On a recent visit to Atlanta, my sister and I took a walk along the city’s Beltline, the project that represents the crowning public-works achievement of this southern metropolis’s boom.
It’s an attractive space—a 22-mile loop of bike paths, promenades, and trails that, in warmer months, serves as a promenade for the city’s young, active, multiracial upper-middle class. Like New York City’s smaller and similarly named High Line, it is a magnet for tourism, an emblem of contemporary urbanism, and a fillip to real-estate speculation in surrounding areas. Bare-chested men and sports-bra-clad women roller-skate past new glass-and-steel apartment buildings, glistening with sweat in the southern summer heat, tugged along by equally well-muscled dogs. Parents push strollers. People do yoga in the shade on patches of grass.
Read Full Article »