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The Civic Trust

Public Space, The Olympics, and the Inner City

CODA has been charged with the responsibility of providing both new and improved existing public space infrastructure for the City of Atlanta adequate to serve the 1996 Olympic Games and its projected crush of visitors. Motivated by the inadequacy of the City's current capacity to handle this level of demand and perhaps embarrassed by it as well, this urgent charge is somewhat ironic for a city, like many other American cities, that has watched the urban public realm deteriorate over the last thirty years without any previous call to action or expression of concern. Even the creation of CODA as a vehicle for urgent urban production is an anomaly for a City with a deteriorating tax base, population, and infrastructure. Responding to this charge is even more challenging when the very notion of public space in American cities is undergoing profound transformations, which are both physical and cultural.

We have come to accept the shopping mall, the office park, and the hotel atrium as 'simulations' of a public realm where we act out a pseudo collective life in urban stage sets that by definition can never be civic. These private simulations have taken the place of 'real' public space because they are generally accessible, safe and well cared for, commodities the public sector can no longer guarantee in its 'real' public spaces, and because the public can no longer find the capital resources to produce real public space. The unique challenge posed by the Olympics is in having created a one time opportunity to provide resources for production of real public space, but not necessarily to provide for its ongoing viability, maintenance, and security.

So as real public space deteriorates without replenishment and private simulations attempt to fill this void, the physical environment reinforces the parallel socio/political deterioration of the notion of urban citizenship. A true public space is where one can feel and act like a citizen or, perhaps if it really does its job, be compelled to feel and act like a citizen. Atlanta is like other American cities in a post modern world, in danger of being a city without citizens - characterized by fragmentation and diversity without a unifying 'public' to identify with. To counteract this, we must learn to include diversity within an expanded definition of citizenship and reinvent a public realm based on the potential synergy of this inclusive diversity instead of abandoning the public realm out of fear of associating with people not like us. In Atlanta, we have haphazardly created a city with a robust cultural and demographic variety which exists physically as a sprawling sunbelt collection of disassociated enclaves at the same time that the political and physical public environment has deteriorated to the point of no longer being able to encourage social interaction or bring the pieces together in a collective whole.

The Civic Trust

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