Nashville Parents Proud of Five-Year-Old City Planner

At the National Planning Awards ceremony this year, Nashville parents Tom and Rebecca Fardle were proud to cheer on their five-year-old son, Nathan Fardle, when he won an award from the city of Nashville for his extensive efforts in city planning over the last five years of his life. Nathan, a preschooler at the Primrose School of Nashville, began his work in city planning from the moment he left his mother’s womb.

“We just handed him a pencil, some grid paper, and access to the city planning documents, and he was ready to go,” Rebecca Fardle said. “It was pure art from the beginning.”

Nathan has since taken several advanced pre-school and pre-pre-school classes on drawing, honing his skills to become Nashville’s preeminent city planner. His recent projects include green-lighting the high rise apartments popping up around West End and traffic plans that result in the lack of traffic flow along Hillsboro Pike from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Although Nathan cannot yet do basic addition or subtraction, Paula Inglett, president of the West End Conservation Society, believes that his skills will only improve with time.

“What he’s done with the traffic on West End has been absolutely astonishing,” Inglett said. “He’s done absolutely nothing with it, and it has acted as a true deconstruction of the controlling role of commuters in Nashville. He’s truly the next Picasso of city planning.”

Social critics and Nashville natives argue that Nathan has failed to address the issues of gentrification in many of Nashville’s historic neighborhoods as well as the potential socioeconomic tensions wrought by such diverse groups living in close quarters. When asked what he thought about the gentrification problem in Nashville, Nathan did not appear to understand what “gentrification” meant and began to cry.

“How dare you hurt his feelings that way!” Tom Fardle said in a comment to the press. “It’s okay, Nathan. Daddy and Mommy will get you ice cream on the way home.”