Nashville's Imagine East Bank is the type of vision that can make a great city | Opinion

• Keel Hunt, columnist for the USA TODAY Network Tennessee, is at work on a fourth book about Tennessee politics and culture.
• Mayor John Cooper unveiled Imagine East Bank on Aug. 22, with elaborate schematics and full-color renderings.
• The Imagine effort owes some of its lineage to earlier great visions such as The Plan of Chicago from 1909 and The Plan of Nashville in 2005.

For most of my life, the riverfront on the east side of the Cumberland was a disappointment – a heavy industrial zone of successful businesses, true, but visually uninteresting, unappealing, uninspiring.

Nashville’s inner-most city blocks between the river and that stretch of interstate highway on the east side seemed especially forlorn if not downright ignored. If any city planners with a strong design sense had ever focused on this zone as a worthy challenge, I figured they must have given up on it.