Whitenesses in the city: A history of place-making in Little Five Points, Atlanta, USA

ABSTRACT

Atlanta has been known for decades as a center of Black culture and Black-owned development in the American South and in the nation. In the past 15 years, the city has begun shifting back toward a whiter residential base. As in other American cities, this trend is being driven by a move from the suburban fringe back to the center by relatively mobile, middle- and upper-middle class white residents. While literature has examined the mechanics and locational preferences of mobile white residents, the characteristics of white urban identity are often overlooked. This paper examines the case of Little Five Points, a retail and entertainment district sitting between affluent neighborhoods east of downtown Atlanta, Georgia, USA. We identify multiple and competing whitenesses articulated and operationalized around Little Five Points over time and show how these multiple whitenesses retain key shared attributes of racial privilege grounded in property and exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Whitenesses
• place-making
• gentrification
• neighborhood change
• Atlanta

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. While this style of governance may have prevented the worst overt white supremacist violence, Edgett and Abdelaziz (2021) argue it required the repression of more militant forms of Black resistance to racism and divided Black struggle along ideological and class lines.

2. See Blau and Michney (2020) for a recounting of a school bombing in 1960.

3. The withdrawal of white Atlanta from the city is encapsulated in the enrollment in the city’s public school district, which at its peak in the late 1950s (pre-desegregation) had almost 100,000 students, the majority of whom were white. By 1965, the majority of the district’s 109,000 students were Black. In subsequent decades total enrollment dropped to just half of the mid-century numbers: by 2010, the school district had just 49,300 students, of whom 90% were Black (Atlanta Public Schools Active Student Enrollment, 2010).

4. The Little Five Points Alliance is a nonprofit organization founded in 2018 by members of the Little 5 Points Community Improvement District (commercial property owners), the Little 5 Points Business Association (business owners), the Candler Park Neighborhood Organization (residents), and the Inman Park Neighborhood Association (residents) to serve as a coordinating body to “focus on improving and sustaining the unique arts and culture district” (l5pa.com/about-us).

5. See for example Atlanta Intown print and online newspaper at reporternewspapers.net/atlantaintown.

6. This was made clear in the neighborhoods’ rejection of the proposed increased density zoning for the city, which was voted on by surrounding neighborhoods and by the Neighborhood Planning Units in October 2021 (see Stokes, 2021 and Inman Park’s neighborhood newspaper the Inman Park Advocator, November 2021 minutes from the October meeting, which documented 57 “no” votes to a single “yes” vote). The proposed zoning would have reduced barriers for the addition of multi-family homes and accessory dwelling units.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kayla Edgett

Kayla Edgett is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on place, race, class, and resistance to racial capitalism.

Katherine Hankins

Katherine Hankins is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University. An urban geographer, she researches how the city is produced and navigated by individuals, groups, and organizations, primarily at the scale of the neighborhood. She pays particular attention to how various practices and moments of urban place-making become “political,” whether through organized collective action or in the ‘quiet politics’ of everyday decision-making and practice. In empirical projects in and about Atlanta, she has considered various “city makers”—agents of urban spatial change—in the arenas of schooling, community development, and housing.

Joseph Pierce

Joseph Pierce is Senior Lecturer of Human Geography at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Trained as an urban geographer, his research interests revolve around place-making, urban politics, housing/development, sustainability, and the relationships between automation and urban landscapes.