Control and Transformation of the Human Geography of Atlanta
The placemaking of modern Atlanta is riddled with legacies of discrimination. The systemic power imbalance – between white and Black residents, owning-class and working-class residents, securely housed and housing insecure residents, men and women – is not only historical, but continues to shape the city today. The sprawl of our metropolitan area is well known, but there exists a deeper story of how inner and outer ring suburbs were formed and their impact on Atlanta’s society.
The inner ring suburbs of Atlanta are College Park, East Point, and Hapeville to the south and west, and Decatur, Druid Hills, and North Druid Hills to the east and north. At the time of their incorporation in the mid-late 1800s, these were rural towns, supported by industry. They were home to mostly white residents, as Jim Crow laws, followed by the New Deal practice of redlining, restricted African American residents to the Black neighborhoods in the city center that “received fewer municipal services with many roads unpaved, water and sewer inadequate, social programs almost nonexistent, and schools overcrowded and underfunded” (Atlanta History Center). As the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement began to have an impact on Atlanta’s white supremacist power structures – expanding voting rights and integrating schools, neighborhoods, parks, and businesses – white residents sought to recreate segregation by leaving the city en masse. New interstate systems that razed impoverished neighborhoods downtown during the so-called urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s provided the infrastructure necessary for white flight to the new, outer suburbs mostly north of the city. When 160,000 white residents (over 30% of the city’s population) were leaving for the suburbs over the 1960s and 1970s, it became a local joke that Atlanta was now “The City Too Busy Moving to Hate” – a subtle undermining of Mayor Bill Hartsfield’s brag that Atlanta was the “City Too Busy to Hate” (Kruse, 2019).
The city’s population continued to decline until about 1990, which had mixed effects on lasting residents. Abandonment of residential parts of the city and inner suburbs by white Atlantans enabled upwardly mobile Black Atlantans to begin to own property in formerly all-white neighborhoods. Housing tax revenues for the city declined, and so social services, most prominently public housing, deteriorated. In response, the city revamped their approach to public housing, demolishing public housing projects and replacing them with private/public mixed-income developments out of the financial reach of most previous tenants. The swiftest transformation came north of downtown in the early 1990s, as the city hid its poor and unhoused in preparation for the 1996 Olympic games. Here, the Techwood/Clark Howell Homes project as well as a commercial business area were razed, the Olympic village and Centennial Olympic Park were constructed, and thousands of unhoused people were illegally arrested and moved into the city jail for the lead-up and duration of the Olympics (Gustafson, 2013).
Women in this white flight movement went from centers where they had connections and potential for autonomy that denser urban areas provide, to spatially insulated suburbs where they took up in-home heteronormative responsibilities and a less self-sufficient lifestyle (Kern 2021). In politics today – ranging from expansion of MARTA to presidential elections – these suburban white women tend to align themselves in opposition to progressive political agendas, essentially standing in the way of their own liberation as well as the liberation of others who have been marginalized by the same “growth machines” as them. Middle class suburban children, now upwardly mobile young adults, are becoming the next owning class in the inner city and inner ring suburbs. They are gentrifying the areas that their parents’ generation fled from and displacing poor and working-class people, many of whom are Black, in the process.
