Ryan Gravel, a designer and planner, graduated from Georgia Tech in 1999 and went to work at an architecture firm that was involved in urban development and master plan projects. He brought his thesis project up at a meeting, and to his surprise, his co-workers were intrigued. “The more people we talked to, the more people wanted to talk about it,” he says. By the summer of 2001, when Cathy Woolard, who was then the chair of the City Council’s Transportation Committee took interest, others got onboard.

Image Ryan Gravel Credit... Rich Addicks for The New York Times

Ryan and his expanding group of partners were able to develop an unprecedented community-oriented grass-roots movement around the project, which got the attention of other elected officials, regional planners and developers. With their support, the project took on a life of its own, expanding beyond transit, trail and economic development to include new parks, affordable housing, an arboretum and more. This further empowered political leadership, who then enabled the creation of a tax increment finance district in 2005 and a new agency assigned to build it.

The timing and politics were right. Atlanta, which had been losing population until the 1990s, was growing faster than any of the suburban neighborhoods. “People saw the change coming, saw new apartments coming, saw it was bringing a better economy to the city, so they were excited about the project,” says Gravel. “The BeltLine became the tool for that change. It would help protect quality of life in the face of growth. In the south or west, where there was nothing new, this was a great new source of investment.

“BeltLine was a compelling vision,” he continues. “It wasn’t just a trail, wasn’t just a transit line. It was a catalyst. Everybody could be part of it. It tapped into the ambition that the city had for itself, that it could be a great city.”

This level of enthusiasm seemed utterly foreign to me, living as I do in the Bay Area, which is having trouble coming to any agreement on how to manage growth and address change (and the success or failure of that growth has a lot to do with investing in not just new, but the right, infrastructure). Nimbyism and dissent are ascendant. Gravel’s description of working together toward a common goal was enviable — so full of awe, so short on arguing.

I described “This Bridge Will Not Be Gray” to him, emphasizing Eggers’s observations about infrastructure needing to be bold and courageous and how that certainly wasn’t how infrastructure was being conceived of today. We agreed that needs to change, something he understands deeply — he just wrote a book on it: “Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities,” in which he makes a passionate case for infrastructure as catalyst, arguing that our collective imaginations and energy can transform the places we live in.