How an old loop of railroads is changing the face of a city | Ryan Gravel

This picture

is from my metro card

when I spent a year abroad in Paris in college in the mid-'90s.

My friend says I look like a French anarchist --

(Laughter)

But this is still what I see

when I look in the mirror in the morning.

Within a month of living in Paris, I'd lost 15 pounds

and I was in the best shape of my life

because I was eating fresh food

and I was walking wherever I went.

Having grown up in suburban Atlanta,

a region built largely by highways and automobiles

and with a reputation as a poster child for sprawl,

Paris fundamentally changed the way I understood

the construction of the world around me,

and I got obsessed with the role of infrastructure --

that it's not just the way to move people from point A to point B,

it's not just the way to convey water or sewage or energy,

but it's the foundation for our economy.

It's the foundation for our social life and for our culture,

and it really matters to the way that we live.

When I came home, I was instantly frustrated,

stuck in traffic as I crossed the top end of our perimeter highway.

Not only was I not moving a muscle,

I had no social interaction

with the hundreds of thousands of people that were hurtling past me,

like me, with their eyes faced forward and their music blaring.

I wondered if this was an inevitable outcome,

or could we do something about it.

Was it possible to transform this condition in Atlanta

into the kind of place that I wanted to live in?

I went back to grad school in architecture and city planning,

developed this interest in infrastructure,

and in 1999 came up with an idea

for my thesis project:

the adaptation of an obsolete loop of old railroad circling downtown

as a new infrastructure for urban revitalization.

It was just an idea.

I never thought we would actually build it.

But I went to work at an architecture firm,

and eventually talked to my coworkers about it,

and they loved the idea.

And as we started talking to more people about it,

more people wanted to hear about it.

In the summer of 2001,

we connected with Cathy Woolard,

who was soon elected city council president.

And we built a citywide vision around this idea:

the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile loop

of transit and trails and transformation.

I was doing two and three meetings a week for two and a half years,

and so was Cathy and her staff and a handful of volunteers.

Together, we built this amazing movement of people and ideas.

It included community advocates who were used to fighting against things,

but found the Atlanta BeltLine as something that they could fight for;

developers who saw the opportunity

to take advantage of a lot of new growth in the city;

and dozens of nonprofit partners who saw their mission

at least partly accomplished by the shared vision.

Now, usually these groups of people aren't at the same table

wanting the same outcome.

But there we were, and it was kind of weird,

but it was really, really powerful.

The people of Atlanta fell in love with a vision

that was better than what they saw through their car windshields,

and the people of Atlanta made it happen,

and I guarantee you we would not be building it otherwise.

From the beginning, our coalition was diverse.

People of all stripes were part of our story.

People on the lower end of the economic spectrum loved it, too.

They were just afraid they weren't going to be able to be there

when it got built, that they'd be priced out.

And we've all heard that kind of story before, right?

But we promised that the Atlanta BeltLine would be different,

and people took ownership of the idea,

and they made it better than anything we ever imagined

in the beginning,

including significant subsidies for housing,

new parks, art, an arboretum -- a list that continues to grow.

And we put in place

the organizations and agencies that were required to make it happen.

And importantly, it is.

Now we're in the early stages of implementation, and it's working.

The first mainline section of trail was opened in 2012,

and it's already generated over three billion dollars

of private-sector investment.

But it's not only changing the physical form of the city,

it's changing the way we think about the city,

and what our expectations are for living there.

About a month ago,

I had to take my kids with me to the grocery store

and they were complaining about it,

because they didn't want to get in the car.

They were saying, "Dad, if we have to go,

can we at least ride our bikes?"

And I said, "Of course we can.

That's what people in Atlanta do.

We ride our bikes to the grocery store."

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Thank you, yeah.

Now, they don't know how ridiculous that is,

but I do.

And I also understand that their expectations for Atlanta

are really powerful.

This kind of transformation is exactly like sprawl

in the last century,

the movement where our investment in highways and automobiles

fundamentally changed American life.

That wasn't some grand conspiracy.

There were conspiracies within it, of course.

But it was a cultural momentum.

