A.G. Gancarski
Where Florida Begins.
The Bold New City of the South.
The Florida You’ve Always Wanted.
The last few decades in Jacksonville have been a graveyard of aspirational slogans and taglines, with one commonality: a lack of real resonance beyond the region, and a hard callous of skepticism among locals.
truJAX, a partnership between the Jacksonville Office of Urban Development, Visit Jacksonville, the JCCI, and the JAX Chamber, seeks to rectify that, via discerning and elaborating a shared vision on identity building and market positioning strategies, many of them outlined in a presentation on Tuesday.
Easier said than done. Jacksonville is a city of contrasts that border on contradictions in many respects. Not for the first time, and possibly not for the last, civic leaders are attempting to rectify that.
John Delaney, former mayor and current president of the University of North Florida, discussed a trip to Nashville last year as illuminating, in establishing how the city has cultivated its “community image.”
Building on its identity as Music City, Delaney said, Nashville “picked a direction” in a thematic sense, which ultimately led to an embrace of its role as a creative hub beyond the strictures of traditional country music.
Jacksonville, it follows, could do something similar, said the key presenter, Will Ketchum of the Burdette Ketchum advertising firm.
The goal: “gaining a sense of who we are as a community,” garnering a fuller “sense of ourselves” and identifying “the trunk of the tree.”
Nashville discovered its “DNA” as a “creative community.”
Jacksonville, however, has a different challenge.
“We have no sense of our self,” Ketchum said, and “the world has a vague sense of us,” a problem exacerbated by being “adrift in defining ourselves” historically.
Or, of having a “neutral identity,” one with many strengths, but no dominant ones that succinctly define Jacksonville.
Hence, the DNA pursuit, the desire to find an identity that is at once authentic and aspirational, yet transcends the ultimate emptiness of sloganeering.
The JAX2025 project, which preceded this, outlined 10 key visions for the city; among them, to have a vibrant economy that served as a global magnet for new business.
This report, two years in the making, advances that theme, Ketchum said.
“We must capture our DNA and create a vision,” he said, to present a “unity in presentation to the world.”
Many aspects of that DNA are apparent: a diverse natural environment; an entrepreneurial spirit; “high civic engagement”; and a “can do spirit and drive.”
Historically, Ketchum maintains that Jacksonville, going back to the 19th century, is a “place where people take action,” characterized by a “push and pull … a rising tide of political activism.”
That push and pull extends to a “confluence and convergence” of inherent contradictions.
The city and the beach.
Shad Khan and the Good Ol’ Boy Network.
Southern Rock and Little Harlem.
As well, Ketchum said, Jacksonville is characterized by a “vigorous exchange of goods, knowledge, ideas, and more,” a spirited “process of issue resolution,” and an “unstoppable, wide open exchange” of “products, ideas, and opinions.”
With all this in mind, a vision: Jacksonville as a “global center for ideas, opinions, and commercial exchange,” predicated on “wide open opportunities,” a “culture of open attitudes,” “debate and discourse,” “transparent government,” and “environmental/commercial balance.”
Jacksonville’s story can’t be defined by maxims like “fun in the sun” or “coastal Southern charm,” says Ketchum. Those aren’t Jacksonville’s identity.
Rather, he said, the city should embrace progressive architecture and concepts, such as an Aquasphere, a riverfront convention center (which could be our Sydney Opera House), a river taxi, and a repurposing of the Landing, modeled after Pittsburgh’s riverfront development, to eschew storefront commerce.
All of this, of course, sounds wonderful. But does it accord with where Jacksonville actually is, once one gets out of the thought leader class and down the pothole-pocked roads, past the pawn shops and sketchy convenience stores, Section 8 apartments and cinder block day care centers with day-glo paint?
For Daniel Davis of the Chamber, that’s not the question.
Jacksonville, he says, must “choose to move forward with wide open opportunities,” embracing its diversity while doing so.
John Delaney noted Jacksonville’s consolidated history as a factor, saying that areas of town would, if consolidation hadn’t happened, would be their “own cities” with sense of places all their own.
The former mayor noted that Jacksonville is, statistically speaking, the most integrated city in the country, despite the pockets of town that belie that assumption.
The salient question to Delaney: “what can we try to rally the community behind?”
For Delaney, the architect of the Better Jacksonville Plan, it comes down to vision. He noted that during a recent economic development trip to Oklahoma City, he and the other attendees saw how the city had a river whose bed was so dry the city budget accounted for cutting its grass twice a year.
However, city leaders in OKC converted that into an asset, damming it up and creating a .8-mile canal, “basically a swimming pool,” traversed with gondolas, with shopping and other amenities on its banks.
This tributary, he noted, was “made up from whole cloth.”
Implementation of this vision begins in the first quarter of 2016, and its benefits are obvious to the city’s leadership class.
Paul Astleford, from Visit Jacksonville, spoke of this as an opportunity to “distinguish ourselves,” via accessing the city’s “grand essence” and distilling that to audiences via brand presentation.
To fully actualize the vision, Delaney added, it will take a continuity of dedication, one that transcends mayoral administrations; Indianapolis’ reinvention of itself took 30 to 40 years, he noted, and was driven by consistency.
In Jacksonville, he noted, there has been some “zigzagging.”
The metaphor that Ketchum returned to during his address: the St. Johns River, which flows backwards and contains a mixture of salt and freshwater.
Marketing complexity is no easy thing for brochures. It will take a unified vision. Avoidance of an economic downturn. And a willingness to move beyond the silo thinking that has defined Jacksonville at its worst.
