atlllllife

Tish and I have come safely again to the smog capital of the southeast, Atlanta. Atlanta is my hometown, the place where I went to high school and the place where I returned after college to initiate my abortive career in law. But it has always been a city that mystifies me because of its utter failure to create anything like a unified city culture or even city center. Other cities, like Boston, New York, or San Francisco, and even other southern cities like Nashville, Memphis, Austin and San Antonio, have managed to create and maintain a city identity. But Atlanta is not like that. Somehow, it has managed to become one damn sprawl ridden township after another.

Of course, I'm unfairly over-generalizing here. There's lots to recommend about the city. If you've been around long enough, you'll have realized that Grant Park, Candler Park, Decatur, Oakhurst, East Lake and a few other neighborhoods have some character to them. But you'll also realize that the vast majority of Atlanta's population (like all of my family for instance) lives outside this neat circumference of palatable areas in the dreaded netherzone that is denominated "Metro-Atlanta."

I myself grew up in one of these nether regions--Stone Mountain. Now, as the metro area goes, Stone Mountain isn't all that bad. Aside from the fact that it has the unpleasant tincture of being the birthplace of the KKK, it was one of the first suburbs of Atlanta and therefore has preserved some degree of character. I drove through the area last night and marveled at the fact that it looks remarkably similar to neighborhood I grew up in. The various homeowner's associations have kept Walmart, Target, Publix, and a welter of strip shopping centers from moving in and paving over all of the green space.

But the problem is that, like the Blight in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, the metro area is always expanding, ever encroaching further on the unsuspecting undeveloped regions at the metro area's fringe. 15 years ago, Cumming was a sleepy cow town, 10 miles away from Atlanta's northernmost suburb, Alpharetta. Now, Cumming is merely another exurb, brutally annexed onto metro-Atlanta's ever-sprawling orbit. Cumming is the unfortunate location where my parents moved while I was in my sophomore year in college.

Atlanta is not alone in the development of such an immense amount of urban blight. Almost every significant city has, in the past 100 years, developed suburbs, and in the past 15 years, developed exurbs. Chicago has Aurora, and L.A. has Palmdale. I'm not bemoaning my experience in the loverly locale of metro-Atlanta to the exclusion of these other cities. I'm saying that wherever sprawl exists, the quality of life is lessened for all involved. I know that some would deem the aforesaid statement sheer arrogance and balderdash, and maybe it is. I know many people, including my family, enjoy living in the suburbs. They cite lower crime rates and more job opportunities as positive factors about suburban life. They probably can't all be wrong for choosing the suburbs. After all, there's nothing biblical about any of what I'm saying. I suppose it's just that I find looking at neon signs in the shape of a sombrero and twenty foot high flourescent cacti advertising restaurants and mini-golf courses a little depressing is all.

So what's the upshot of my little rant here? Basically, I'm angry about suburbs and exurbs for two divergent reasons. First, I think suburbs and exurbs are bad for urban areas. Cities need stable families, not just poor people and slick yuppies. To the extent that it becomes normalized for people to have families and move out of cities, those urban centers become destablized and unbalanced. This is not just a qualitative observation: economically, when families move out, important businesses like grocery stores, laundromats, and hardware stores in the city go out of business, and when that happens, life in the city becomes unfeasible. A secondary element of this reason is that suburbs and exurbs generate more pollution and energy waste in a given geographic area because more green areas are deforested in the process of development and more cars are put on the road for longer periods of time, creating more road construction and maintenance and more traffic jams (the latter of which have become synonomous to me with being Atlanta).

Secondly, I believe that suburbs and exurbs are bad for the people who live in them. This is like Plato's pyschological paradox: a person will not choose what is bad for him. But people choose things all the time that are bad for them. Therefore, they must not know that those things are bad for them. Now, most people choose to move away from cities because they believe that they will find better schools, more privacy, lower cost of living, etc. But the untenable tradeoff that they do not often realize they are making is that they are exchanging the mostly communitarian, symbiotic quality of city life for an isolating, fragmented existence in the suburbs (I know that this is not true for everyone; many people find a way to be in deep relationships in the suburbs. But even the architecture of suburban locales is constructed in such a way to isolate people from each other--expansive yards, houses set way back from the street, decks instead of porches, etc.). Suburbs wed you to your automobile. Since nothing is walkable (especially your job, if you live in the city), you must drive everywhere, meaning less time in relationships and more time in isolation. Local grocers and laundromats get replaced by giant megastores like Walmart and Publix, thereby displacing the organic relationships formed between store owners and customers and substituting a nearly faceless relationship between a cashier and a sales unit (and this relationship is designed by the store to be as brief an encounter as possible so as to maximize the amount of customers pushed through the store at any given moment). Organic relationships with neighbors and passersby are exchanged for a small circle of intimate acquaitances selected based on common experience or interest. In the religious realm, the church deteriotes from a parish model of ecclesiastical organization to a commuter model. In these latter two ways, no one ever gets to know anyone who can challenge them or really anyone who is different from them. All of this may mean that suburbs are more "pleasant" or more "convenient," but they cannot be regarded as better environments qualitatively for the people who live in them.

I hope that none of my Atlanta friends are offended by this post. I don't intend it as a personal attack on anyone who lives in the suburbs. I mean it mostly as a reflection on the 18+ frustrating years that I have spent living in the suburbs of Atlanta.