Cities We Live In: From Atlanta to American Urbanism

What began as a conversation about the city of Atlanta quickly evolved into a discussion on American urbanism and city planning. In this episode of ​our mini-series ​Cities We Live In​, our guest is Paul Knight, an urban and architectural designer at Historical Concepts and the Executive Director at the nonprofit Douglas C. Allen Institute for the Study of Cities. Paul kicks off the discussion by posing the question first asked by professor Doug Allen to his seminar students at Georgia Tech: "How did we arrive here, at the corner of 5th Street and West Peachtree in Atlanta?" The answer, as our discussion makes clear, covers vast lineages of design in the western hemisphere: from the concept of the polis​ in ancient Greece, the urban environments built by the Roman Empire, and all the way to the American cities that sought to capture those same ideals. Human civilization has grappled with the challenges of designing better cities, ​and ultimately it comes down to how those city plans are laid out in the first place.

Cities We Live In is a study of what makes our favorite cities stand out, and in doing so conveying a need for a return to traditional design principles which make them so beloved. Not simply a history of urban form, Cities We Live In teaches us why good places matter.​