A Q&A WITH BELTLINE VISIONARY RYAN GRAVEL

By Wendy Binns

The BeltLine, the 22-mile loop connecting our city, was the graduate thesis of Ryan Gravel in 1999 while a graduate student at Georgia Tech. Now he says that he is “living the dream.” His idea of the BeltLine is coming to life. As we celebrate Earth Day this month, I sat down with Ryan at his office in Ponce City Market to talk about his recent projects, the future and striking that balance between nature and urban life.

Congratulations on your book, “Where We Want to Live,” which came out last month. For those not living in Atlanta or too young to remember as the BeltLine was becoming a reality, this is a good history. What are your goals with publishing this book?

I wanted to do two things. One is I wanted to share the story of the BeltLine for people, especially young people. I believe very strongly that the only reason we’re building the BeltLine is because the people of Atlanta fell in love with it. And they made it happen. They empowered and even obligated the city leadership to put the nuts and bolts together to make the project come to life. Otherwise, it’s just too hard. It created a political context in support of a very expensive and enormous political undertaking. And, that’s why we’re doing it. Because people love it and they wanted it. Our movement was in 2001-2004. That’s when we built that base of the support and obviously the support has grown since then, too. That was the beginning where people really felt a sense of ownership and authorship of the project. That idea itself expanded beyond what we ever could have imagined. And so that sense of ownership was really clear at the time, but today – if you’re 25 now, you weren’t even a teenager at the time, so you weren’t paying attention. It’s important going ahead that people still feel that sense of ownership so that we make sure we get the best version of the BeltLine, the best outcome. We are in the very early stages of implementation.

We have a long way to go. And, how it gets built really matters. People need to remain vigilant and make sure that it happens in the best possible way. And that everybody is included in that. That’s one piece, is to remind people of that and tell that story. The other that I really wanted to say is that I have a unique view of the project. I get to travel a lot and share our story abroad, all over the country and increasingly internationally. And the world is watching us. This is part of a much larger story. These projects like the BeltLine are in every city I go to. But the BeltLine is definitely a leader. It’s big geographically. It’s broad programmatically. We’ve made a lot of progress. It’s doing what we said it’s going to do. And so it’s important that we locally think of it in those kinds of terms that the world is watching. If we saw the importance of it in terms of a larger national story, that maybe we’d find some other revenue sources to build it faster.

This month you are the keynote speaker at EarthShare of Georgia’s Earth Day Leadership Breakfast on Thursday, April 14, with an audience of environmental, business and other community leaders. Attendees will be part of a discussion focused on the event’s theme of land conservation, including green space, urban agriculture and sustainable building. How do you think these conversations could inspire attendees to collaborate and create results for a more sustainable environment for Georgia? If anything, the BeltLine story proves that we can accomplish more together than we can individually. And, part of the appeal of the BeltLine is that it has meaning and value for lots of different people who have lots of different perspectives and different interests. You can like it for the trail, you can like it for the transit, you can like it for the parks, you can like it for the economic development, community revitalization, health, art. There are all these different layers of reasons you can love it. And the reason why it is so broad in that way is because there were a lot of people at the table and that the vision was basically built around a table. I call it a table of ideas. And people get to share what they’re doing and see their interests align in strategic ways that actually supports each other

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