Talking Head

When David Byrne speaks, it's a good idea to listen, because he usually has something interesting to say. Last year, Byrne chronicled his thoughts about how cities could change to better accommodate bicyclists, pedestrians and transit riders in his book The Bicycle Diaries. He recently visited Atlanta for a bikes-and-cities panel at something called the Congress for The New Urbanism, a conference put on with the assistance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I encourage you to read his interesting remarks in their entirety, but here is what he had to say about the Georgia capital:

"As the taxi pulled up to the Atlanta Hilton, I was surrounded by smiling, handsome black men in a variety of doorman outfits. All charming, and all welcoming me effusively to Atlanta. Southern hospitality — what a change from New York! As I passed through the double doors into the massive lobby, suddenly all the people around me were white. Or at least that was the initial impression. It was like I’d gone through some magical portal — with one group left outside, and another inside. The black people of Atlanta have all the social service jobs and are largely kept separate — outside, if possible — from the white masters. I’m exaggerating, but this is the first impression one gets.

It’s horribly insulting, but it’s as if the masters have created live lawn jockeys, welcoming visitors to their property. Now, to be fair, Atlanta had Andrew Young as a mayor and has a whole slew of black universities, as well as quite a few major music artists of note; but, well, this was my perception."

A fair enough observation, and one that touches on the sensitive subject of race in Atlanta, an issue that even now lies just beneath the surface of much of Atlanta's urban policy. Not only have the scars from much of the civil rights movement of the 1960s not completely healed here, there are some here who are still holding grudges about the Civil War of the 1860 and the subsequent Reconstruction. Byrne goes on to identify one of the factors that doesn't allow those wounds to completely heal, starting with the observation that Atlanta has some of the worst urban sprawl in the country:

"In Atlanta, as in many other US cities, in the ’60s, white flight accelerated — fear of a black planet, as the Public Enemy record is titled, had taken hold in a big way. The cities were where you lived if you couldn’t afford to get out. John Portman, the architect and developer, began building massive, futuristic hotel complexes in the center of town. They were so big that once inside, one never had to leave. A fellow conference attendee compared the Marriott Hotel, one of Portman’s projects, to the extraordinary sets for the old sci-fi movie Things To Come, a film directed by William Cameron Menzies.

This shit is real! The future is here. . . and it’s white! (This is the interior of the Marriott that he built.)

I have heard it said that Portman, once celebrated as the Michaelangelo behind Atlanta's renaissance of the 1970s, actually did as much to destroy this city as General Sherman did a century earlier. Portman's big downtown developments, like Colony Center, are totally self-enclosed complexes which make absolutely no concessions to pedestrian access. City streets became solely for cars to shuttle between the suburbs and these complexes, and sidewalks were nothing but inconvenient obstacles that cars had to pass over to get from the streets to the complexes. Outside, there was no meaningful street life, no sidewalk cafes, no exterior newsstands or kiosks at which to linger. As Byrne notes:

In Atlanta you can walk for blocks in the center of downtown and find no shops — not any visible ones anyway. There are some restaurants and bars, but no other establishments. There might be interior courts with drug stores, stationary stores, copy shops, newsstands or clothing stores, but access to these from the street isn’t possible. . .

How can places like Atlanta bring some life into their urban center? I think it’s a long haul, and they should…umm…think small. When I was there, I asked if there were some neighborhoods and communities that might become less car dependent and more people friendly. A couple, maybe, was the reply. I don’t know where they are, but in the center they are not.

Unfortunately for Byrne and his readers, but fortunately for Atlanta, the city does in fact have a few (although not nearly enough) such in-town neighborhoods and communities, notably, Virginia-Highlands, Little Five Points, and East Atlanta Village, interestingly, also the very communities in which most of Byrne's fan base probably live. And new proposals like the Atlanta Beltline and Byrne's fellow panelist Charles Brewer's Glenwood Park are also trying to take the city in the pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly direction that Byrne envisions. For what it's worth, my civic efforts have been in trying to bring my local communities like Collier Village and Brookwood in line with this New Urbanist/Smart Growth vision. But as Byrne concludes, "If those options or others aren’t available soon, I would suggest that Atlanta residents move to nearby Athens or Savannah if they want a more pleasant life."