Atlanta’s Hypomanic Drive to Develop

Atlanta’s Hypomanic Drive to Develop describes a civic and commercial temperament that treats ambitious growth as both a wager and a way of remaking the city. Wes Jordan applies the term to developers and business interests willing to disregard daunting odds without, in his formulation, losing all sense of proportion. The novel gives that drive a visible geography—highways, towers, and expanding edge cities—and a political mechanism in which capital and public power bargain over who benefits from growth.

A City Growing Outward

For Charlie Croker, the development boom had transformed the land around Atlanta. From the air, he sees the highway interchanges and office parks that have helped draw Greater Atlanta’s population outward beneath its trees. In his account, the growth of American cities has shifted from old downtowns to commercial clusters on the metropolitan edge, organized around highways. Buckhead was Atlanta’s first such center; Perimeter Center and developments near the Galleria followed.

That pattern makes Croker’s own Cherokee County project seem, at first, like a bold step into the next phase of expansion. He imagines a new edge city bearing his name, situated beyond existing centers and ahead of the growth he expects to arrive. The ambition is not merely to erect a building but to anticipate—and help create—the future geography of the metropolis.

The Temperament of the Bet

Jordan calls Atlanta’s business leaders hypomanic: they refuse to be deterred by the odds, yet remain purposeful enough to turn audacity into institutions and investment. He points to Inman Armholster as an example of a person who embodies that refusal to accept limits. The city’s towers along Peachtree Street serve as evidence of the broader ambition. They were intended to establish Atlanta not merely as a regional center but as a national one, and Jordan credits the business interests with having achieved that aim.

The ambition then enlarges. On International Boulevard, Jordan describes a further dream: to make Atlanta a world center, comparable to established international capitals and eventually more consequential than New York. He presents the city’s airport, its corporate networks, and CNN’s global visibility during the Gulf War as assets that might support that claim. His confidence is deliberately conditional—Atlanta’s leaders may pull it off—but their ability to generate money and give it leverage makes the prospect difficult to dismiss.

The Edge City’s Reversal

Croker Concourse exposes the danger inside the same confidence. Seen from Charlie’s G-5, the complex is a tower, mall, cineplex, hotel-and-apartment development, and a vast parking area that is conspicuously empty. It stands like an isolated island among trees: a project built for the future whose anticipated surrounding growth has not yet arrived. Charlie recognizes that a later highway might eventually make someone wealthy from what he has built, but that possibility does not solve the present problem of distance from the old city.

The Cosmos Club concentrates the project’s extravagance. Its domed tower contains a planetarium and a private dining club, with an elaborate astronomical light show developed by the Henry Beuhl, Jr., observatory at Carnegie-Mellon University. Charlie invested $8.5 million in the feature, only to find that diners would not travel to Cherokee County for lunch beneath simulated stars. The club becomes an expensive failure within the larger development, while the empty asphalt makes the cost of betting ahead of demand visible from above.

Growth, Power, and Exchange

Jordan also explains Atlanta’s development through a political balance between the city and its surrounding region. He compares Atlanta to a baseball whose white cover and winding string surround a small, hard black core: in his account, the votes of Black residents in South Atlanta control the city itself, while millions of white residents live across North Atlanta and the surrounding counties. The metaphor presents the city’s political structure as a problem business interests must negotiate, not simply bypass.

Jordan’s example is the billion-dollar airport expansion during Maynard’s mayoralty. Maynard secured business support while requiring that 30 percent of the project go to minority contractors; Jordan recalls that the arrangement helped create twenty-five Black millionaires. He describes this bargain as the Atlanta Way: business interests obtain a major project, while political leaders can point to economic benefits for Black constituents.

A proposed Highway 600 through South Atlanta makes the exchange more explicit. When developers, contractors, and union representatives approach Isaac Blakey about opposition to the highway, Blakey cuts through their expansive talk about the regional economy and global village by demanding that they recognize the neighborhood’s power and provide benefits. Jordan distinguishes this arrangement from bribery: in his description, development support is negotiated through public goods such as day-care centers, youth centers, health clinics, parks, and swimming pools. The hypomanic drive therefore depends not only on private daring but also on political bargaining over the distribution of growth’s gains.

The Concept’s Double Edge

The concept links Atlanta’s soaring confidence to its uneven results. The same willingness to build beyond established demand helps create new centers, towers, and international ambitions; in Croker Concourse, it also produces an isolated complex whose future value depends on infrastructure and growth that have yet to catch up. The city’s developmental energy is neither simply a triumph nor simply a delusion. Its force lies in the capacity to make unlikely projects real, while its risk lies in treating anticipated growth as though it were already present.