Given our line of business, we've both traveled a lot over the years to places both exotic and decidedly less so. And, like many, we share a habit when visiting a new city of always making it a point to get out and walk: Steve because he's naturally curious, and Geoff because his Dad convinced him years ago that doing so is a surefire cure for jetlag. We're not the only ones who swear by it; there's something about walking a city that moving at faster speeds just doesn't allow for. You get more detail – more of the grit, the smells (good and bad), and definitely more of the beauty.

We have each been blessed to have seminal experiences and memories based on city travels. For Geoff, Tokyo stands out. When he used to travel there regularly, he would typically get out of his sleepless bed before daylight and, just as dawn was breaking, walk down to the Tsukiji Fish Market. Although it has now been shut down and moved to Toyosu, Tsukiji was for decades one of the world's great wonders: a sprawling warren of stalls chock full of unimaginable sea creatures in crates and barrels that seemed to stretch forever. He would quite literally get lost wandering for hours, taking in the mayhem and occasional tuna auction as a cultural and circadian reset.

Steve vividly remembers a 2005 guided tour of Rocinha, a Rio de Janeiro favela that was, at the time, considered one of the most dangerous places in the world. Although much of what he saw was shocking given his background, the tour guide – a local – invited Steve into his home at the end and gave him hope for the future. While outside lay incredible strife and squalor, inside the guide's children were learning on the Internet, something that wouldn't have been possible even a few years earlier.

Ryan Gravel's city epiphany came during study abroad in Paris. That epiphany is now changing the face of his hometown of Atlanta. Known to some as “The BeltLine Guy,” Ryan has been on a mission for over two decades to bring a new way of living in and experiencing the city – not to mention the value of human connection – to all Atlantans. What started as a master's thesis at Georgia Tech has turned into one of the largest urban economic development projects in America today, all inspired by a series of wanderings that Ryan experienced in Paris. Along the way, he has had successes both large and small, become pretty famous in Atlanta and beyond, and written a book called Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities. But he has also faced innumerable twists, turns, and failures. Working at the intersection of civic leadership, local and state government, real estate development, the broader private sector, and community activism, Ryan has become the epitome of an Adapt provocateur: always with the end goal in mind and always ready to shift his next step forward to accomplish it.¹

Many outside the United States – or even outside the state of Georgia for that matter – may not know much about the project that Ryan provoked. Today, the Atlanta BeltLine is envisioned as “the catalyst for making Atlanta a global beacon for equitable, inclusive, and sustainable city life.” The goals that the organization lays out are both impressive and daunting: 33 miles of multi-use urban trails; 22 miles of pedestrian-friendly rail transit; $10 billion in economic development; 5,600 units of affordable workforce housing; 1,300 acres of new greenspace; 1,100 acres of environmental cleanup; 46 miles of improved streetscapes; the largest outdoor public art exhibition in the southern United States; and 30,000 permanent jobs. And it all originated in the brain of a college kid who was so caught up in wandering the streets of Paris that he missed his train.²

Gravel was born at an Air Force base in Louisiana, where all of his extended family is from. He moved with his immediate family to the suburbs of Atlanta as a toddler because his parents were looking for greater economic opportunity. A twin, Ryan calls himself the “shy and creative one,” juxtaposed to a brother whom he describes as athletic, outgoing, and whom all the girls liked. He reports having spent much of his youth “in [his] head imagining things … always drawing and making stuff.” A self-proclaimed railway nut, he grew up in Chamblee, Georgia, listening to the nearby rail cars go by at night. With a construction engineer as a father and a mother who worked on quilts and crafts, Ryan seems genetically predisposed to fields that blended art and science.

Gravel has also always been fascinated by people. He thinks there is something inherently interesting in the choices people make about their lives and the manifest differences that appear when you look across a community. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that he gravitated toward architecture as his field of study: it managed to check the “art + science” box while giving Ryan the opportunity to design spaces for people to enjoy, move around in, and live their lives in. He describes architecture as three-dimensional problem solving and architectural education as the defense of your design to a jury of peers.

