(press.) In anticipation of the release of Where We Want to Live – Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities, Atlanta Magazine published two pieces in their March issue. The first is Steve Fennessy’s “The BeltLine Guy: A Q&A with Ryan Gravel” – blurb below. The second is an excerpt from the book – the entirety of Chapter 4, “There’s Nothing Wrong With Sprawl.”

Excerpt: “Today the BeltLine has become so imprinted on our civic DNA that it’s easy to forget how far it’s come, and how fast. Those walkers and joggers and strollers and cyclists clogging the Eastside Trail on the weekends? Those insanely priced apartments overlooking it? What’s now a destination was, until very recently, trash and kudzu. And it’s not hyperbole to say it would be still if Ryan Gravel hadn’t decided in 1999 to write his Georgia Tech master’s thesis on how four different rail lines encircling the city could be strung together. The resulting 22-mile tree-lined loop, he argued, could connect neighborhoods, get residents out of their cars, and link up with MARTA stations. “It was a sensible and interesting, almost obvious, proposal,” Gravel writes in his book Where We Want to Live, which comes out this month. Of course, Atlanta’s history is full of sensible proposals that went nowhere. Gravel’s book recounts how the BeltLine went from the theoretical to the real—and how far it still has to go.” >> More.