Aging infrastructure in first ring suburbs.

Infrastructure is kind of a hot topic right now.  The American Society of Civil Engineers released its 2009 Report Card for Infrastructure, giving the nation a cumulative grade of “D”.   Obama has been pushing for infrastructure improvements as a way to improve the economy while any mayor with a half baked, “shovel ready” project salivates at the thought of freely flowing federal funds.  One of the questions asked at the monthly CQRGC Healthy Places meeting was about suburban vs urban infrastructure investment. Specifically, they were interested in the investment split between the first ring suburb of Gwinnett County and the urban core of Fulton County. The speaker, Paul Moore from Glatting Jackson, answered the question with an example that I had particular experience with – the Parisian suburb riots of 2005-06.

During my last year of undergraduate Architecture at Georgia Tech, I studied abroad for 10 months in Paris. I lived in the northern portion of the 18th arrondisement, which is better known for the artist’s district Montmartre and the graceful cathedral of Sacre Coeur. For me, it was also nervously close to ‘les banlieues’, or suburbs of Paris. Despite their proximity to downtown, the neighborhoods are separated from historic Paris by a literal ring of disinvested rail tracks that remain under utilized in order to remain available for military use in case of the city’s attack. And while I can’t vouch for the relevance of this motive, I can say that the elevated rail line does a great job at separating the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’ in the city.

Peaceful Protests.

In fact, the phrase ‘les banlieues’ is now recognized as a euphemism in the French press to describe low income housing projects that the government practically forced immigrant communities into during the 1970s and 80s. Petty crime has also increased in France, with much of it blamed on juvenile delinquency fostered within the banlieues, as a result the ensuing areas are perceived as being unsafe places to live. During the early 1990s, tougher law enforcement and immigration control measures were enacted, and partly as a reaction to those increased penalties without a perceived increased in assistance, the area imploded with riots in the Fall of 2005.

Now, some might say that Buford Highway would never come to such extremes, but a quick pass at the area:

• Its aging infrastructure that was never built to be adaptable, a key tenant for sustainability. Atlanta had similar growth issues during the 1950s.

• However, at that point, Atlanta had the tax revenues to support re-investment. Currently, Gwinnett County is experiencing decreasing  tax revenues each year.

• The changing demographic of the Buford Highway strip, is startling similar to the immigrant based Paris suburbs.

With the current mortgage crisis, economic downtown, and rising prices, its not out of reach to think that we might have similar problems in our own back yard. As these first ring suburbs age, and traditional disenfranchised communities growing larger, this purely infrastructural issue can spill over and really start affecting communities.

 

In the beginning, we knew it was coming.

The CQRGC Healthy Places January monthly meeting’s topic was the Connect Atlanta plan, the city’s new comprehensive transportation plan. The presentation was enlightening in multiple ways, but one notable piece of information eschewed my perception of a piece of Atlanta’s transportation development history. When the Connect Atlanta plan came out, many people I knew lauded it as Atlanta’s first transportation plan, and while this is true in many ways, Atlanta has had several transportation planning initiatives already. What really got me, was that planners recognized the inefficiencies of the freeway system early on and called out the necessity of a balanced transportation plan. And this was before construction even started on the 1950s freeway system!

Jammed.

The speaker, Paul Moore from Gladding Jackson pulled a 1958 graph of Atlanta city transit ridership statistics. The early planner’s mindsets were eye opening. I have continually heard in my education that this city was ‘designed’ to grow entirely around the highways with no alternative methods of transportation.

As it turns out, during the initial studies, planners recognized that the coming freeways could only support Atlanta’s growth if, if and only if, transit ridership remained at the same rates. In 1958, this was at 50%!! Yes you read that right, 50%. Incredible. Still, the pre 1950’s graph pointed out quite clearly that the city had three options:

• It could, in a best case scenario, increase transit ridership from current levels.
• It could, in what they projected to be the most likely scenario, keep transit ridership levels at the same rate.
• Or, in a worse case scenario, transit ridership could decrease 20%.

Unfortunately, we all know how that one turned out. Atlanta city transit ridership decreased an astounding 43%, down to 7% of total trips taken by the year 2007. Wow.

Now, if the 1950s planners had only had the foresight to create policies that would keep transit ridership at similar or increasing levels, rather than relying on chance to keep them there, we’d be in a different place than we are today. But what would those have been? I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the rise of the 2^nd and 3^rd ring suburbs and subsequential growth of perimeter job centers at that early stage of planning, but the simple act of keeping the downtown street car networks would have been a good start.

I wonder, what are we doing today that will seem so short sighted in the future?

 

ciudades del futuro

“Cities of the Future” was sponsored by the History Channel, here in Atlanta this year. Washington DC and San Francisco were also featured. The competition encourages architect’s utopian visions of how our cities may be formed in the next hundred years.

Many, many of my past/present/and future studio professors were involved. Some through the official Georgia Tech team and others through their own firms. The point was to visually describe a futuristic scenario for Atlanta’s growth exactly one hundred years from today, hopefully while creating a building typology to rival that of the ancients (hence, the competition being sponsored by the History channel). A lot of students participated too, several friends of mine, mostly second year grads. During this same time frame however, I was working on the Urban Land Institute’s graduate level urban design competition. So I took merely an hour to sneak away from that prep to take some photos of my current studio professor’s entry. They named it “UberAtlanta” haha. Gotta love the Dutch.

Here’s the slightly more mainstream entry from what turned out to be Atlanta’s winners. They will go on to compete against the winners from DC and Sanny Franny.

More pictures on Flickr.

 

around hillard street

While returning to the site today to retake some photos for our site study collage, I drove around the Sweet Auburn area that’s just north of our site. Hillard Street in particular had some really great views of the city’s skyline, being almost exactly perpendicular of the Peachtree ridge. So I wove my way through the one-way grid, trying to get the perfect angle for a photograph. The area is perfectly sited for these grand views, and yet the area is economically depressed.

However, there are a few projects slated for the neighborhood. Several plan to be financed by the Eastside TAD, which plans to provide funding to reconnect the Sweet Auburn neighborhood with the area around the new Georgia Aquarium, hopefully improving its economic impact and improving the long-standing neighborhoods around Sweet Auburn. Notably, the Grant Park neighborhood association has a redevelopment plan for the MLK Marta parking lot. And the notorious public housing project, Grady Homes, has been demolished to make way for a mixed-income, HOPE VI community. It’s a really gorgeous area of Atlanta, with a lot of potential, sitting on one of the highest elevation points in the city. Its a shame it’s currently being under utilized.

The other thing that really struck me, was the enormous presence of I-75/85 there. It’s elevated, approximately two stories above ground level, and the void it creates under its immense road width is incredible. The structure is so stoic and regularized, yet there were people walking all through it, talking, buying-selling, and just getting out of the heat. It’s being used right now as a for profit parking lot, but with all that foot traffic, I could easily see it being changed into a temporary market of some kind. Something that would gently weave around the enormous columns of the highway support structure to reconnect the pedestrian oriented retail on either side of the split.