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T his project set out to answer three questions. How have regional planning agencies supported and extended metropolitan decentralization? What role have regional planning agencies played in the expansion of federal and state power over land development decisions? Through what channels have regional planning agencies coordinated planning and development activity? By looking across three decades, from 1970 to 2002, of regional planning and exploring a series of planning events in Atlanta, I have attempted to sketch an answer. An unexpectedly coordinated regional planning process, managed by the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) and supported by the state of Georgia, lay behind the construction of Atlanta’s notorious urban sprawl. The regional planning process reflected underlying political circumstances in the region, but it also operated according to an internal logic that changed the region’s politics. The complexity of this relationship offers perspective on a larger question: to what extent has late twentieth-century urban sprawl been planned? Atlanta ’s experience suggests that regional planning should be considered one of the major factors that, along with demographic, technological, and economic changes, transformed American cities in the decades between the end of World War II and the end of the twentieth century. In short, ARC and the state did not create growth, but they had a major hand in allocating where growth happened. From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, discussion and debate about regional planning among Atlanta’s politicians, businessmen, public administrators, and planners centered on who should have the authority to make development decisions and what kind of organizational structure would best facilitate those decisions. Whether 7 A Regional Story 174 | Chapter 7 publicly stated or not, the conclusion was consistently reached that the opinions of the men who ran Atlanta’s downtown businesses should hold sway.1 The tenor of this debate began to change in the late 1960s, though, and the stable leadership that had long governed the city, and by default most of its suburbs, faced new challenges. Changing demographics, shifting state politics, and expanding federal policy meant Atlanta’s tight-knit governing coalition began to lose control over the regional planning process in the early 1970s. What emerged in its place was a broader coalition spread over a wider geography, in which the state and the regional planning commission came to occupy the seat of power. This expanded governing coalition, a group that also included increasingly powerful suburban politicians, displaced Atlanta’s existing governing regime. Through a series of plans and legislation, ARC and the state slowly tightened control over land development across metropolitan Atlanta—control, however, that led not to more compact or sensitive forms of development but just the opposite: the rise of what might be called massive sprawl. Instead of softening the impact of growth, the new regional planning coalition accelerated it. Though ARC and the state could not and did not attempt to control the details of small development decisions within the region, they controlled the large decisions related to infrastructure and governance. When it emerged from the Georgia General Assembly, the bill that created ARC in 1971 granted policy-making authority to a large governing board comprising elected officials, including county commissioners and mayors, and citizens. ARC’s structure helped codify the changed politics of metropolitan Atlanta. The growth of the suburban belt that stretched around the city had given the politicians based there significant power within the region, which was reflected in the ARC board: every member had one vote regardless of geographic affiliation. While Atlanta’s old elites had not entirely lost their place, the organization of ARC pointed to a future in which the regional power structure would increasingly bend to suburban concerns.2 With so much federal infrastructure money at stake, suburban politicians recognized that gaining a voice in the regional planning process would ensure that a large portion of those funds benefited their districts. Politicians in Atlanta’s suburbs were hungry for growth and development , and in their courting of new development they tended to pay little mind to the form that growth took. Despite significant changes in federal antipoverty and environmental policy, issues related to socioeconomic equity, affordable housing, or protecting fragile natural resources received little attention. The politics of development in the early 1970s instead remained focused on roads, water, transit, and airports, the placement of which would have enormous implications for land development. As had been the case with the earlier Metropolitan Planning Commission and the Atlanta Region Metropolitan Planning Commission, the issues...

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