The Downtown Peachtree district sits at the heart of Downtown Atlanta. The large-scale division and dispossession of land alongside typologies of skyscrapers with internal atriums, encapsulate the pervasive forms of property. The legacy of neoliberalism has left future generations with areas such as Downtown Peachtree, which are emblematic of this regime of property, and manifest the relationship between architecture and politics, both involving architecture’s role in the economy, as well as its role as a cultural object. In its current expression, interior urbanism leaves the city outside. Artificial ecologies are imagined, underserved people are marginalized, and everyday living experiences are suppressed. Individual comfort predominates over collective care. We envision a future for the interior urbanism of atrium spaces that supplants the oppressive Cartesian regime of property. We reject the current, exclusive, and proprietary building owner and embrace long-term tenure of the land by welcoming the systemically overlooked and dispossessed. The unhoused, the housing-insecure, the sex worker, and the student come together in spaces of collective care to re-imagine spaces of transgression, ecology and the senses. Critical of the current trope of sustainability, we embrace a multi-temporal understanding of spatial relations in order to develop an enclave of resistance beyond privatized enclosure working towards mutual aid. Our aim is to render visible the invisible social ecosystems, peoples and patterns of a place. We position ourselves as the ‘anti-developer’ developers!
