Atlanta suburb elects white Republican to city council! Trust me, it’s newsworthy.
Doraville [map, official, wiki], a suburb of Atlanta, has elected Brian Bates to city council. He meets three of the criteria for being a suburban politician in our state: he’s 1) white, 2) male, and 3) a Republican.
He’s also gay.
I’ve suspected real social progress would occur in Atlanta’s suburbs over the next decade, I just never expected it to happen this soon. I’ll try not to read too much into Brian Bates’ victory; at the very least, however, it tells me that Republican voters in Doraville are adults.
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The most affordable places to live well.
The most affordable places to live well, according to Forbes Magazine. Atlanta is ranked tenth.
The greening of Toronto’s parking lots
Atlanta could learn something from a pilot project for creating more efficient and appealing parking lots within Toronto. Spacing Toronto writes:
the City of Toronto is piloting new design guidelines for “greening” surface parking lots. The proposals include measures to address many of the major environmental problems, and in the process, they address some of the aesthetic problems as well. Ideas include landscaping with trees and grasses, using permeable surfaces such as bricks, and creating separated pedestrian walkways.
The Anglophilic American suburb
For over a century, American developers and suburban-boosters have branded their communities with an easily-pronounced, “safe”, Anglophilic vocabulary:
Anglophilia runs deep in American culture, but it’s been particularly useful in helping Americans lay out a fantasy for how they want to live, a measure of wealth and success that’s guided urban planners for a century…
We anoint our suburbs with the names of invented British estates out of insecurity, nostalgia and a love of fantasy. America’s Buckingham at Queensbridges and Canterberry Crossings are, in the words of “Geography of Nowhere” author Jim Kunstler, “only part of the growing abstraction that is necessary to sell the suburbs. It’s a place without a past and without a future that leads to anxiety and depression. It’s through those cracks in the damage, that the marketers fill a void.”
But marketers fill this void haphazardly.
You know you’re in suburban Atlanta when the street names shift from memorializing an important local leaders–in the Civil Rights movement or otherwise–to being the imagined names of British people and their estates: Sir Charles Drive, Abbottswell Drive, Glenforest Drive, and most of the streets in Peachtree City.
Tensions between mass transit and mixed-use
…there is a contradiction in the planning approaches of many jurisdictions that are developing mass transit, in that promotion of mixed-use urban areas actually weakens the strong nodes that are the lifeblood of mass transit.
To be fair, the concept of mixed-use areas is intended to support short walking trips rather than public transport; but the application of mixed uses, increased densities, parking requirements and public transport are not always thought through in a coherent way at the metropolitan scale.
This presents a serious risk to the attainment of green transport. The greater risk, though, may be the inability of metropolitan authorities to exercise adequate control over all the factors that need to be brought together for a green transport strategy. Even in the context of strong policy, planning is often fragmented and stymied by political interference, uncooperative developers and unreliable funding.
This tension is not clearly evident in Atlanta but, then again, the city’s largest mixed-use development doesn’t seem to encourage any form of transportation that isn’t via automobile.
The democracy of traffic
Traffic democratizes; commuting equalizes. Hell, the very word commute comes from the Latin for to change.
It’s rush hour in Atlanta; if you’re on the road in a car, you’ll have to wait. The commute doesn’t care about your income level or what kind of car you drive. Twice daily, Interstates 75 and 85 are the most mixed of mixed-income experiments in the region. The trouble is, we’re all locked inside our cars.
The trouble could be worse. The rich could skip the traffic ritual in favor of a helicopter ride.
They already do it in Sao Paulo:
Like a fleet of airborne limousines, the helicopters are increasingly used by privileged Paulistanos to commute, attend meetings, even run errands and go to church. Helicopter landing pads are now standard features of many of Sao Paulo’s guarded residential compounds and high-rise roofs.
Illustrating what may be a Blade Runner-esque glimpse of the future in metropolises where rich and poor are crammed together, helicopters are the vehicle of choice for more than just their convenience. Many of the roads here are hopelessly clogged with traffic. Carjackings, kidnappings of executives and roadside robberies have become a part of the risks of daily life for anyone perceived to have money.
At 400 and growing, the total fleet of private helicopters in Sao Paulo is the biggest of any city in the developing world. Although the fleets in New York and Tokyo are larger, the helicopters in those cities are owned mostly by corporations, not rich individuals.
The future of commuting looks a lot less democratic. I’ll miss the Jaguars next to me in traffic when they’re gone.
Atlanta: ready to secede?
We’ve tried and we’ve tried to be a loyal part of Georgia. Maybe the solution, though, is to set ourselves apart. To secede – at least in spirit, if not in body. Raise the bold banner of rebellion. Creative Loafing asks local leaders if and how Atlanta should secede.
Otis White suggests metro-Atlantans build a better regional government to overcome what he sees as the problem:
Regions outgrow their physical infrastructures, government arrangements and tax structures. Atlanta has crossed that point. What once worked in metro Atlanta doesn’t work anymore. Our state leaders – and some of our regional ones – haven’t grasped this yet.
I’d give this more thought, but I’m thirsty…need…water…
A handy list of Atlanta’s recent plans and studies
The city of Atlanta offers a handy (and fairly comprehensive) list of its recent plans and studies.
BarCamp Atlanta
I’ll be attending BarCamp Atlanta tomorrow, October 12th. I hope to be able to find somebody who can help me on my local government hyperlinks project. I’m not sure what I’ll present at BarCamp. Perhaps I’ll just host a conversation addressing the digital divide and similar issues arising from the inequitable distribution of ICTs within the city and the corporate commodification of the Internet.