It was millions of people making millions of decisions

over an extended period of time,

that fundamentally changed not only the way that we build cities,

but it changed our expectations

for our lives.

These changes were the foundations for urban sprawl.

We didn't call it sprawl at that time.

We called it the future.

And it was.

And we got all the highways and strip malls and cul-de-sacs we wanted.

It was a radical transformation,

but it was built by a cultural momentum.

So it's important to not separate

the physical construction of the places we live

from other things that are happening at that time.

At that time,

in the second half of the last century,

science was curing disease

and lifting us to the moon,

and the sexual revolution was breaking down barriers,

and the Civil Rights Movement began its march

toward the fulfillment of our nation's promise.

Television, entertainment, food, travel, business -- everything was changing,

and both the public and private sectors were colluding

to give us the lives we wanted.

The Federal Highway Administration,

for example, didn't exist before there were highways.

Think about it.

(Laughter)

Of course, today it's important to understand and acknowledge

that those benefits accrued to some groups of people

and not to others.

It was not an equitable cultural momentum.

But when we look today in wonder and disgust, maybe,

at the metropolis sprawl before us,

we wonder if we're stuck.

Are we stuck with the legacy of that inequity?

Are we stuck with this dystopian traffic hellscape?

Are we stuck with rampant urban displacement,

with environmental degradation?

Are we stuck with social isolation

or political polarization?

Are these the inevitable and permanent outcomes?

Or are they the result of our collective cultural decisions

that we've made for ourselves?

And if they are,

can't we change them?

What I have learned from our experience in Atlanta

is not an anomaly.

Similar stories are playing out everywhere,

where people are reclaiming not only old railroads,

but also degraded urban waterways and obsolete roadways,

reinventing all of the infrastructure

in their lives.

Whether here in New York

or in Houston

or Miami,

Detroit, Philadelphia,

Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore,

Toronto and Paris,

cities big and small all over the world are reclaiming and reinventing

this infrastructure for themselves,

including the mother of all catalyst infrastructure projects,

the Los Angeles River,

the revitalization effort for which similarly started

as a grassroots movement,

has developed into a cultural momentum,

and is now in the early stages of being transformed

into some kind of life-affirming infrastructure again,

this one with trails and parks and fishing and boating

and community revitalization,

and of course, water quality and flood control.

It's already improving the lives of people.

It's already changing the way the rest of us think about Los Angeles.

This is more than just infrastructure.

We're building new lives for ourselves.

It's a movement that includes local food, urban agriculture,

craft beer, the maker movement,

tech and design -- all of these things, early indicators of a really radical shift

in the way we build cities.

We're taking places like this

and transforming them into this.

And soon this.

And this is all exciting and good.

We're changing the world for the better.

Good for us!

And it is awesome -- I mean that.

But our history of sprawl,

and from what we can already see with these catalyst projects today,

we know and must remember

that big changes like this don't usually benefit everyone.

The market forces unleashed by this cultural momentum

often include the seemingly unstoppable

and inevitable cycle of rising taxes, prices and rents.

This is urgent.

If we care, we have to stand up

and speak out.

This should be a call to action,

because the answer can't be to not improve communities.

The answer can't be to not build parks and transit and grocery stores.

The answer can't be to hold communities down

just to keep them affordable.

But we do have to follow through and address the financial realities

that we're facing.

This is hard, and it won't happen on its own.

We can do it, and I'm committed to this goal in Atlanta,

to sticking up again for people who made it possible in the first place.

We can't call it a success without them.

I certainly can't,

because the people I made commitments to all those years

weren't abstract populations.

They're my friends and neighbors.

They're people that I love.

So even though it started as my graduate thesis

and I'm working hard for 16 years with thousands of people

to help make this thing come to life,

I know and believe that who the BeltLine is being built for

is just as important as whether it's built at all.

Not just in Atlanta,

but locally and globally,

we have to understand

this accountability to the people whose lives we are changing,

because this is us.

We are the lives we're talking about.

These places aren't inevitable.

The places we live aren't inevitable,

and if we want something different, we just need to speak up.

We have to ensure that change comes on our terms.

And to do that,

we have to participate actively in the process of shaping change.

Thank you.

(Applause)