Focus on development

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Ruth Dusseault

"Walmart" (1994) by Ruth Dusseault

Atlantans have a laundry list of complaints to chalk up to manic development. There's sprawl, smog, gridlock, outrageously priced intown real estate, no parking. Atlanta is the second-fastest growing metropolitan area in the United States, and for many it has become a totem of unchecked greed riding roughshod over long-term, practical planning.

For development analysts such as author James Howard Kunstler, who describes Atlanta in his book The City in Mind as "one big-ass parking lot under a toxic pall," Atlanta has become an urban whipping boy, a prime example of what not to do in creating the city of the future.

But the onward march of Atlanta's strip-mall-and-subdivision progress continues, and it is, oddly enough, artists who are offering some of the most arresting, often passionate commentary on development. Lately you can't wave a cat in this town without whacking an artist doing watercolors of Atlanta construction sites, such as Teresa Bramlette, or making beautiful photos of freshly tilled home sites, such as Thomas Tulis.

After years of celebrating the South's flora and fauna and its steamy, gothic landscape, local artists are finally beginning to survey the world of the urban center. Three Atlanta artists of note -- Robert Bubp, Julie Stuart and Ruth Dusseault -- have spent between one and 10 years charting Atlanta's rapid development in art projects that range from the incendiary to the documentary to the metaphorical.

While writers and theoreticians have tended to focus on traffic and pollution as development's legacy, these artists concern themselves with the more ephemeral assaults to Atlanta's identity being erased for a chain store, cathedral-ceilinged, whitebread Mono-polis.

Development is a hot button issue for almost everyone in Atlanta, but especially for these three locals artists, who recently gathered to discuss with Creative Loafing how this contentious phenomenon informs their work.

Creative Loafing: When did you start doing work about development?

Bubp: I'd been doing a lot of walking in the city, and I was walking down Edgewood Avenue to get to school and places had started to disappear. And at that point I began to be more interested in why they were disappearing and at what rate. I was going at such a slow pace, and the building, which was supposed to be permanent, was going at such a rapid pace.

Stuart: It was probably moving to Atlanta and living out in the suburbs where, in the four or five years that we've lived there, half of what's out there now wasn't there when we moved in. Just seeing the rapid clear-cut -- which is what they call it when they just level a forest -- and just the monoculture of strip malls and office complexes going up and seeing what's being lost.

Is New Urbanism [the development of compact, walkable, mixed-use communities] the answer to these problems?

Dusseault: Their ideals might actually be in the right place, but authenticating them might be a different story. The developers of Atlantic Station [a $2 billion multi-use project under construction on the former site of the Atlantic Steel Mill] want to make this a walking city. They want to make it a model for New Urbanism. But they also want to attract all of the suburban people back to town, and that means offering, as we've seen, suburban parking, suburban warehouse shopping ...

Suburban people who move back into town aren't interested in a lifestyle change. They want to just take suburbia and move it here so that they don't have to drive so far.

Bubp: It's trendy to move back into this and become part of the urban environment again. And I think she's right that people don't really want to have a lifestyle change and eventually they're going to change their minds again and move back out to the suburbs.

Dusseault: They're still not going to talk to their neighbors.

You are all fairly pessimistic. Do you feel like you have any optimism about where development is going?

Stuart: I have to have hope. I can't live my life without it. I think you can claim small victories in places. Like in my neighborhood where we bought 70 acres and just stopped the development. I think that Atlanta has just grown so fast and nobody really had a long-range development policy in place. And now they just want the growth at any cost, and I think that's what they've got.

Bubp: I'm pretty skeptical. The problem is that construction has become so much a part of the base economy that basically you'd be creating a recession by restricting it. Honestly, there are a lot of people being employed in this and a lot of them are illegal immigrants and people in the economic underclass, as well as people who are getting rich at this.

Dusseault: The thing that concerns me is the fact that Atlanta's always had an identity crisis, and we identify ourselves with our history, and we already had pretty shallow roots and to see new "old" buildings go up is rather disturbing.

Stuart: While still tearing down the old ones.

Bubp: That's part of the reason why we have no history, is because they keep rebuilding everything.

Dusseault: And the velocity of change is very anxiety producing, and I think all artists are telltales for social anxieties and panic. But this is a postmodern city. Part of me wants to just revel in that. Our public space is the Academy Awards. It's exactly a reflection of our culture.

Bubp: I think the way architecture is treated is a reflection of the disposability of every aspect of culture. Everything that's created is created with planned obsolescence in mind and architecture has become part of that. That's part of the reason why I identify with how the marginalized groups perceive this and how we are arranged in the city through gentrification, through staying on the interstates, through not noticing the disposability. For me it's about not ever having any chance to be in charge at all or have my opinion solicited on any level.

