Create West Virginia

Quality of Place is the sum of a community’s parts—its built environment, its assets, its personality as experienced through all five senses. In these sessions, we’ll invite participants to assess their own communities in comparison with contemporary American ideals, and we’ll explore Wheeling, a community that is applying creative solutions to its challenges.

In 1969 Walter Cronkite announced to the nation in his evening news broadcast that the Environmental Protection Agency declared Chattanooga had the nation’s worst air quality. A few years later, the New York Times published an article noting that Chattanooga was the only major city in the South not experiencing growth.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Artshas accepted the invitation from the West Virginia Division of Culture andHistoryto make West Virginia the site of the National SymphonyOrchestra’s 2010 American Residency. Between April 5 and April 13, 2010, the members of the Orchestra will participate in approximately 150 education and performance activities throughout the state.

One of West Virginia’s most outstanding features is her quaint small communities and towns, many of them seriously threatened by decline and others faced with unfettered growth.  What some treasure as under-appreciated or unrecognized assets others scorn. Some residents resent any change. The future inevitably unfolds. Will you design it to your liking, or will you leave it to someone else? These six tracks and the Tuesday 7 a.m. bonus track may jump-start your thinking.

Sometimes those in the creative communities movement will get a skeptical response from leaders who believe in "real" economic development that focuses primarily on traditional infrastructure projects - roads, buildings, business parks, etc. Usually these leaders have not fully grasped the reality of an incredibly mobile, flexible, high-tech creative workforce that more often than not makes their choice on where to live and work based on its "quality of place."