Atlanta

GI In Atlanta

11 Plans Reviewed
Atlanta predominantly uses GI to address stormwater issues, although plans embrace a wide range of types and benefits.

Equity of Green Infrastructure

Some Atlanta plans utilize an equity lens, and the city seeks processes for addressing known equity concerns.

City Information

Incorporated 1837
135.6 sq miles
498,000 Total Population, 3673 People per sq. mile
Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests
$55,279 Median household income
63% Estimated rent-burdened households
17.7% Housing units vacant

*unless otherwise noted, data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018

Atlanta has experienced rapid economic and population growth over the last several decades. The city was formed in the tumultuous period of forced removal of Natives across the SE, including the Muscogee Creek and Cherokee peoples whose homelands the city occupies. An epicenter of the 20th century Civil Rights Movement, the city has become internationally recognized as a Black cultural hub. The only major Southeastern city emerging from the Civil war with its infrastructure intact, this crossroads city serves as a regional economic beacon.

However, growth has been highly unequal. Mirroring legacies of urban renewal, ambitious plans for urban expansion, redevelopment, and redesign, have not benefited many families, who instead face significant risks of housing displacement. Increasing climate hazards of floods, droughts, and heatwaves further threaten marginalized communities.

Green Infrastructure in Atlanta

GI planning in Atlanta encompasses stormwater management and planning for landscape connectivity, and is deeply intertwined with planning for urban redevelopment and comprehensive land use planning. Examples include the large number of regulatory plans implementing stormwater focused GI in specific subbasins, the Atlanta Comprehensive and Resilience plans utilizing landscape and integrative concepts of GI, and the Atlanta Beltway plan which refers to GI but does not define it.

Plans utilizing landscape GI concepts focus more on larger landscape elements (e.g. parks, the urban tree canopy, and trail networks) while stormwater focused plans, including those using integrative concepts, focus more on hybrid facilities and green materials. Functionally, plans use GI to manage urban hydrology, though some plans utilizing landscape concepts see it as a tool for supplying transportation and thermal regulation services.

Mirroring this functional focus, most benefits associated with GI relate to improved environmental conditions (largely water quality). However stormwater focused plans emphasize the reduced costs of infrastructure services, increasing property values, and a number of other economic and social benefits.

Overall, no Atlanta plans cover all 10 of our equity dimensions despite having significant implications for equity. In a few key areas they represent current best practices across our study cities, namely in understanding the contextual value of GI and the hazards that GI related redevelopment poses.

There is a promising trend in the most current plans to center equity concerns. However, most plans don’t define equity or address justice. There is a major need for mechanisms to involve communities in the evaluation of existing planning efforts.

With few exceptions, many of the mechanisms for community inclusion remain unspecified, and there are extremely limited avenues for affected communities to evaluate planned outcomes. For example, while Atlanta’s updated Comprehensive Plan sought community input, participation in design and implementation is largely limited to public agencies with limited mechanisms for public involvement.

While the Comp plan is the only plan that specifies mechanisms for community evaluation, it does so through limited means, namely, a livability index and the Department of Parks and Recreation ongoing needs assessments. The Resilience strategy also sought extensive public input through a number of avenues, representing one of the more inclusive planning processes we examined, however, it was not possible to evaluate how representative this engagement was of Atlanta’s diverse communities.

No plans besides the GI Strategic Action Plan define equity. The most complete framings of equity are found in the Comp and Resilience plans, which include the need to move Atlanta out of the top 10 most income unequal cities by building intergenerational wealth. Mentions of justice are rare, and while acknowledging historical struggles, they largely do not acknowledge their continuation in the present or the capacity of city agencies and government to address them. Overall, framings revolve around using GI to provide universal benefits for all Atlantans

All Atlanta plans use GI to reduce urban hazards and add value to the urban landscape. The dominant concerns around equity in the GI strategic plan revolve around historical and ongoing uneven distributions of flooding hazards. Plans acknowledge the risks of gentrification associated with urban renewal projects catalyzed by large public investments in GI, in particular around parks. Both the Comp plan and GI Action Plan acknowledge the added need for labor to maintain GI, and many stormwater plans actively seek volunteer labor from communities where GI is implemented but do not discuss compensation. The resilience plan acknowledges the need for higher value labor for community wealth building, but does not specify any mechanisms to do so through GI.

Atlanta has numerous opportunities for improving equity in its GI planning and programs. As the city continues to grow in population and economic activity, a core issue is who benefits and who pays for ongoing redevelopment projects. Like many redeveloping cities, new forms of decision making are likely required to guide investments in public services, infrastructure, and housing that benefit current residents without displacing them.

