ABSTRACT
Sometimes it is important to find what the city is – instead of what it was, or what it should be. That is what drove me to Atlanta – an intuition that the real city at the end of the 20th century could be found there …
Atlanta has CNN and Coca-Cola.
Atlanta has a black mayor, and it will have the Olympics.
Atlanta has culture, or at least it has a Richard Meier museum (like Ulm, Barcelona, Frankfurt, The Hague, etc.).
Atlanta has an airport; actually it has 40 airports. One of them is the biggest airport in the world. Not that everybody wants to be there; it’s a hub, a spoke, an airport for connections. It could be anywhere.
Atlanta has history, or rather it had history; now it has history machines that replay the battles of the Civil War every hour on the hour. Its real history has been erased, removed, or artificially resuscitated.
Atlanta has other elements that provide intensity without physical density: one building looks innocent from the outside – like a regular supermarket – but is actually the largest, most sophisticated food hall in the world. Each day it receives three cargo planes of fresh products from Holland, four from Paris, two from Southeast Asia. It proves that there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of gourmets in Atlanta.
Atlanta does not have the classical symptoms of city; it is not dense; it is a sparse, thin carpet of habitation, a kind of suprematist composition of little fields. Its strongest contextual givens are vegetal and infrastructural: forest and roads. Atlanta is not a city; it is a landscape.
Atlanta’s basic form – but it is not a form – its basic formlessness is generated by the highway system, a stretched X surrounded by an O: branches running across the city connecting to a single perimeter highway. The X brings people in and out; the O – like a turntable – takes them anywhere. They are thinking about projecting a super-O somewhere in the beyond.
Atlanta has nature, both original and improved – a sparkling, perfect nature where no leaf is ever out of place. Its artificiality sometimes makes it hard to tell whether you are outside or inside; somehow, you’re always in nature.
Atlanta does not have planning, exactly, but another process called zoning. Atlanta’s zoning law is very interesting; its first line tells you what to do if you want to propose an exception to the regulations. The regulations are so weak that the exception is the norm. Elsewhere, zoning has a bad name – for putting things in their place simplistically: work, sleep, shop, play. Atlanta has a kind of reverse zoning, zoning as instrument of indetermination, making anything possible anywhere.
