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Atlanta, GA | Posted: November 26, 2012
Rebecca Keane
404-894-1720
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How will Atlanta become a top tier green city by 2035? Can anyone build a green building? Do poor neighborhoods care about sustainability? What big businesses are entering the business of sustainability? How is altruism meaningful as a sustainability concept?
Liam's Legacy 2012 Symposium
Liam RattrayHow will Atlanta become a top tier green city by 2035? Can anyone build a green building? Do poor neighborhoods care about sustainability? What big businesses are entering the business of sustainability? How is altruism meaningful as a sustainability concept?
These and other wide-ranging topics wove seamlessly together during the “Liam’s Legacy Symposium: Shaping a Sustainable City” on November 8. Panelists from Atlanta organizations addressed the concrete and the conceptual, policy and practical application, and inspiration for action on scales small and large.
“We’ve got a plan!” was the pacesetting mantra offered by keynote speaker, Denise Quarles, Director of the Office of Sustainability for the City of Atlanta. Quarles heads Mayor Kasim Reed’s efforts to reinvent Atlanta as a top-tier city for sustainability by 2035. Her presentation showed Atlanta’s strengths, progress, and challenges in key green measures. For example, the city doesn’t make the top 50 for bikeability, but plans to double its bike lanes/mileage in the next few years. It is abundantly forested, yet has only 4.6% green space, compared to 19% for New York City. It rates in the top 10 for green buildings and is doing well in green jobs. It ranks second in recycling facilities, but few Atlantans actually recycle.
Moderated by Dean Jacqueline Royster, panelists included long-time local advocates for sustainability. Dennis Creech of Southface Energy Institute, who has spent decades making sustainability easy to understand and apply, discussed the results of Southface’s project to build the greenest building possible using off-the-shelf materials. Susan Pierce-Cunningham of Trees Atlanta highlighted the power of volunteerism to bring about change. Demarcus Peters of the English Avenue Neighborhood Associatin, offered examples such as a project that tracked tire dumping to demonstrate that even neighborhoods where residents are struggling just to "keep the lights on" can be active in sustainability. Peter’s noted that the single biggest factor determining a person’s support for sustainability is a connection to the issue at an early age. Sabir Khan, associate professor in the College of Architecture, and CoA graduate, Michael Sizemore, of The Sizemore Group offered frameworks for thinking about interdisciplinary problem solving, resources, and societal challenges.
Addressing the audience of students, who were primarily from Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, engineering, and architecture, Sizemore said, “You are learning a way of thinking that is important to the future” for shaping cities, town centers, and campuses.
The symposium was organized by the Georgia Tech Honors Program headed by Greg Nobles, professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society. It honors the memory of Liam Rattray (1989-2011), an honors program student, a student in public policy, and a campus leader in sustainability. Rattray had just graduated when he was killed by a drunk driver.
