Sam Rosen, in a recent essay in The Atlantic, tackles Metro Atlanta’s “controversial” cityhood movement. In the piece, Rosen gives a compelling overview of some of the major themes and histories that inform cityhood, touching on white flight, tax revolts, and racial politics, as well as governance, corruption, and self-determination. It’s a solid foray into a complex, ongoing phenomenon and its key players.

Where Rosen misses, it seems largely due to a lack of everyday familiarity with the Atlanta area (he refers to the failed City of LaVista Hills as a “neighborhood” when LaVista Hills doesn’t exist, and never has), a focus on the stories of people, and a preoccupation with intent, rather than a focused, analytical incision into the corpus of cityhood. These incompletions and artifacts of journalistic writing do not necessarily constitute faults in Rosen’s well-researched and timely piece. However, these issues do open up a productive space for conversation and complication of the ways in which we think about, write about, and do politics around cityhood. For instance: what do we make of the reticence to engage substantially with legacies of racism in debates around cityhood? What does it mean for a black community to take up a tool historically developed and employed to the detriment of black and underresourced communities? Below, I tease out these and related themes in the context of the City of Stonecrest, and argue for a new politics of cityhood particularly attuned to history and geography in Atlanta.