Join the Department of City Planning’s Office of Design for a special December Bookclub discussion about our latest selection, Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis, by Christopher C. Sellers. Sellers will join us for our discussion virtually.

---

About the book

A sweeping history of Atlanta’s environmental policies and transformations through the prism of race

Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city’s variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of “the environment.” Arising out of Atlanta’s Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism’s undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South.