On Saturday, October 29, We Love BuHi and PopATL will take over Buford Highway with the Buford Highway Halloween Parade and Pop-Up!
Leader
Marian Liou
Location
5000 Buford Highway NE Chamblee, GA 30341
The Buford Highway Halloween Parade and Pop-Up is a partnership between We Love BuHi and PopATL. We Love BuHi is a social enterprise that catalyzes and supports a livable, lovable, inclusive Buford Highway through creative placemaking. PopATL is a tactical urbanism group of Atlanta-based architects, planners and designers. Our goal is to activate a centrally located and highly visible empty lot of Buford Highway with activities and art. The event will take place on Saturday, October 29.
Buford Highway is a transportation corridor in metropolitan Atlanta that is home to many immigrant residents, business owners, and, most notably, restaurants serving cuisine from all around the world, predominantly Asia and Latin America. The road is distinguished by aging strip malls and sprawling apartment complexes interspersed with used car dealerships, pawn shops, and large parking lots.
Together, We Love BuHi and PopATL aim to provide residents and visitors a fun experience of small-scale human activity in an environment designed and built to move cars and trucks. We hope to cement widespread appreciation of the cultural treasure that is Buford Highway, as well as catalyze more creative placemaking and people-friendly development and policy.
We're livening and lighting up Buford Highway by giving it a gateway feature and a parade! We're reinventing an empty parking lot as a Pop-Up Playground with activities, games and music for one evening and then hosting a Halloween costume parade with kites and lanterns and home-made decorations on Atlanta's most interesting street.
The challenge on Buford Highway is to include, engage and inform the immigrant communities living and working on Buford Highway of the opportunities and decisions that directly affect their current and future quality of life and livelihoods.
The Buford Highway Pop-Up Playground and Parade is a creative place-making collaboration that catalyzes a broad, community-driven conversation about this challenge, encouraging local residents, business owners and policy makers to re-examine and imagine what Buford Highway can be. Our vision for Buford Highway is a livable, safe, healthy, thriving, attractive, inclusive, affordable area that fully embraces and celebrates its multicultural character.