When Southern Living named Charleston the best city in the South last month — again, for the tenth year in a row — the response from locals was pretty much unanimous.
Yawn. Stretch. Did you see where I left my keys, honey?
See, not to brag, but we know Charleston is special. And not just because an endless parade of planners, promoters and preservationists keep telling us so.
As residents old and new could — and will, if given half a chance — tell you, there really is something unique about Charleston. Something that makes its Old World streets and alleys not just improbably beautiful, but happily livable as well.
But have you ever asked yourself exactly what that something is?
Well, as it turns out, billionaire businessman Ben Navarro — the local philanthropist who’s in the process of buying the 70 undeveloped acres at downtown’s Union Pier with a pledge to be more steward than developer — has been asking that question for about a year now.
And as Charleston City Paper reporter Skyler Baldwin learned when he spoke last week with the world-class team of experts Navarro has put together to find the answers, the results aren’t just interesting. They’re a startling rebuke to the top-down, “master-planned” development philosophy that’s reigned in Charleston and around the country for the past generation or more.
“When you look at the old city and how it developed organically and incrementally, all of the lessons are actually already here,” architect Christian Sottile told Baldwin. “The larger development world today just doesn’t follow the lessons that come from the best and oldest parts of Charleston.”
Of course, that’s easy to say. But what makes this Navarro initiative — known internally as Union Pier University — different isn’t the expert opinions. It’s the data-driven rigor that supports all their findings.
For instance, most people would tell you Charleston is a remarkably walkable city, with small blocks and frequent intersections to break up the space. But now, thanks to Union Pier U, we can actually see it in the numbers. Downtown Charleston neighborhoods like Ansonborough and the French Quarter have 300 to 400 intersections per square mile — compared to other famously walkable cities like Amsterdam, with 244.
And that’s just one example of the data that’s been gathered. Even more impressive — and more critical to the frequently flooded city’s future — is the careful mapping of every drop of water that enters or leaves the Union Pier area.
“If you don’t understand all of it,” Sottile noted, pointing at the hydrology maps covering the walls, “you’re not really going to understand any of it.”
The goal of all this study? To produce the conditions for an organic redevelopment of Union Pier — one that allows it to grow the way the old city around it did, with infrastructure and zoning that support what Narraro’s team calls an “intentionally incremental” approach.
It’s a vision that neighborhood leaders and preservationists are calling responsible and elegant — a “model process” in the words of Preservation Society President Brian Turner.
How will all this ultimately play out? Obviously, it’s way too early to tell. But already, we can say that Navarro and his team are approaching the project with the care and seriousness Charleston deserves.
And that’s nothing to yawn at.
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