About

At its core, National Park City is an effort to build creativity, synergy, and cooperation across cities that unlock solutions to problems and open new doors to achieve community potential that makes cities greener, wilder, more connected, and healthier.

Born from the vision of Mayor Tim Kelly and Scott Marin, the head of the Department of Parks and Outdoors (DPO), Chattanooga's National Park City journey is uniquely positioned as a government-initiated movement that thrives on community partnership and participation. While DPO provides leadership and resources, the movement's success depends on active community engagement, partnerships, and collaborative decision-making.

In other words, it depends on people. 

This work is framed in each city's "Charter" which was created with over 75 community leaders. This co-created Charter has identified commitments that became opportunities for specific community members and organizations to coalesce around. These teams then create more spaces for new leaders, new voices, new inspirations, and thus, those most important moments when we discover new civic capacity.

Each element of the Charter requires a working group that serves as a convening leadership team to identify and align community goals around the charter item. Each Charter team launches with a leadership group of two or three initial committed individuals, supported by staff at the DPO. This group helps arrange and coordinate meeting times and locations and acts as a supportive role as well as an accountability partner during the process. Charter leaders engage additional Chattanooga residents who indicated interest in working on specific areas of interest. This is the crucial connection point for the movement - this is how change and progress are focused, more people are engaged, and networks are built and sustained. This is community ownership.

Charter working group leaders are anticipated to need to set aside a few hours per month at the start of the work to organize the teams, host workshops with engaged leaders, and communicate progress and initiatives. The key here is to build a culture of transparency, collaboration, and networks that unlock the potential of Chattanooga to achieve National Park City objectives in those defined working spaces. This is paramount as we will learn and grow together. as we will learn together and grow together.

Chattanooga City Council adopted by resolution the campaign to establish Chattanooga as a National Park City in 2024.  When the resolution passed, Council directed that the campaign and ongoing work should have city advised input for sustained success, and that this responsibility would be assigned to the City's Parks & Outdoors Advisory Committee and provide regular reports to City Council through the Parks & Public Works Committee.  Further, the Chair of the Parks & Public Works Committee will serve as co-chair of the Chattanooga National Park City community.

Everyone in a National Park City is able to benefit and contribute everyday. It is a large-scale and long-term vision that is achievable through many actions. Much is already happening but by working, learning, sharing and acting together, across communities and governments, we can achieve even more.
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London became the first National Park City in 2019, with Adelaide joining in 2021. Dozens more cities around the world are on the journey including; Glasgow, Breda, Rotterdam, Southampton and Chattanooga – we are on course for at least 25 National Park Cities by 2025.

With the majority of the world’s population now living in urban areas, National Park Cities are an inspiring way to rethink cities, their futures and how we inhabit them. National Park Cities are about the whole place and landscape – where everyone can be involved and help make a difference to improve city life for nature and people alike.

Chattanooga's Journey

Nature gives Chattanooga its very identity. The word “Chattanooga” itself is believed to have derived from a Creek word that roughly translates to “rock rising to a point” or the Muskogean word “chato,” meaning “rock which embodies the essence of Southern United States culture, where the convergence of people, culture, and nature define our way of life.

Chattanoogans are fortunate indeed, given the relatively close proximity that every household has to our nearby mountains, rivers, and greenways nestled between the Cumberland Plateau and Appalachian Mountains. This distinctive landscape has significantly shaped the cultural traditions of our region including cuisine, music, and culture.

Yet our history is unfortunately scarred by episodes in which the rich natural gifts of this area were forcibly taken, as with the horrific displacement of Native American tribes and Black Americans throughout the 19th century, or subsequently obscured by industrial waste and pollution in the 20th century. We were, for a time in the 1960s, widely known as the dirtiest city in America. Our history holds complex truths and is a complicated, imperfect story and one that is still very much being written.

One thing remains true: over more than 12,000 years of human settlement, the city and the people that call this bend in the river home have been a living testament to the ways that nature and urban living can and must be integrated. Our city, cradled by mountains and the Tennessee River, has earned international acclaim for its abundant outdoor amenities, proximity to nature, and ecological protection measures. Our city has risen and learned from its past and embraced culture and expression through the arts to the sports fields to the native culinary cuisine seen in our neighborhoods. Even so, we have more to do to bring these assets within reach of everyone who calls this place home.

‍Chattanooga is a place unlike anywhere else: a city that is not merely close to nature and diverse, but whose citizens are close with nature and each other. Our identity as a National Park City will not be a new direction for Chattanooga - it will be a recognition of who we have always been and a commitment to the journey to include more faces and places along the way. As a National Park City, we are excited to commit to this work and share what we learn from it with the world.