Atlanta 100 years from now will be a forest of buildings, you say?

It might indeed be a forest — but the traditional kind with streams.

Mikki K. Harris/AJC (ENLARGE)

Eric Bishop of EDAW stands with a 2108 model of Atlanta. EDAW and its partners won $10,000 in a contest for the project.

PHOTOS AND VIDEO • To see images from EDAW's entry, click here. • The New York firm HWKN didn't win the Atlanta competition but its YouTube video presentation, in which Atlanta becomes "MEtreePOLIS," is worth a look: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vtKyFsUtW8 • More Business news • More Metro news

All it will take is rethinking how the city reinvents itself as manmade structures decay.

That's the argument the architectural firm EDAW makes. And it must be a good one because it earned EDAW and three partners $10,000 in a History Channel competition called "City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge."

Martin Felsen, a judge in the competition and president of the Chicago architectural firm UrbanLab, said EDAW's vision makes sense in a city already known for its trees.

"We thought that it was doable, not even in the future, but now," Felsen said. "Atlanta is a landscape with a city within it."

In EDAW's "The City in the Forest" plan, buildings soar above highways, freeing up land for more trees and allowing buried spring-fed streams to return to life.

Some of the storm runoff that now disappears into underground pipes would be captured and cleansed in wetlands. Today's sewer tunnels would be used to store drinking water, making the city drought resistant.

"Why do we push all this water away as quickly as we can?" asked EDAW senior associate Eric Bishop, who spearheaded the competition entry.

EDAW was assisted by praxis3 and Metcalf & Eddy, both in Atlanta, and BNIM of Kansas City.

The EDAW team beat seven other competitors in devising the best plan for what Atlanta ought to look like in 2108. Other design teams won competitions in San Francisco and Washington.

Online voters on the History Channel Web site will decide which of the three plans is the nation's best. The voting ends April 28, and the winner will be announced May 5 on the "Cities of the Underworld" show.

Richard Meier, who designed the High Museum, says on the History Channel Web site that in EDAW's plan "forests serve as the environmental lungs of the city.

"They filter storm water, which is currently channeled underground, allowing it to percolate through the soil and become usable. They purify the air."

Steve Cover, Atlanta's commissioner of planning and community development and a judge in the competition, pointed out that the city's transportation corridors already are magnets for concentrated growth, so EDAW's vision is within the realm of possibility. "It can evolve that way," Cover said.

A project in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood provides an inkling of that back-to-nature redevelopment.

The future North Avenue park will include a stormwater management pond or ponds surrounded by a terraced park and wetlands. As the drainage point for about 800 acres, the water feature will reduce flooding that's plagued the area and provide a scenic gathering spot for neighbors.

"There are a lot of little things you can do," Bishop said. "But when you add them up, it's a big thing."