Atlanta Unbound: Enabling Sprawl through Policy and Planning

Looking at Atlanta, Georgia, one might conclude that the city’s notorious sprawl, degraded air quality, and tenuous water supply is a result of a lack of planning—particularly an absence of coordination at the regional level. In Atlanta Unbound, Carlton Wade Basmajian shows that Atlanta’s low-density urban form and its associated problems have been both highly coordinated and regionally planned.

Basmajian’s shrewd analysis shows how regional policies spanned political boundaries and framed ...