

Mayor William Hartsfield famously proclaimed Atlanta the “City Too Busy to Hate” in 1955, a reference to the corporate backbone of the city as too busy making deals and the ongoing backroom negotiations brokered during the Civil Rights Era between white and black elites.  As was clear then and is evident now, the city was not too busy to inscribe its racialized and classed politics into the social and spatial orderings of the city.  In this presentation, I examine both the mobilities of the city, or the relocation and displacement—often forced—of residents around the city, produced by the urban regimes of the day, and the mobilizations, or activisms, associated with resisting or transforming such forces.  I highlight the spaces that are produced by these dialectical processes and suggest openings for further scholarship on Atlanta’s politics and spaces of hope.


Atlanta Studies Symposium: Mobilities & Mobilizations in the City That’s Too Busy: Katherine Hankins

Developing a Participatory GIS methodology for mapping non-native invasive species in urban forests
Timothy Hawthorne

Creating Historical Geodatabases: Modeling Atlanta
Emily Clark, Emory University

“Re-Mapping Segregated Atlanta: Building Digital Research Tools to Examine the City’s History”
Randy Gue, Emory University
Alice Hickcox, Emory University
Michael C. Page, Emory University



Digital Tools for Mapping the Built and Natural Environment

Black Neighborhood Attachments, Social Capital, and Collective Action: A Research Project
Todd Shaw, University of South Carolina
Kirk Foster, University of South Carolina
Barbara Combs, University of Mississippi
Michael Hodge, Morehouse College
Desiree Pedescleaux, Spelman College

The West End and the Old Fourth Ward: Further Understanding the Insights of Place Attachment
Barbara Combs, University of Mississippi

The Dynamics of Segregation and African American Neighborhoods
David Wong, George Mason University
Kasim Ortiz, University of South Carolina

Race, Atlanta Public Housing, and the Roots of Social Capital
Todd Shaw, University of South Carolina
James McCoy, University of South Carolina

EmoryDiSC