In his senior year at Georgia Tech, Ryan did a year abroad in Paris and “it fundamentally changed the way [he] saw the world.” He was there to study architecture, but Ryan quickly learned that “the buildings are indistinguishable from the experience of the city.” He recognized that in some ways, architecture was the design of the city. Ryan took to walking everywhere, gazing up and around, perhaps subconsciously working to satiate his natural desire to observe others and his surroundings. Ryan also quickly discovered three things that have long drawn visitors from other parts of the world to Europe: it's relatively small, it's jammed with history and incredibly interesting cities other than Paris, and it's all interconnected with an excellent railway infrastructure.

Ryan had become a student of cities.

As he took all of this in, he observed another phenomenon: he felt better. Within the first month of living there, he lost 15 pounds. He was walking everywhere, eating fresh food, and utterly thriving in the stimulating environment of a bustling city. He was surrounded by incredible architecture and art and – most importantly – a whole society. As he describes it:

Ryan came to understand that “infrastructure was the construction not only of the city, but of our lives.” It's all about the infrastructure. He remembers that within a block of his apartment in Paris, he could walk down the street and make a choice about whether to hop on the metro to go across town or catch a train to Lyon or Berlin. He didn't have to get into a car to go anywhere and, partly as a result, he didn't have to overly plan his life. He could just live it. One of his most formative experiences in Paris also says a lot about Ryan himself and what may lie at the heart of his particular style of provocation.

It happened as he set off on a long weekend. Although he had spent lots of time wandering and observing Paris, his schoolwork had limited his travel in Europe. As his time wound down before having to head back to the States, he planned a lightning-quick jaunt to Pisa and Florence: two Italian cities he had wanted to see for their contributions to culture and architecture. To say that Ryan strikes us as someone who doesn't worry too much about planning things is an understatement, for sure. But this one he had planned: his departure from the Gare de Lyon with two nights at hostels and an overnight train back to Paris would get him back to school in time. Sadly – or perhaps fortuitously – an oversight related to the European norm of conveying times using a 24-hour clock rather than the 12-hour clock that he had grown up with meant that he missed the train for the first leg of his trip by two hours. Late at night, he realized that there was no way that he would be able to fit all he had planned in if he left the next day. But after a few moments of despondency, he ran to another train station across the Seine, to catch a train to Toulouse.

Toulouse is nowhere near Italy, but at least it was south of Paris, which tells us something about Ryan the provocateur. Although he had an objective in mind, he did not define that objective in the way that many might. He didn't define success as reaching Pisa and Florence; he defined it as having an experience that put him in a different place, in the flow with others. While he did eventually make it to Italy that weekend, he had other experiences wandering Toulouse, Nice, and Marseilles. And he's pretty sanguine about the whole thing: “Was I bummed that I had less than a day to see the great masterworks? Sure. But I also experienced things I would never have seen if my trip had gone according to plan.”

When we pointed out to him the irony of someone who has built his reputation as an urban planner discounting the value of planning, his response gives us some insight into the brain of Ryan Gravel: “I trust myself to make decisions. You know, like, intuitively, I know kind of where I'm going and I'm super-honest with myself and I just trust myself to make decisions, and that has worked for me so far.” He pays attention to signals and he lets those signals define a North Star to strive for, recognizing that he doesn't need to know the exact progression of every step that will take him there. The signals he received in Paris and other parts of Europe planted the seeds that would become the Atlanta BeltLine.

When Gravel returned to Atlanta in 1999, it didn't take too long for his epiphany. He was driving to work on the highway one day when it hit him: he wasn't interacting with anyone the way he did in Paris. He got into his car to go to work and “even though [he] was passing 100,000 people, [he] didn't see anyone. It was mind-numbing. It took about the same amount of time to get to work as it took … to get to school in Paris, but [he] didn't move a muscle. [He] realized that the infrastructure [in Atlanta] was a barrier to the kind of life [he] wanted.” He saw a fundamental difference between the life he experienced growing up and the life he had enjoyed in Paris. In his words:

Ryan didn't know it at that moment, but he was setting the wheels in motion to transform the city of Atlanta.

