Wow. I'm glad to hear it is really a pleasant place.

I was reporting a personal experience, not making a blanket judgement of anything. Actually, not having or expecting a silver platter, I hired a taxi and went out to a very pleasant part of town where the Martin Luther King memorial is, and walked around. It's just that between point A and point B wasn't really walkable or bikeable, so far as I could see. But then, I didn't know what to expect, being a tourist from a small town in Oregon. I hoped for peach trees downtown, I suppose -- sort of like English peasants believed the streets of London were paved with gold. Silly me.

See this kind of superficial judgment makes me wonder about all of the other observations here and how many of them are similarly based on such shallow observations and guilt by association. Suburban Atlanta does have many terrible characteristics and the city isn't perfect but it certainly isn't the dehumanizing moonscape that many make it out to be.

I am quite hopeful that most people on this blog are less superficial in their immediate judgements. Sorry.

The city has one of the strongest tree ordinances in the country and working hard to undo the Robert Moses type mistakes of the 1960s in the central business districts.\\

Funny... I lived in Atlanta several years back. And I don't remember things the same way. Every piece of land that could be built upon was in play. KFC's and condo's mixed it up. Sidewalks? Forgetaboutit. Waste of concrete. There is a lot of ornamental landscaping, bfd, the sound of leaf blowers and line trimmers never ends.

When you leave you'll realize how lousy it really is.

Yeah, downtown Atlanta isn't that bad.. but the other 95% of the city is horrible. It isn't just the car centric city planning but also the attitude.

When I lived in DC, pedestrians would typically step boldly in front of traffic as they crossed the street knowing the cars would stop.

In Atlanta, pedestrians are typically seen making a mad dash across the street to avoid being run over by swarms of SUVs who may stop for pedestrians in the cross walk or may just swerve around them.

It brings back memories of the old Atari game Frogger.

Atlanta is the least pedestrian friendly city I have ever lived in or visited.

Actually, there are very material reasons why those are
not merely phsycological realities but also physically
inseperable from the continued survival of this economy.
the oil fuels an intensity and scale of that game orders
of magnitude greater than ever before possible, and with
that contrast in mind perhaps even recent history looks
stable or even static in comparison. However, all things
must grow or die. Living things can't grow beyond very
modest limits, and the abundant diversity of life is a way
the grow-or-die dynamic yields healthy outcomes. Tipping
the balance of power through technology begins to turn
a stable though dynamic biological community into a runaway
escalation, which will be more destructive the longer it
goes uncorrected. Clever being that we humans are, we
stepped into the trap. Once you start this avalanche going,
the rules of the game are the same, but you have to run
faster and faster. It's not just the same moves of the
game played over and over in a circle, but the same kind
of moves of the game played with an ever-higher ante and
ever-higher stakes spiralling up to where we are now.
Oil is one of the major factors fuelling this escalation,
quite literally. It isn't th eonly one. All such runaway
processes eventually run out of steam and crash. The one
we live in today is breaking down, and oil peaking is only one of the reasons.

But no, you have it backwards. It isn't spiritual ideas
which have dictated material reality. Quite the other
way around- the material reality of living in an escalation
played a significant role in the evolution of human cultures
over the past 5 to 10 thousand years. Those cultural
attributes which were more compatible with the material reality of escalation have become more pronounced.

Vision does not drive material culture, except insofar
as those aspects of material culture driven _do not affect
the bottom line_ of competition and survival. Those material
realities dictate the viable parameters of vision, and
incompatible vision is eliminated.