Fostering an arts community is often a challenge for cities on the rise. Is a community of arts and culture one that can be planned and calculated, or one that needs to grow organically? In Memphis, Tennessee, nine local arts, education, and healthcare organizations have established the Crosstown Development Project to create a unique "vertical urban village" within a vacated 1.5 million-square-foot space. The village aims to use one of the city’s most notorious blight nuisances to bring life back to the building itself and the surrounding neighborhood.