Ryan worked in architecture for a year after receiving his undergraduate degree but came to realize that the structures he was designing – office complexes built for driving commuters – were part of the problem. So he decided to return to Georgia Tech for a master's in city planning, which later expanded to include a dual degree with architecture. Still dissatisfied with his way of life at the time, and in need of creating a thesis project that would span both planning and design, Ryan decided to do something about it. “I just decided to design the kind of place I'd like to live,” Ryan recounts. “I didn't think we were actually going to do it.”

One could argue that there are few cities in the world where geography, history, and social issues collide in a way to create the unique context that Atlanta did for Ryan's master's thesis. Ryan's natural interest in railroads (from lying in bed growing up in Chamblee, listening to the passing trains) came into play as it was the technology on which the city of Atlanta had relied for movement of both goods and people in the pre-automobile era.

But to really understand Atlanta, you have to place yourself in the time the city experienced much of its growth: at the same time the automobile was becoming standard in American life, starting in the 1960s and lasting through the next several decades. Most of Atlanta was really designed for cars, not people. “The infrastructure in Atlanta did not include sidewalks for years and years and years. You could develop a whole community, a thousand homes, and not build a single sidewalk,” says Ed McBrayer of the PATH Foundation.³ Atlanta was a collection of disconnected neighborhoods, not laid out in a grid pattern. As a consequence, as a city resident you rarely had an opportunity to interact with your neighbors. And at the time of Ryan's studies, much of downtown Atlanta – where Georgia Tech is located – was still scarred by the loss of industrial activity that had not yet been replaced.

Ryan envisioned a better Atlanta, one where people could walk and ride bikes to go to work, or to the park, or grocery shopping. It was a place to see other people, and a place where people could meet their neighbors. This last concept has always been important to Ryan. He saw that the physical infrastructure in Atlanta, including railroads, divided neighborhoods along lines of race and class and he knew that rethinking those barriers could create an organic way to reconnect with one another.

The basic concept of the BeltLine is to connect 45 different neighborhoods in a loop around the city, leveraging four different railway freight corridors, known as “belt lines,” that were built over a century ago and that roughly line up to create a 22-mile loop. Once realized, it would connect these neighborhoods with a combination of trails, transit, parks, art, affordable housing, an arboretum, and a slew of shops and restaurants to enjoy along the way. The concept has been to build this over space that had largely been forgotten in the sprawl that Atlanta had become, to make use of deserted industrial land that deepened divisions between different parts of Atlanta and the citizens themselves. Perhaps most importantly to Ryan's vision, the BeltLine means that people from areas of Atlanta who would never previously have run into each other are now thrust into the same space to interact.

Ryan's vision wasn't entirely new. There were early plans in the 1960s for some interior commuter lines on portions of the loop, including a train running by the former Sears fortress-looking building. But Ryan's vision included the entire loop and aligned with the kind of future that he – and a lot of other people – were looking for. His thesis described a city with “side-by-side streetcar tracks, 45 stops, dense residential construction, green space and walking trails,” based on the idea that “the expansion of mass transit infrastructure could lead to both the revival of the inner city and protection of our natural ecology.”⁴

In 2001, Ryan sent his plan and other relevant materials to various people who he thought would be key stakeholders, including the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), the governor, and the mayor. Momentum grew and they were invited to host a public meeting to describe the vision. Subsequently, over the next several years and through different roles, including working for the city, private firms, and now his own consulting practice, Ryan kept engaging with officials and the community. The BeltLine officially opened in 2008, but it's still very much a work in process.

The BeltLine is ambitious. Arguably the largest urban economic development project in the United States at the moment, between 2005 and 2019 the BeltLine attracted approximately $500 million in direct investment and over $5 billion in private investment. At its core, the BeltLine is today essentially a long pedestrian throughway that leverages the old railway tracks, not dissimilar to one of Gravel's inspirations: the smaller-scale Promenade Plantée in Paris. Around that thoroughfare, neighborhoods are coming back to life and private real estate investment is pouring in. Many of the adjacent neighborhoods have increased total jobs (between 2002 and 2017) at rates between 45% and almost 1,000%, according to the BeltLine Data Explorer.

