Making Place In The Nonplace Urban Realm: Notes On The Revitalization Of Downtown Atlanta

Abstract

Over the last three decades, Atlanta has been one of the nation's leading metropolitan areas in terms of population growth and job creation. However, with the exception of a few elite enclaves, the central city has experienced the deterioration of its physical and social infrastructure. The 1996 Summer Olympic Games brought renewed interest in the future of downtown, and a number of public and private efforts were undertaken to revitalize the public character of the central area through the enhancement of the built environment and the gentrification of depressed commercial and residential neighborhoods. This essay examines some of these efforts and argues that these acts of urban imagineering fail to address the political, economic, and cultural processes that have not-so-creatively destroyed the urban landscape and pose only a superficial fix to deep-rooted structural problems. Numerous recent chroniclers of the urban landscape have much commented that the sociospatial processes of late capitalism have rendered contemporary cities less unique and more

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.