projekts:
“We have utterly destroyed Atlanta.
I don’t think any people will want to try and live there now.”
-Indiana soldier, 1864
As a generation raised in the sprawl discovers the center, they begin to occupy it, bringing with them the ideals of the structure of society with which they are most familiar. Encroaching upon the city, suburbanites expect to continue to enjoy the same elements of the environment in which they were reared. Lured by of the charm and excitement of ‘intown’ living, as it is promised by the Real Estate/Lifestyle section of the newspaper, they pay no apparent heed to the perversity inherent in their attempts to make the city match the image of the periphery which they have left. By encouraging the intown growth of the constituents of sprawl, namely the retail ‘big box’ and the residential ‘gated community’, they cause the city to be reshaped in a manner prohibitive to the urban lifestyle which they had anticipated.
The result of these structural impositions is a landscape that increasingly discourages peripatetic activity. As parts of the city continue to be voided from the public sphere, citizens no longer live in the city; they begin to live through the city. Familiarity is achieved only with points on a circuit; with the increase in transience comes a decreased interaction with and knowledge of one’s environment. This is usually self-disculpated by the refrain of ‘needing a car’ in the city by those oblivious to the circularity of this reasoning; the infrastructure that necessitates use of a car is, in fact, designed to accommodate the car in the first place. Continued reliance on automobiles within the city will result only in shaping a landscape in which they are purportedly indispensable. The automobile is akin to a narcotic; the more it is used, the more it is needed.
Big box retailers replace the local shops and ambulatory arcades. Previous establishments of commerce admittedly had been a party to fragmentation, inasmuch as their design allowed for the automobiles that would inevitably, because of their locations, arrive. Nevertheless, there were still efforts, such as Arquitectonica’s now demolished Rio Mall, formerly located at the corner of Piedmont and North Avenues, to open an environment that would provide for the visitor a complete destination - an agora of corrugated metal - rather than just a front door in a blank wall in front of which to stop before driving 500 yards to the next front door. In contrast, Midtown Place, a recently built shopping center located on the former site of a demolished shopping center, located on the former site of the Ponce de Leon Park baseball stadium, which was demolished after the building of Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, which was demolished to make a parking lot for the Turner Field stadium across the street, is such an immense swath of asphalt that drivers on Ponce de Leon are unable to see the stores at the far end of the development. The details of the center’s tenants are masked by dense shrubbery and chain link that, though intending to somehow hide the enormous stretch of building from adjacent homeowners, forces local patrons to choose between taking a circuitous route around the perimeter to the one available entrance or activating their automobiles for a 10-minute drive to the stores a quarter mile from their homes.
Midtown Place, former location of Ponce de Leon Lake
Notwithstanding the debilitating effects of the economic forces that these supermarts bring to bear upon the local artisans and shopkeepers, substantial damage is done to the function of the street as a place of public exchange. The vast expanse of asphalt that is required to provide the mandatory number of parking spaces necessarily increases the distance of the stores from both the street and other stores; this territory is dangerous and difficult to traverse on foot. The parking lot contains the customer, so it receives the ‘best’ face, whilst the street and the surrounding homes are presented with a blank wall.
Whereas Atlanta’s previous residential neighborhoods, such as Midtown or Inman Park, were still navigable by automobile, these drives were languid meanders, like the quiet creep of kudzu or the sticky seep of pinesap; major thoroughfares were easily traveled on foot, allowing for an ambulatory traverse of the larger routes when necessary. Thus, it was conceivable that an inhabitant of Ansley Park would stroll to the cluster of shops on Monroe Avenue to take a coffee; a Midtown local might cross Piedmont Avenue to attend a performance on Peachtree, the ‘Main Street’ of Atlanta. New additions to the neighborhoods are fenced and referred to as ‘communities’, thereby divorcing themselves from the city both physically and nominally. The use of the term ‘community’ makes a distinction between the people living inside the gate and those who teem beyond the barrier. Whereas a neighborhood is defined by those who take a residence in the area; the community is an entity which one has to join; where the neighborhood is friendly, the community is a clique. These developments are deposited throughout the city, creating forbidden zones for the previous inhabitants, like colonial forts or frontier outposts declaring to the indigenous peoples that a new claim has been staked and they should take heed that this territory is now off limits to them.
The rectangle bounded by Piedmont Ave, Courtland St, Pine St, and Currier St effectively has been removed from the relative center of the city. The sidewalk on each side of the development is faced with a steel fence, which is broken only twice, on one way streets, by gated entrances. Hence, pedestrian activity on the street, be it commercial or social, has been rendered impossible on all four blocks. Beyond the fence, the street level of the apartment structure is an artifice; the first level of inhabitation, at least as it is viewed from the sidewalk, is ten feet above the ground, so that anyone viewing the building from the sidewalk is presented with a half-hearted concession to the human scale in the form of paint representing an arch over a window-shaped indentation in the stucco. This technique is eerily reminiscent of high-rise urban prisons, disguised with confusing fenestration and suggestive of yet another unassuming beige office block.
450 Piedmont, luxury townhouse apartments
For these new itinerant citizens, memory of the city becomes imbued not with the haptic understanding of the traces of the neighborhood such as the texture of a fellow pedestrian’s shawl or the break of pine needles betwixt heel and flagstone, but instead with the schedule of stop lights and the hue of oil stained pavement. The noiton of sensing the city from the context of the sidewalk is so foreign to those who drive through it that the few people who can sometimes be glimpsed through the windshield - as they stagger along an abandoned storefront or huddle against a bus stop - are considered as alien or other. From the perspective of the motorist, the people who are at these margins are considered outcasts, as they must have some defect that renders them incapable of being assimilated into the flow of motor traffic. Those who travel outside the auto routes are to the driver what bandits and beasts were to the superstitious denizens of the walled medieval town. The pedestrian is simultaneously a novelty and a threat.
In denser towns, such as New York City, even though one might have absolutely no financial or legal claim to a single square foot of the city, one may still feel that, in a broader sense, they are a part owner of the city, that the parks and buildings and benches belong to everyone and no one, even if this misguided feeling is based upon a combination of familiarity that is personal and an experience that has been shared by thousands or millions of others. How else can be described the sensation of entering 42nd street station if not in terms of both ownership and alienation?
In contrast, the desolation of Atlanta created by the commercial sprawls and the residential compounds instills a feeling of marginalization. Within one’s own city, the citizen feels not only a lack of proprietorship, but a sense of total disenfranchisement. One feels no reason to have attachment to the city, as he or she is without share or pride. Feelings are stifled by the increasing lack of social involvement; this frustration leads to desperation and resentment. Conversion of the center into sprawl is what engenders the misunderstandings that allow societal maladies such as racism, homophobia, and general hatred.
Atlanta has always been defined as an intersection. The future location of the city was chosen as the terminus for the Western and Atlantic Railroad in Georgia’s northwestern hinterland. Atlanta has long been the home of an airport that is both the largest and the busiest in the world. It currently holds the title for the nation’s longest commute.