Still, only about half of the envisioned trail system is built out, and Ryan wishes it was happening more quickly. He also wishes that one foundational aspect of the BeltLine vision – the creation of more affordable housing – was more of a shared, consistent priority among all players. One of the concerns from the community has always been that increasing property values would price out original residents of neighborhoods adjacent to the BeltLine. Indeed, the project has had considerable impact on home prices, with several BeltLine neighborhoods experiencing price per-square-foot increases between 2013 and 2018 of more than 100%.⁵

Ryan's frustrations – with the speed of progress, with shifting priorities, with the ever-changing personnel involved – are part of the reason he has had an episodic relationship with the project over the years. In 2016, he went so far as to resign from the board of the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership, the project's fundraising arm. But he has always stayed involved – whether deep in the heart of the planning and execution or influencing from the periphery. Although it may sound like a ridiculous metaphor, it was hard for us not to think of Ryan as a bit of a sheepdog for the project, helping to stave off impending chaos among hundreds of involved parties while ensuring the whole flock keeps on moving forward. According to people who know about these things, sheepdogs work based on two very simple rules: “The first rule: The sheepdog learns how to make the sheep come together in a flock. The second rule: Whenever the sheep are in a tightly knit group, the dog pushes them forwards.”⁶ And those are exactly the types of things Ryan has been doing for close to 22 years at this point.

One of the unique things about the BeltLine is the degree to which, in the early stages, it garnered widespread support from anyone who heard about the idea. What was particularly unique was that you had factions – who would normally be at odds with each other – each vocally supporting the idea. Community activists agreed with developers, politicians with nonprofits: the idea had broad-based support. In short, Ryan had envisioned something that had considerable and broad-based desirability that, so long as it built and sustained momentum, was destined to cross the “if”-to-“when” chasm. There was nobody who could argue it wasn't a great idea.

That hardly means it was easy.

First, for Ryan to even come up with the idea, he had to eschew a lot of what he had learned in urban planning. To be clear, Ryan isn't trying to disparage his schooling; he simply conceives of his job to be more about design and less about planning. He says:

Ryan's natural inclination was to envision the goal. He envisioned the future – he said he wanted to design the future, not plan it based on existing processes and procedures. He wanted to decouple the future, untethering it from existing reality. He started with human needs and figured out how to get there.

But this isn't one of those grand stories where the brilliant visionary knows from day one exactly what they want to achieve. It happened more organically. At his first job after graduate school, Ryan was working on a project in one of the neighborhoods along the route of his BeltLine thesis and he started talking to his co-workers about it. “The more we talked, the more they were intrigued and I kept answering questions about it,” Ryan remembers. “I wouldn't have really gone out and shared the idea on my own, but they really loved it … the more people we talked to, the more people wanted to hear it. So I was kind of compelled to go along for the ride.”

Ryan soon met Cathy Woolard, who would become a city council representative for District Six. Woolard was particularly interested in the transit component of the concept. When she was elected city council president, she pushed for town hall meetings on the idea in her district. Woolard became an important champion of the idea and her staff supported Ryan and a few other volunteers.

It took several years of many meetings a week to create the groundswell of support that the idea garnered. Any objections that were raised weren't about the vision of the project; they were about who the project was for, and whether it would be built. And to launch a project of this magnitude, you really need broad-based support. Ryan's role was to answer questions about what it might mean for communities, sometimes delving deep into the minutiae. People wanted to figure out where their house was relative to the plans, seeking to envision what their lives would be like once the project got underway.

One of the beautiful things about the design was that it mostly leveraged abandoned land around the rail lines, at that time a breeding ground for crime. It didn't rip through neighborhoods or disrupt existing infrastructure. Ryan told us, “It wasn't scary to anyone because it was at the industrial edge of the neighborhood.” Ryan used his nights, weekends, and vacation time to volunteer to continue to meet interested parties, designing apartments by day and out in the community by night engaging with church groups, business groups, neighborhood groups, city council – anyone who wanted to hear about it.

