Envisioning a New City Center: Time, Displacement, and Atlanta’s Suburban Futures

Abstract

AbstractIn the fast‐growing, gentrifying metro Atlanta region, poor people and immigrants are simultaneously being priced out of inner city neighborhoods and displaced by suburban revitalization initiatives. Affordable housing activists struggle to adapt their strategies to the place and pace of redevelopment. In this context, focusing on time becomes increasingly crucial to understanding people’s varying experiences and responses to these phenomena. I develop this insight by attending to an often‐overlooked site of gentrification: a majority‐white, conservative, but rapidly diversifying suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. In 2012, this suburban municipality launched an ambitious plan to transform its sprawling, car‐centric landscape into a brand‐new “city center.” The project, inspired by the principles of new urbanism, was only the first step toward a broader redevelopment vision targeting the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. By analyzing planning documents alongside ethnographic data, I examine how affluent homeowners, renters, activists, and institutional actors differentially engaged with and endured the temporalities of redevelopment. I focus in particular on working poor Latinx families, who were first to be affected by these plans. Unlike nonresident activists, these people did not engage in overt forms of contestation, nor did they try to influence local planning decisions. Instead, they deployed various time‐tricking (Bear 2016) and place making tactics in an effort to build a life in the leftover spaces and “meantime” of redevelopment. Through creative uses of time and the re‐purposing of disinvested landscapes, Latinx residents endured the regime of temporal uncertainty and residential mobility (re)produced by redevelopment.