Excerpt: “In 1999, Ryan Gravel – then an urban planning student at Georgia Tech – proposed the Beltline in his Masters’ thesis. Though Atlanta is now a capital of American car culture, it was founded in the 1840’s at a rail intersection. Gravel imagined a necklace of public paths, recreational space and light rail, built mostly on disused railbed. It would traverse some of Atlanta’s most neglected neighbourhoods, where the stigma of living on the wrong side of the tracks – even dormant ones – has persisted. “The idea was to take a barrier and turn it into a gathering place,” says Gravel, now an urban designer at architecture firm Perkins+Will.” >> More.