Every so often, someone in Atlanta looks at the 16-lane gash of I-75/85 running through downtown and asks the same question: what if it weren't a highway at all? In early 2024, urban designer Stone Ray took that thought experiment further than most, producing Photoshop renderings that reimagine the Downtown Connector as a flowing recreational river.
Ray, who works for Birmingham-based planning firm Orchestra Partners, said the images came together in minutes -- a quick creative exercise built on a simple prompt: what if I-75/85 were a river? The renderings show the freeway trench filled with flowing water, joggers and cyclists replacing commuter traffic along its banks.
It's not the first time Atlantans have imagined the city's infrastructure underwater for fun -- there's a long-running local tradition of flooding various downtown spaces in concept art, largely as a way of poking at how much of the urban core is given over to car infrastructure. The renderings invite the obvious comparison: cities actually built on real rivers get a defining natural amenity that Atlanta, landlocked and freeway-crossed, never had the chance to develop. "Cannonball off the 17th Street bridge anybody?" the original piece joked.
The idea is obviously not going anywhere near a construction budget. But it landed at an interesting moment -- the same window when downtown's real, funded answer to the divided-by-freeway problem, The Stitch, was moving through its own design phase just a few blocks away. Where The Stitch caps the Connector with new park space, Ray's river concept goes further, imagining the whole trench transformed. Neither is likely to happen exactly as rendered, but both point at the same underlying itch: Atlanta's freeways cut through some of its most valuable real estate, and there's no shortage of ideas for what could replace them.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published February 2024.