Advocates: Atlanta elected officials - and whoever might take their place - must support good urbanism
‘This is not Minecraft... This is a permanent city we’re building’
Roughly 100 local wonks, policy gurus, and everyday residents gathered at Old Fourth Ward’s Condesa Coffee on July 26 to discuss the importance of making walkable streets, better planning, and transit top of mind at City Hall and an issue during next year’s municipal elections.
“We have to make good urbanism a political issue in 2017,” said Matt Garbett, an Adair Park rabble-rouser and often-quoted foe of parking. “Educate the ones who can, replace the ones who won’t learn.”
Garbett and Darin Givens, a Downtown writer and web developer best known for the ATLUrbanist blog, are calling for an “urbanism army” to start educating city policymakers and supporting candidates who will champion better streets and planning. In early June, Garbett, Givens, and Lauren Welsh, a Candler Park resident, launched ThreadATL, an online resource aimed at encouraging more discussion about urbanism.
When it comes to better planning, better streets, and better livability, Atlanta seems to take one step forward and two steps back. City Hall hires a forward-looking planning commissioner, creates a chief bicycle officer position, approves a funding mechanism to expand transit, and adds bike lanes. At the same time, it remains silent on development concepts near transit that are top heavy with parking and plays catch-up on preserving historic buildings.
The good things won’t completely work if the bad things keep happening. Those missteps mean that Atlanta makes snail’s-pace progress toward becoming the type of city that residents say they want.
The best way to change that is to educate policymakers and elect people who understand, Garbett and Givens say. They’re open to all options, ranging from educating elected officials to a political action committee that would support candidates. Givens envisions creating a cycle of good urbanism through education, advocacy, and showing up at the polls.
“We need residents who demand good urbanism from our leaders, and leaders who demand it from developers,” Givens said. “And it needs to be something on the table for all elections... We need to ask our leaders, ‘how committed are you to good urbanism? How committed are you to undoing the damage of car-centric development?’”
Atlanta’s already practicing urbanism, Garbett said, it’s just bad urbanism, and often times it’s celebrated. To him, good urbanism reduces residents’ dependence on car-oriented transportation, including transit, by building places where people can move around without a car. Bad urbanism fuels sprawl, hurts public health, dirties the environment, adds to the cost of housing, strains our social lives, and more. Worst of all, it costs money, both to individuals and the public.
Developers packing their projects with parking spots contribute to that problem by wasting valuable space and making it easier for people to continue driving everywhere. The city and its agencies play a role by doling out incentives or approving poor urbanism. City officials need to hold developers accountable and start looking at what type of places the developments will create, not just the number of jobs, Garbett said.
“If you’re investing in bad urbanism, you’re not investing in Atlanta no matter how many jobs it generates,” he said, reminding the audience that this generation might have just one chance to make things right. “What we’re building is not a draft. This is not Minecraft. The novelty of a bar in a Kroger is going to fade in a few months and that building will be there long after the streetcar stops next to it. This is a permanent city we’re building.”
Neither Garbett nor Givens, both of whom have contributed opinion columns to CL, are professional planners. Givens grew up in Cobb County before it became blanketed with subdivisions and grew interested in how cities work after a childhood visit to Savannah. The closest place he could find in Atlanta with that same walkable feel was Fairlie-Poplar, where he lives with his family today. Garbett, who grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, said he didn’t know planning existed until he moved to the Old Fourth Ward and became active in his neighborhood association, in 2010. He got a crash course in seeing how bad buildings get built, plus a lot of reading.
The two chose to get engaged and educated about the issue, and are now more formally joining a vocal group of urbanists, transportation advocates, and community activists who want change.
“Good urbanism has to be a top issue in campaign of 2017,” Garbett said. “When you go to meetings, bring up, ‘how does this impact good urbanism?’... We need to educate them. We need to make them see the importance of it.”
NOTE: This post has been altered to fix a transcription error. Garbett moved to Old Fourth Ward in 2010.