development that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
The theory is not unlike formulas that have led to success in other areas like Silicon Valley, where one of its most indispensable traits is the denseness of creative thought and communication among separate companies.
And now Chattanooga is trying to foster that same kind of innovation economy, and has been for several years.
Since 2010 when the first gigabit network in the Western hemisphere was introduced to Chattanooga, incubators, venture capitalists, and startups have exploded throughout the city, propelling it into national headlines for everything from record-breaking 3-D printers to STEM schools linking to a 4k microscope at USC.
The heart of what Mr. Hays calls the “innovation economy” is also the physical heart of downtown, something Enterprise has identified as an actual innovation district.
This is defined as a 140-acre district centered around the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Georgia Avenue.
Within that district are the majority of the dozens of startups and venture capital groups that have sprung up since the gig was introduced. It’s also the area that is receiving the most intense scrutiny for further development to compliment the kind of collaborative creation those companies thrive on.
To that end, the city is making a concerted effort to redesign existing spaces like Miller Park and Plaza to make both as attractive and useful as possible for downtown residents and workers.
There is also a continuing issue of residential space since Chattanooga’s population that lives downtown is proportionately smaller than other similar cities on the same development track.
The effort to address that issue can be seen in obvious, ongoing projects, including the Tomorrow building on Georgia Avenue which Mr. Hays said will be used to provide micro-units for incoming millennials wanting to “live, work, and play” in a dense urban environment.
Similarly, the Edney Building is part of a joint effort between CoLab and the Enterprise Center to combine public and private efforts to build creative spaces where startups and tech companies can share ideas organically.
He said, “Chattanooga works best when private and public sectors come together.”
This city reimagined itself once in the late 80s with the development of the waterfront and the northern part of downtown, transforming from literally the “dirtiest city in the nation” to “the Scenic City.”
It took hard work and a distinct vision, but now Chattanooga may be doing it all over again, this time for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.