Placemaking Week

If a city’s downtown is its soul, then Alpharetta didn’t have one - or at least it was not recognizable. But over a few decades, Alpharetta blossomed from a bedroom community of 3,000 into a regional employment hub of 120,000. While the office parks and cul-de-sacs had popped up all over the place, the city was lacking collective public gathering places to serve a diverse mix of people. This session explores the City's role in revitalizing, and in many ways, creating a downtown in Alpharetta. Since its announcement in 2015, close to $250 million additional dollars of investment have poured into the downtown. In the last five years, downtown Alpharetta has become the setting of numerous new festivals and events, it has added more than three dozen new businesses and more than doubled the population that had lived there before. But most importantly, it has given the City a sense of soul that was missing.

Talking points include creating new public spaces through easement agreements, leveraging private impact fees to build public trails, the conversion of old right-of-way into pedestrian alleys, and the inclusion of public art requirements in zoning cases.