Dusseault: You can provide ammunition to the political process by giving them aesthetic bullets. Artists and writers go out into the world and decode these bizarre places. That's our role -- we're the decoders. We're the ones that are playing with the most ridiculous ideas to see what we can get. If you're sitting in a planning meeting you can't do that.

But Robert is touching on something that's very important, why this work is so loaded is because you're not only artists, you're people living in this city.

Dusseault: Well, the thing that disturbs everybody is change. I think it's just the element of change.

Stuart: And especially bad change.

Bubp: Part of the reason we get so bothered by Atlanta not having an identity is because you can't get a handle on what the city's point of view is, what its character is. And somehow our values are associated with that in some way.

Stuart: There are ways to do it better, to plan better, to preserve things better, to not interfere quite so much to the point that we're obliterating the natural systems that we rely on. I really kind of see it that way, that we are really doing irreparable damage in this march toward progress.

Do you think that artists have a responsibility to be socially and politically engaged with the world around you?

Dusseault: As an artist, I feel kind of compelled to perpetuate an esthetic dialogue and keep that forum alive and also as an academic to try and create platforms for discussions like this and try to engage the public and give them a mental space to be stimulated and to think and to imagine. And I think that art can play that role. And that's a political act in art, giving people imaginary space and time.

If development is the problem, what do you see as the issues that the city has lost touch with?

Bubp: There's a certain attachment to values, character, that comes out of a sense of place, and I think that what happens is, cities historically kind of rebuild themselves over and over again periodically throughout history. ... But the pace that Atlanta does it ... I think people lose a sense of what the city is about.

You're ... suggesting that there's some trickle down -- that the character of individuals in the city is somehow linked to their identity of the city.

Stuart: I can see for myself, my surroundings totally influence me. ... We are natural beings, we are made from nature so when you start separating yourself and cutting yourself off from your essential elements, you're dehumanizing yourself in a lot of ways.

Bubp: I agree that we're natural beings, and I enjoy experiencing that as much as anybody, But I don't feel quite the same need to do it, to be in a natural setting all the time. I think it's because, partly for me, I like to be where people are. As a social being, that's what the city is about for me -- it's about energy and about connecting to people and it's about diversity. And I really appreciate that about the city.

Stuart: But I think the city is arranged in ways that the human element isn't allowed. There aren't all of these little interactions in the city -- I think probably in most places. And I'm the kind of person, I seek out those types of places. I want to have relationships with the people I buy my food from. I think much of the progress of the city and the rest of the nation has been obliterating those relationships. We go to Home Depot instead of the neighborhood hardware store.

Bubp: That is so true. ... If you're driving into the city from Roswell and you've made this long commute and you go to the Subway to get a sandwich, it's the same 19-year-old that you dealt with out in Roswell, and there's no impetus to cultivate any kind of a relationship in that sense. That's one of the very disturbing things about downtown, is it is entirely a 9-5 place.

Dusseault: [In] older cities that have public transport ... chance encounters ... occur on the street. People are very diverse -- whether they run into each other getting into a car, or just meet on the street, or just stop to hear a musician or look at a store window -- that moment when they turn to each other and say something, they have a conversation and they find something in common, and that breeds a civilization.

Stuart: I must say that in my neighborhood, we have a really strong sense of community. We have a history of people who lived there first and their stories. And it's a way of being that sort of gets passed onto the new people that come in, too. And it's in the suburbs -- we all pretty much drive out of there to go to work in other places -- so I don't quite understand why that isn't replicated more.

Do you feel like your interest in the way your neighborhood is changing and in development has created your sense of community? Maybe ultimately development has created your sense of place?

Stuart: Probably. I think it is a way of fighting against the progress to a certain extent to be happy in the place where you are -- to make it relevant to yourself.

Dusseault: We get very uncomfortable when we're not around diversity because it threatens our identity, and one of the things that I like most is when you're walking through Little Five Points -- and some people think it's total cheese -- but these suburban kids drive miles to come down there and sit on the stoop and talk to a homeless guy about playing the bongos. And it looks silly when you walk by and it's easy to thumb your nose up, but they need to do that because they need to know something about the Other in order to know themselves.

Bubp: It's the escape from that which is so represented in suburban life. Certainly I grew up with that living in a completely whitewashed neighborhood and living in a city that's completely whitewashed as well. I spent most of my growing-up life in Charlotte, which is a horribly segregated city. And when I first started to experience diversity in college, I realized it is important, and it does matter to a sense of identity.

That's what I've been talking about when I do my process walking through the city and taking photographs and doing what I'm doing, I convince myself that the homeless people and the people that approach me and talk to me need to connect. But it's probably me, it's probably I need to connect to that, and that helps me feel like I am more part of the city.