Eventually, enough people did hear about it. And advocates for different issues all saw something in the project: “Advocates for housing, bicycling, pedestrians, transit, tree canopy protection, parks, water, all saw their issue in this. And it wasn't just the white hipster set most associated with gentrification – it was everyone.” One seminal moment came in 2003, at a meeting of the Atlanta Regional Commission – the group responsible for allocating regional share of transportation funding. The team called on their broad coalition to attend the meeting:

Initially, Ryan was nervous about making a public comment on the record. But his nerves were at least partially settled when he heard two women whom he didn't know talking about the project before the meeting started:

This was the signal; Gravel knew they were moving through the “if”-to-“when” phase change. The broad basis of support combined with willingness of others to take personal, individual ownership of the project compelled him to shift his stance and the way he was provoking the future.

Whether they knew it or not, Ryan, Woolard, and the broader team quickly began leaning on almost every mode of “when” provocation to keep up momentum. Sometimes they were in drive mode, achieving small wins as they transformed abandoned land into park and playground space. At other times, they could do nothing more than activate a broad coalition to achieve more complex subgoals – the passage of a piece of legislation or approval of a budget. In an era before social media, they got people doing things like writing letters to editors, calling council representatives, attending meetings with talking points, and so on. Although the long arc of Ryan's story paints him as the very definition of an Adapt provocateur, that doesn't mean that has been his only mode of action. He had to use them all.

The BeltLine project naturally went through a number of growing pains as it got off the ground, and those growing pains have continued to this day. Ryan has been in and out over time as leadership has evolved. But the idea has enough momentum that it continues to flourish. The Atlanta BeltLine organization still has as lofty a set of goals as Ryan ever had. It may not be everything that Ryan had originally envisioned, brought to life in exactly the way he would have liked, but it's certainly a reasonable facsimile.

And whether as sheepdog, conscience, visionary, or just another volunteer, Ryan has been involved at every step of the way. It occurred to us that he seems to have The Godfather’s Michael Corleone syndrome: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Although he has been mostly working on his own for the last decade or so, he's never been fully “out.” Humorously, on one of the days we interviewed him, he claimed to not be involved with the project, and then said that he was “just on the phone with leadership the other day.”

Ryan's ability as an Adapt provocateur has been that, while he claims to have some strong ideas about the BeltLine as it relates to the things that make a difference between its working and not working, he recognizes that the nature of city development requires others to build on his original vision. He has the ability to take himself out of the picture to allow others to evaluate the strength of the idea, not his role in it. As a result, the BeltLine has adapted and morphed over time – and will continue to do so – with the citizenry of Atlanta taking ownership of the ideas and building on it.

Part of the allure of the BeltLine – and one of the things that naturally enabled it to pass the desirability and viability hurdles – is that it isn't just one thing. “It is a community revitalization project,” Ryan notes, “an economic development project, a transit project, a trail project, a greenway project, a public health project, a public art project, a public park project, a water quality project. It is a brownfield remediation project. It is all kinds of things, so whatever your interest is, you can see yourself in it.” The best way to understand the impact of the BeltLine is to listen to Atlanta residents talk about it. They use terms like “godsend” and “brilliant,” noting that people get out and walk to places they never would before. The way of living in a city that Ryan experienced in Paris 25 years ago is coming to life for Atlantans: humans connecting with humans across social boundaries in a way that just hasn't been a reality before.

Some of our favorite anecdotes from Ryan relate to the organic nature of life on the BeltLine. In one, he relayed the experience of walking home from work and unexpectedly crossing paths with his daughter riding her bike home from school. It sounds like a simple, unremarkable scene, until you consider that the scene would literally not have been possible without the BeltLine. Ryan would be stuck in his car passing the nameless, faceless thousands on his way to work, missing out on the happy accident of a brief interaction with his child on a bike. As the BeltLine comes further to life, innovations small and large will blossom, driven by others working on the platform that Ryan provoked. And he'll be there to experience it with them, quietly relishing their successes: