Atlanta

Atlanta is a unique place to study Urban Design. The region – it is more than a city – has all the symptoms of the contemporary city along with many of its wonders. Nestled in the forested hills of the Georgia piedmont, it is a low-density, automobile oriented metropolis governed by more than 125 local governments. Growing from about 2 million to 4 million residents in 20 years and adding another million in the next 10, Atlanta now stretches more than a hundred miles from north to south. From a regional railroad hub soon after its birth in 1837 to the civil rights era of the 1960's, Atlanta is now global with daily flights to 600 cities across the country and across the world: Europe, Asia, Africa, South America. Downtown Atlanta was once the center but is now only one of many centers and no longer the biggest. Atlanta is the official name of a small city of less than 400,000 but almost four million people call Atlanta their home, even though many may have never actually been there.

The lack of mobility during rush hour is stimulating rapid gentrification of neighborhoods that 10 years ago were written off to be perpetually poor. First ring suburbs built for the white flight of the 1960's and the apartment communities for the baby boom singles in the 1970's are transforming, but no one yet knows into what. The commercial strips built to serve the first wave of expansion are changing, too, some occupied by thriving immigrant entrepreneurs and some simply abandoned. The ever-expanding fringe provides some of the most expensive and some of the most affordable new houses in America, but at the price of longer and longer commuting times and multiple environmental consequences. After rush hour, Atlanta's wide highways, among the best in the country, allow residents to go to dinner 30 miles away, catch a movie 20 miles the other way and arrive home in time for Letterman. But fewer and fewer people ride MARTA trains, in part because public transit covers less and less of the region's jobs and residents year by year.

Atlanta is a metropolitan laboratory for research, design and debate about contemporary cities. Georgia Tech, at the center of this giant laboratory, structures urban design studios, seminars and on-going debates around three themes: Urban Design for re-inhabitation the urban core, Urban Design for retrofitting first ring suburbs, Urban Design for managing growth on the fringe, and the recognition that all three involve the collaborative and interdisciplinary work involving architecture, landscape, and planning with the resources of a growing number of alumni with growing urban design practices in Atlanta, serving the region, the Southeast and the nation.