Like many other cities we examined, a core struggle is to seek creative means for meeting regulatory requirements around managing urban environmental impacts while meeting other interdependent social, environmental, and infrastructural objectives. To that end we provide concrete recommendations for communities, city policy makers, and non-government entities involved in Green Infrastructure in Atlanta

Community Groups

Atlanta has numerous communities who have long fought for their right to the city, and unfortunately their ongoing struggles often not discussed by current plans and planners. However, some headway has been made with community based planning practices that sought to create binding visions for neighborhood planning and guiding city investments in public real infrastructure, as evidenced within the Proctor Creek and Sugar and Intrenchment creek WIPS (which reference community led visions from plans not authored by city agencies).

Reclaiming the Value of GI Equals Reclaiming the Value Of Urban Land

Communities must continue to find alternative means of owning and valuing land outside of the speculative real estate market; in other cities these have taken the forms of limited equity housing co-ops, and a national conversation around public banking and the right to housing. Such mechanisms may require a deep restructuring of city budgets and revenue generation mechanisms, as well as approaches to build community wealth that are not solely based on property value.

Building Community Cohesion Through Community Organizing

Strong internal community organizing forms the foundation of strong community led planning. Community groups must continue to organize around their collective interest, and should be supported by city agencies and ngos. However, when partnering with NGOs, CDCs, and city agencies, strong community organizing will be required so external influences and funding do not cause or exacerbate divisions within the community

The Need for Substantive and Transparent Community Engagement

Current planning practices in Atlanta have almost no mechanisms for community based evaluation of the implementation of GI plans aside from Parks and Recreation needs assessments. However, the current administration has centered equity concerns within the current GI plan, and this may present an opportunity for community groups to demand such mechanisms, alongside the creation of precautionary mechanisms for preventing housing displacement from urban renewal projects and GI programs.

Policy Makers and Planners

A diverse array of city agencies and government entities are involved in GI planning in Atlanta. While the GI strategic plan has a welcome focus on equity issues, plans at large in Atlanta remain contradictory about what GI is and what it does, and have limited mechanisms for public engagement and participation from planning through to evaluation.

Rooting GI in the urban landscape for community needs

Planners and policy makers should acknowledge that the GI concept must integrate a diverse array of private and public green spaces. While current plans focus on stormwater and flooding, other emergent approaches seek to create functional alternative transit networks, including pedestrian, bicycle, light electric vehicle, and environmentally friendly mass transit. These linkages should be more clearly identified and strengthened to provide a more socially, infrastructurally, and environmentally sound basis for integrative planning efforts.

From Words to Action

Planners and policy makers need to move beyond discussing equity concerns in plans and move towards creating binding statutory and regulatory mechanisms for community inclusion in plan formulation and evaluation. These include specific mechanisms for community inclusion in designing structural adjustments to city policies that prioritize building property value over community incomes. Existing processes for community inclusion (as in the GI Strategic Plan and Resilience Plans) must become more transparent of what demographics in the city participated in plan creation.

Clarifying Definitions and Making them Count

Foundations and funders should also collaborate with communities and city agencies for a larger scale rethink around the functions and benefits of GI - for example it may be necessary to eliminate further development within flood prone areas and build more affordable housing outside of hazards rather than facilitating redevelopment there with GI. Larger scale analyses of runoff, social and environmental inequality, and housing needs may yield insight into how other parts of the city can be redeveloped to improve economic and housing justice while making space for nature and improving climate resilience.

Foundations and Funders

Foundations and funders in Atlanta appear to have contributed to community engaged planning processes dealing with Green Infrastructure. However, these plans do not appear to be binding upon city agencies. While policy makers and planners should build in such mechanisms, funders can support community organizing which forms the foundation of effective and just urban environmental governance.

Support Intersectional Organizing

Dedicated funding for community organizing around environmental, housing, and social justice needs to support existing community led initiatives to address those intersectional challenges. Like many other cities, open forums to discuss and strategize around these intersecting issues are lacking, and building new mechanisms to facilitate collaboration and joint planning between disparate groups are necessary.

From the Grassroots to City Hall

Community based initiatives need to find concrete avenues for translating into binding mechanisms for city agencies when enacting and evaluating programs. Community led plans without follow through can undermine public appetite for engagement in future planning efforts, and yet, planning is required to address intersecting challenges around urban stormwater, flooding, and housing. So while many of the most disaffected communities may abandon planning processes, they are also the ones whos voices are most needed to formulate alternative visions and futures in city plans, and funders should prioritize those efforts that support organizing on the frontlines of displacement and climate hazards and seek to create lasting structural and institutional change.

Rethinking and Remaking Urban Form

Planning for equity in Green Infrastructure requires a deep rethinking and restructuring of urban governance to build wealth and value for communities while reshaping the city to be more socially just and environmentally resilient. GI, like other public realm investments, has long term impacts on the quality of built environment, and with appropriate social decision making processes, can provide valuable public services for many generations.

Atlanta has opportunities to address its long standing inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards and wealth, but these opportunities require changing the status quo around redevelopment.