City on the verge : Atlanta and the fight for America's urban future /

Studying architecture abroad in the 1990s, Ryan Gravel came to the conclusion of many an American in Paris: Urban life is better sans automobile. Upon his return to Atlanta, he drew up a plan to turn that sprawling region, where most streets don't even have sidewalks, into something navigable by foot and light rail. Gravel's master's thesis proposed converting a decommissioned 22-mile rail loop around the city center into a streetcar line to get people out of their cars and link the city's largely segregated neighborhoods. Most architecture theses gather dust, but not Gravel's. His optimistic New South hometown - a city that, in the words of one early-20th-century observer, "struts before the world as the liberal gateway" - took up the project and branded it the BeltLine. With philanthropists' backing, pedestrian and bicycle paths were added and over a billion dollars in private real estate funding poured in to develop properties along the route. But as Pendergrast, an Atlanta native who now lives in Vermont, finds in his exhaustive reporting, this hopeful tale does not necessarily have a happy ending. While private development has boomed, it remains unclear when, if ever, the streetcar loop will be built. Last fall, Gravel himself resigned from the BeltLine board to protest the lack of affordable housing being constructed with the project. Given Atlanta's long history of fake-it-till-you-make-it boosterism, it's unclear whether the BeltLine will be an urban inflection point or just the city's latest "top-down 'one big project' trap."

Pendergrast (For God, Country, and Coca-Cola), an Atlanta native, devotes this detailed study to how the city might be revived and reimagined for the 21st century. Mixing planning, history, and personal anecdotes, he describes an urban renewal project's path from grassroots idea to $4 billion project, slated for 2030 completion. The BeltLine, a collection of abandoned rail lines ringing Atlanta, could reconnect wildly disparate elements of a city that "sold its soul to the automobile" and has long been equated with urban sprawl riven with racial and economic inequality. The key: connected light rail, trails, pedestrian paths, and improved accessibility. Pendergrast has an obvious love for both the city and the energy behind the BeltLine project, but the level of neighborhood-by-neighborhood detail may be daunting for nonresidents. At the conclusion, the scope widens as he invokes similar projects, but this section touches only lightly on broader planning principles. More tellingly, his most powerful anecdote involves a beloved African-American maid who worked for his family for decades and lived less than eight miles away. He first saw her house nearly 40 years after her death in 1975, while doing research for the book. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, ICM. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Pendergrast's (For God, Country & Coca-Cola) latest is an enchanting story of a Sunbelt city that will captivate both urban planners and the general public. An Atlanta native, the author brings an engaging and insightful voice to this work, and his research is meticulously thorough. Here, he chronicles the BeltLine: a greenspace network of over 1,300 acres girdling the city of Atlanta and connecting 45 neighborhoods through greenways, trails, and transit lines. Nestled within the framework of the BeltLine story is a tale of race relations fraught with failed urban policies. As Pendergrast writes, "Atlanta is on the verge of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline." However, the BeltLine has the potential to improve blighted neighborhoods and blur the rigid lines drawn by income inequality. Will it fulfill this promise? Will the Phoenix City rise once again, or will leadership blunders doom its future? VERDICT This work is appropriate reading for architects and city planners, but it will also pique the interests of general readers.-Jennifer A. Townes, Georgia Coll., Milledgeville © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Given enough political will and enough choice, we can save the world. Or, as this case study shows, we can let things continue to go to hell in a handbasket lined with peach blossoms.Atlanta, the titular center city, contains only some 7 percent of the 6 million inhabitants of the greater area called Atlanta. That metropolis, writes native son Pendergrast (Beyond Fair Trade: How One Small Coffee Company Helped Transform a Hillside Village in Thailand, 2015, etc.), constitutes a "vast world where most people who say they live in Atlanta' actually reside" strung out somewhere on a beltway or endless avenue named, inevitably, Peachtree. The BeltLine is one, "a twenty-two-mile ring of mostly defunct rail lines, running through forty-five neighborhoods girdling Atlanta's downtown." Faced with this crumbling bit of infrastructure, Atlanta writ large has been trying to remake it to spur development and redevelopment, bringing life to an often ghostly downtown, and, with luck, easing the city's notorious gridlock. In all this, Atlanta has discernible options that may lead to better tomorrows in a nation not well known for long-term thinking. The author turns in a lively urban history, charting Atlanta's growth and linking it to political developments over timenot least of them Jim Crow laws that forged many of those wrong-side-of-the-tracks neighborhoods. He is generally optimistic, even in a time when taxpayers are reluctant to shoulder the burden of improving the commonweal: "Change is in the air in Atlanta," he writes, "mostly for the good." Where money and political will have been spent, that is, things have changed for the better, though the author also reckons, eyes open, that the possibility also exists that Atlantans will "continue to live segregated and unequal lives." A welcome look at a citya mass of citiesnot often heard from in the urban-studies literature and of wide interest well beyond the I-95 corridor. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.