For Ryan Gravel—an urban planner by training who initially proposed the concept of the BeltLine in his Georgia Tech master’s thesis and is now an author and urban design consultant—urban infrastructure can serve as a metaphor for an entire culture. Ultimately, he said, it succeeds best when it brings people together, in both its creation and how it is used. But city leaders need to think bigger about the implications of infrastructure projects of all sizes.

Read more at UrbanLand: The Magazine of the Urban Land Institute.