Atlanta Unbound: Enabling Sprawl through Policy and Planning by Carlton Wade Basmajian (review)

Born at the confluence of two railroads in the 1830s, today the city of Atlanta is home to less than 500,000 residents (US Census Bureau, 2012). However, metro Atlanta (Atlanta-Sandy Springs Roswell Metropolitan Standard Area), the focus on Carlton Wade Basmajian’s book, has almost 5.5 million people. Containing over half the population of Georgia (an otherwise rural state), metro Atlanta covers an area the size of Massachusetts, and is frequently cited as a remarkable example of sprawl in the United States. It certainly offers a powerful case study to explore twentieth century low-density urban expansion in the United States.

A quick review of Atlantan urban histories over the last twenty-five years indicates that Atlanta has been interpreted through three primary lenses: race (as in R. Bayor’s Race and the Shaping of 20th Century Atlanta [1996]); political economy (as in D. Whitelegg’s “A Battle on Two Fronts: Competitive Urges ‘Inside’ Atlanta” [2002]); and regime theory (as in C. Stone’s Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 [1989]). Claiming that previous scholars of Atlanta’s urban history, like scholars of US urban expansion more generally, have ignored the active role of regional planning, Basmajian explores how regional planners engaged with Atlanta and post–World War II expansion.

Swimming in the archival seas in and around Atlanta, Basmajian has masterfully charted the course of the Atlanta Regional Commission (est. 1971): the 1976 Regional Development plan of metro Atlanta; 1980s “growth management” efforts; and the 1990s battle over the regional transportation network. The penultimate transportation chapter comes across as the most animated of the book. Sprawl-oriented assumptions underlying computer modeling drove the relentless building of major highways into suburbia. Threaded with both thoughtful analysis and rambunctious newspaper accounts, this chapter also stands as a useful reflection on Roy Barnes governorship of the state.

Basmajian offers the concept of planning as an “imprint of ‘regional thinking,’” examining three scales of infrastructure policy (local, state, and federal) that, “together managed the urban development process” (2). Basmajian offers a way of understanding regional planning as a discourse of planning growth in northern Georgia (2). However, a more fully fleshed out theoretical articulation of regional thinking and institutional discourse would have been welcome. Several theorists who might have offered useful spatial and legal perspectives to theorize the various planning discourses materializing urban and suburban Atlanta spaces include: Duncan and Duncan’s always thoughtful reflections on power and landscape (as in Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb [2004]); Richard Schein’s work on the work various formal and informal organizations shape urban spaces (as “A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene” [1997]); and Lewyn’s reflections on legal spaces (as in “Zoning and Land Use Planning: Plans are Not Enough” [2013]).

More broadly, Basmajian follows in the footsteps of Americanists engaged in understanding the cultural production of urban and suburban spaces. This book offers American Studies practitioners a useful example of what the cultural geographer Richard Schein calls materialized discourse and discourse materialized. Atlanta Unbound provides a powerful resource for considering an evolving relationship between ideology and material landscapes. It also leaves this reader to wonder about the next step of both recognizing the unique elements of individual metropolitan regions, while also drawing larger conclusions about sprawl in twentieth century American cities.