“The suit-and-tie crowd has a little trouble here,” says David Bishop, owner of Atlanta’s 97 Estoria bar, “but everyone else has a blast.” The here Bishop is referring to is Cabbagetown, an historic quarter with factory-worker housing, abandoned warehouses, a dwindling drug trade—and some of the hottest spots in Atlanta. Cabbagetown is Atlanta’s next big thing.
Areas like Cabbagetown—artsy, foodie, edgy, and brand spanking new—are blooming in cities around the country. After years of decline in the post-WWII era of big suburbs, bigger houses, and even bigger cars, America’s neglected urban areas are finally experiencing a renaissance-according to the U.S. Census, almost every major city has grown in the past 10 years. Welcome to the 21st century, the Era of Urban Emergence.
“Most of the established areas are all bought-out and very expensive. So folks are driven to seek out ‘secondary’ neighborhoods,” says Doug Farr, author of Sustainable Urbanism (Wiley, 2008), a primer for environmentally friendly design in these newly booming cities.
