The Too-Busy City: Atlanta and Urbanity at the End of the Twentieth Century

According to Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., Atlanta was “the city of the sixties in America.” It earned high marks from national media outlets for the peaceful integration of its schools, and under Allen’s direction, posted gains in economic development that made it the envy of cities nationwide. Unemployment plummeted, convention business doubled, and Atlanta became a “major league” city when it lured the Braves franchise from Milwaukee.

Notwithstanding its tremendous growth, the city faced challenges that, for Allen and his allies, were existential in nature. Since the 1920s, rates of growth beyond the city limits had outpaced those within by wide margins. A successful annexation campaign undertaken in the previous decade had augmented Atlanta’s population by a third and restored what leaders called its “racial balance,” but by Allen’s mayoralty, the city’s demographics were again tipping toward a black majority. The ambitious system of expressways that converged on the central business district had meanwhile failed to protect downtown’s primacy in an era of metropolitan expansion, imperiling its future prospects and jeopardizing the financial basis for municipal government. Using the events of Allen’s mayoralty as a point of departure, this paper will provide a broad assessment of Atlanta’s growth in final decades of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to its ongoing mobility crisis and the continued fragmentation of its politics.

With federal transportation spending in decline and state leaders unwilling to intervene, Atlanta’s fractious governments have so far been unwilling to overcome their historic enmities to pave a path forward – a failure that, as this paper will demonstrate, is rooted in the region’s contentious history, and that portends great problems for its future.