Ryan Gravel, senior urban designer with Perkins+Will, Atlanta, was honored by ENR as one of its 2011 "Newsmakers."
Inspired by a brief stint living in Paris during college, Ryan Gravel wrote his master's thesis at the Georgia Institute of Technology on his idea of converting Atlanta's abandoned 22-mile-long freight-rail corridor, which encircles the city's urban core, into a "belt line" that would reconnect the city's neighborhoods. After graduation, the idea lingered. Eventually, Gravel started Friends of the BeltLine, a non-profit group that helped win initial support to push the project forward.