Atlanta Urbanist Book Group
A Better Atlanta, One Book at a Time
Our mission at the Atlanta Urbanist Book Group is to introduce new ideas to Urban Atlanta by reading recent books about cities, identifying the ideas we think would work in Atlanta, and offering civic leaders a guide to these ideas.
We define “urbanism” broadly. We are reading books about transportation, land use, housing, public safety, government reform, neighborhoods, social infrastructure, education, economic development, regionalism, diversity, politics, arts and culture, volunteerism, and more.
Our aim isn’t to review books but to show how their ideas apply to Atlanta today and suggest ways of moving from good ideas to good actions.
Interested? Like to join us for a discussion? Click here to sign up for our email notices about books and meeting dates.
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Next Book: Keeping the Chattahoochee: Reviving and Defending a Great Southern River
Mar 5, 2025
We will discuss the memoir of an environmentalist that also tells us much about what makes advocacy and reform effective. It’s how a small group, working in the right ways, forced a city to take on a problem its leaders absolutely did not want to deal with, the polluting of a river. The city and river? Atlanta and the Chattahoochee.
Sally Bethea was the founding director of the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.
We’ll look for lessons urbanists should take from Bethea’s decades-long efforts to stop a city’s fouling of a river and discuss how these lessons could be used in other reform efforts.