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Back before the
Summer Olympics of 1996, mainstream Atlanta was anxious to present
itself as the type of cosmopolitan city that was just the place
to host such an international gathering. Public sculptures baring
themes of multiculturalism were erected and The Flags Of All Nations
were suddenly strung across every barren urban space. Atlanta's
official representatives, being primarily informed by a corporate
power structure, quickly confused multiculturalism with multinationalism.
CNN and Coca-Cola, for example, were held out as examples of Atlanta's
contact with, rather than impact on, the various cultures of the
world. Totally ignored in the clumsy race to secure and, then,
put on the Olympics were the ongoing, radical cultural changes
in the Atlanta suburbs.
While the center of downtown was razed to make way for a treeless,
concrete, internationally-themed park; mundane strip malls and
abandoned chain-stores along Buford Highway were continuing to
be bought and renovated by Mexican, Chinese, and Vietnamese immigrants,
to name only a few. This was a time when virtually every downtown
apartment building was being renovated into a high priced condo
and nearly every old warehouse was being renovated into Artist
Lofts, a trend still continuing 7 years later. The aim was clearly
stated by private/public groups such as Central Atlanta Progress:
to attract affluent ex-urbanites back to an inner city whose streets
lacked the kind of street life that, in their eyes, spoke of cosmopolitan
urbanity. Thus, the center of downtown was awkwardly renamed the
Fairlie-Poplar District (later referred to by some as the Fairly
Unpopular District), and an urban planner was hastily brought
in to re-invent the Chick-fil-A-businessman-lunch area as European
café sidewalk culture.
That time period now seems to distill mainstream Atlanta's reception
of it's new ethnic suburban communities. Mention of Atlanta's
growing heterogeneous foreign communities along the Buford Highway
corridor was conspicuously absent from Olympic newspaper and TV
coverage, tourist literature and public speeches. Why was Atlanta's
most visible foreign community left out of the very public discourse
aimed at promoting it's internationality? One obvious answer would
be the presence of problematic immigration issues: the idea being
that attention focused on the area may mean attention focused
on immigration issues which would distract from the relentlessly
positive, glossy, and generalized promotion of Atlanta. While
this may be the case to a degree, more subtle contradictions could
have developed. In a way, Buford can be seen to represent a deep
identity crisis for Atlanta's official representatives and large
businesses. Sure, Buford exemplifies a largely harmonious ethnic
diversity and the economic and cultural revitalization of a sleepy
area, not to mention the kind of boot-strap entrepreneurship so
often advocated by conservative policy-makers.
The problem then becomes one of representation; that is to say,
the landscape of Buford is not marketably picturesque. Driving
around from strip mall to strip mall (the "Retail Plazas"
of official literature), Dekalb County's hesitant monikoring and
half-hearted marketing of "The International Village Corridor"
seems embarrassingly dated and patronizing at best. The ghost
of "Chambodia" still lingers near the corners of popular
and official imagination. The reason is that it is built as a
make-do appropriation of neglected suburbia: This is may not be
the glimpse of the future that city organizers and asvault contractors
want to present to a public to whom it preaches unmitigated paving
and sprawl.
So,
Buford is the locus of an interesting paradox of how Atlanta perceives
itself. As construction and road-building continues to expand
and expand further outside the city's Perimeter with no cohesive
long-term strategy, downtown developers continue to develop lofts
and condos in an effort to attract those same demographics to
create a seemingly urbane and cultured inner-city. Meanwhile,
areas like Buford Highway, with all their progress and problems;
places where new and uniquely Atlantan hybrid cultures are emerging
are virtually ignored as emblematic of the real New South.
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