An Atlanta area urban planner critiques Suntrust Park/The Battery:
http://deadspin.com/the-braves-new-b...are-1797593063
Attached to SunTrust Park like a Cinnabon-scented goiter is the Battery Atlanta, a $550M mixed-used development that looks an awful lot like a New Urbanist project, the widely criticized school of planning that is equal parts social engineering and neoliberalism. New Urbanism is city planning as Truman Show, attempting to humanize and rescale the misguided master planning concepts favored by designers like Le Corbusier. Cities like Seaside, Fla.,—where the Truman Show was partially filmed—and Disney-designed Celebration are attempts to urbanize the suburbs by integrating venerable concepts like transit-oriented design into communities cut from whole cloth. What many of these inorganic communities lack, however, is true diversity. Studies show that homes in New Urbanism communities are often expensive and the communities are more racially homogeneous than urban neighborhoods. “New Urbanism takes seriously many challenges of America’s current suburban landscape with an attention to the human scale, historical references, and architectural character,” says Ashley Bigham, a Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan’s architecture school and co-founder of Outpost Office. “However, many critics of New Urbanism have noted that relying on a historical understanding of urban spaces limits, if not excludes, more contemporary aspects of the city including individual expression and economic diversity.” Planting a project like the Battery in the middle of Cobb County (62 percent white at the last census, compared to 38 percent for Atlanta) only serves to amplify those issues.
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SunTrust Park is an evolution of that “otherness” that the Atlanta suburbs originally represented, a stadium that wants as much to do with its team’s namesake city as the county that’s paying its bills. It still remains to be seen how tight that embrace will be when the team eventually becomes relevant again. As Jason Henderson noted in our conversation, “If the Braves win a World Series, where are they having the parade?”
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Givens also laments the potential lack of diversity at games now that transit options are meager. “When the Braves were at Turner Field, it would have been one of the few opportunities for people from largely-white Cobb to mix face-to-face with people of color and people in lower economic classes,” he said. “You didn’t need to own a car. You could take a MARTA bus there, or even walk if you lived in Summerhill, Peoplestown, or Mechanicsville—all neighborhoods where most residents are historically black and lower-income.”
[MENTION=108]jpx7[/MENTION] [MENTION=4]Julio3000[/MENTION]
Originally Posted by Hawk
An Atlanta area urban planner critiques Suntrust Park/The Battery:
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