Imagine you’re stuck in Atlanta traffic. A maze of cars, asphalt, powerlines, and skyscrapers is the vista du jour. Fast forward 100 years from now and a radically different view will include lush forests, green spaces, and pristine waterways. At least that’s the hope of some of the nation’s leading designers, architects, and engineers.
Atlanta-based firm Praxis3—and the local offices of San Francisco’s EDAW; Kansas City, Mo.’s BNIM; and Wakefield, Mass.-based Metcalf & Eddy— partnered in the History Channel’s City of the Future competition. They had seven days to formulate a 100-year plan for Atlanta. Online voters chose their entry, which beat out plans to transform Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.
“We created as simple a story as possible,” says the team’s leader, Eric Bishop, a senior associate of EDAW, an international engineering, architecture, and planning firm. “Anything we proposed had to be viable today. There was just an elegant simplicity to it.” The proposal was sweeping in its recommendations. Rivers will resurface, dense residential corridors will be built along existing transportation routes, and trees will pop up everywhere in between. Green rooftops will reduce water run-off , while greywater systems will be implemented to reduce water consumption. These eff orts are designed to spur significant long-term solutions.
Atlanta’s development and planning communities seem to be listening. The plan, dubbed “The City in the Forest,” is serving as a jumping-off point for a citywide sustainability program that is currently in the works. “There are a lot of complex issues coming down the road—energy, water, climate change—
that we need to be prepared to confront,” Bishop says. —M.C.L.
