Metro Atlanta's future: Slow period perfect to quicken creativity

"This recession has given us a chance to think." — Urban planner Andres Duany

The “Big R” may be officially over, but normalcy is still a ways off for Atlanta. It will be at least a few years before our regional economy is again growing with kudzu-like speed.

Growth was the old normal, and we became used to it.

A new normal will emerge gradually as economic activities regain traction. Metro Atlanta should act now to define that on our terms.

A slow healing of our economy presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to think deeply about the future. This has value only if we apply the end product toward tuning up, if not overhauling, our strategic vision for the future. Excelling in this work will best situate metro Atlanta for the next chapters in our economic story.

Doing so is easier now that far fewer newcomers are showing up at our doorstep. In years past, new arrivals both filled the jobs we once created and simultaneously strained our undersized infrastructure.

An August snapshot by the Atlanta Regional Commission reports that the 10-county core has added only about 56,000 people since the recession began. The ARC calls that influx “the slowest growth period in the region since the 1950s.”

What better time to strategize about our metro area than when growth pressures are essentially nil? Urban planner Andres Duany, speaking before an ARC assembly last year, said the recession “is a wonderful opportunity to try new ideas.” North Carolina’s Institute for Emerging Issues expounded on that theme in a report, quoting New York Times columnist David Brooks as saying, “Recessions are periods of rebirth, a rethinking of how we live and how we want to live, new things come into creation.”

We can start by ceasing thoughts along the lines of “things aren’t what they used to be, but we’re going to make them that way again.” That back-to-the-future attitude won’t lift Atlanta from the trough we’re now in.

What will get us going again is thinking boldly about the jobs of tomorrow, the workers who will fill them, where they will live and how they will travel.

That’s not to trash the past, or what it built. In truth, this region may recover faster if we do reach back and reclaim our old ability to see well into the future. That will better the odds of building a region that profitably meets needs that our competitors have yet to even envision. Innovation, followed by action. That’s what made us a magnet for job creation and growth that’s drawn sharp, hardworking people from Hahira to Mumbai.

We’ve done some of this work already. Duany told the ARC that “this is not a place where plans stay on a shelf.” Like companies that periodically update business plans, our leaders should enhance the best of the current knowledge base with additions that reflect the best educated guesses about future realities.

Projecting what Atlanta will look like and how it will function in the decades ahead is tricky work, true. But we can do it, and do it well.

What emerges should be an Atlanta-style plan that’s unlike any other. A model that recognizes Atlantans and Georgians, like all Americans, are living through a time when many expectations have been radically reset by the faltering economy.

Longer-term, these recession-wrought changes will affect our future, from what types of houses rise on now-empty subdivision plots to what economic motor may one day find a home in Doraville on the old GM plant site. The new order will affect how we travel around, and through, the region. It will impact how we use limited water stores. The list of so ons and so forths is lengthy.

Answering these needs as a metro area requires asking big, sharp questions in both the public and private sectors. “What are those things between now and the next 20 or 30 years that we need to claim to define ourselves and be able to be successful in the future?” asked Catherine Ross, director of the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development at Georgia Tech. We all have a stake in the answer.

If there’s any beauty in recession, it may be in the opportunity to dwell awhile on how to best focus constrained resources toward making brighter tomorrows. No region can do that better than metro Atlanta if we but join hands and lean into the task.