Regional Chauvinism

I had the opportunity to spend last Friday morning with several thinkers and doers in the fields of urban design, landscape architecture and park design. The event was a walkabout on the site of one segment of the Atlanta Beltline and the participants were made up of a group of leading landscape architects from around the country – mostly people involved in urban issues of park planning, transportation planning, communications and education.

We in Atlanta tend to think of Atlanta’s urban issues as being universal. A few years ago Atlanta had several dubious distinctions. We were first in the Nation in pedestrian death and injury along our roadways. Likewise, we were at the top of the statistics on traffic related air pollution, time spent in traffic, miles driven to get to work, lack of sidewalks, lack of overall connectivity, fuel consumption per capita, and so on. The numbers, and experiences were, and remain, so bad that much of the great reputation Atlanta built as a livable city was becoming tarnished. Companies were choosing other cities over Atlanta for expansion and relocation.

Atlanta is perpetually at odds with the State of Georgia. In truth, Atlanta is a relatively small city. The population within the City of Atlanta is only 520,000. On the other hand Metropolitan Atlanta, is the 9th largest metropolitan area in the US with a population over 10 times that of the City at 5,200,000. Politically, the City and the close-in suburban areas tend to be liberal. Most of Metro Atlanta is conservative, as is the majority of the State of Georgia. For many years the City allowed itself to be walked on by the State. The State began to see the City, in its traditional role of a hub of transportation, to be subject to the State’s need to speed intrastate traffic through with as little hindrance as possible. The urban fabric was ripped with massive freeway projects which divided neighborhoods and destroyed property values. White flight was blamed for much of the City’s neighborhood decline but, in fact, it was largely due to the fact that long stable neighborhoods were being ripped apart by large scale transportation projects.

Mayor Andrew Young based much of his mayorship on an effort to assist the state with plowing an expressway through a string of stable inner city neighborhoods along a route which had been earlier killed by neighborhood groups in a twenty year long series of lawsuits against the Georgia Department of Transportation. Mayor Young’s predecessors were also big highway men. Much of this approach was brought to a halt as the City began to regain its sense of self in the early 1970’s. Law suits were filed against inner city expressway projects and those projects were ultimately halted. Neighborhoods banded together into political action groups and the City began to elect mayors, legislators and councilpersons who would stand up to the forces which put freeways ahead of neighborhoods. Local politicians began to see themselves more as advocates for city life rather than actors on a national stage.

Things have improved. The Atlanta Regional Commission has promoted a series of successful planning efforts called Livable Centers Initiatives wherein grants are made to communities to improve connectivity and a more urban sense of community, These studies often include planning for creating downtowns in the midst off sprawl, where none had existed before.

Business also jumped on the new urbanism bandwagon in an effort to find ways to improve connectivity and create environments which would be attractive to the forces of growth. There are 6 universities in the City limits and another two in nearby Decatur. The Universities, led by Georgia State University president Carl Patton, began to promote urban activities to bring life to the City at night and to improve safety for pedestrians. The City got on the band wagon and began to promote itself as a college town – this really worked – there are a number of new dormitories and classroom buildings in downtown and midtown. Neighborhoods began to heal; a healthy street life has taken hold in many areas of downtown and midtown. There are a number of quite nice urbanist projects at or near completion in the city, including a dense transit oriented development located around the Lindbergh MARTA subway station in the north midtown area and another in an area reclaimed from a large steel mill.

The result of these efforts has been a shift in perceptions. Atlanta is now the number one most desirable location for recent college graduates and for young adults in general. A good and improving intown lifestyle combined with a good job market and a sense of ‘cool’ has brought the City back to life. Employers are taking notice and are beginning to come back as well.

Nevertheless, the state transportation authority continues to express its regional chauvinism in unpredictable ways. Recently, on the eve of the passage of an element critical to the expansion of Atlanta’s intown park and light rail system (Google ‘Atlanta Beltline and GADOT’) the state filed to block the transaction so that they could force a heavy rail line through the middle of the City’s finest park and several of its most desirable inner ring neighborhoods. You would think that they had learned a lesson from their last effort to do something like this. Or at least that they had enough common sense not to attempt to tackle the professional and intellectual (and financial) heart of the City with some half cocked scheme to introduce heavy rail into a series of popular and stable parks and neighborhoods. The City was so completely surprised by this effort, which could only be classified as an ambush, that the Mayor put a half page op-ed into the local newspaper vowing to fight back by taking the state’s attack all the way to Congress and the White House. The State’s move not only surprised the City, but it hurt the City’s efforts to bond some of its park and transit efforts as well. This State scheme is not likely to go anywhere unless the State can find a way to put the rail lines in a tunnel, but the whole affair is indicative of the low level of regard and communication between the City and the State.

As someone who is involved in urban design and planning, I think that I tend to see the urban experience in general as being similar to that in Atlanta, as do many people in Atlanta.