Why Atlanta Is The Opposite of How A City Should Work

Atlanta, Georgia has no navigable river, no harbor, and no lake. The Chattahoochee River running near its western edge is shallow, rocky, and commercially useless. A surveyor drove a wooden stake into a ridge in the Georgia foothills in 1837 — and that stake became the fourteenth-largest metropolitan area in the United States. This video breaks down why Atlanta makes no sense as an American city and why it keeps growing anyway. From the zero mile post to the BeltLine, this is the story of the city that had no geographic reason to exist — and turned that into its only competitive advantage.