James_May-June_2026_web - Flipbook - Page 17
region will see an impact positively, where you’re going to have
the opportunity to tell the story
of Suwanee, or Douglasville, or
Hapeville, or anywhere around
the region to tell the story of
what it’s like to live, to work, to
play in your community through
the lens of the World Cup.”
MA R T A: Exa Bes
& Transit Ambaado
features a fully renovated atrium and food hall, with
plans for meeting spaces, pop-ups and retailers to take
advantage of its location ‘at the center of it all.’
Furthermore, just across the street the massive, $5
billion Centennial Yards project has sprung from the
earth in record time, with the newly opened Hotel Phoenix ready to welcome fans who will practically be able
to roll out of bed straight into the stadium. The hotel is
the first stage in one of the South’s largest development
projects, building an entire ‘mini-city’ out of the 50-acre
plot of land formerly known as The Gulch, which for decades was thought to be too complicated and costly to
build on. It’s not a stretch to say that World Cup hosting
duties were in part responsible for kicking the project
into gear, with Atlanta officials signing off on a $1.9
billion incentive package in 2019 that got the ball rolling
and ensured the first stages would be completed by the
time the actual soccer ball gets rolling this year.
With the World Cup top of mind, Atlanta Mayor
Andre Dickens engineered the creation of Showcase Atlanta, the city’s leadership initiative that looks to make
sure the city’s business community takes full advantage
of hosting such a large-scale event. Dickens said he
wants the World Cup to happen with Atlanta, not to Atlanta, and that local businesses should be active participants rather than passive observers. Showcase Atlanta
offers resources, workshops, digital marketing grants,
and connections to regional stakeholders like MARTA
and the Beltline. On top of assisting small businesses,
the organization also aims to, obviously, showcase Atlanta, and not just the area around the stadium where
the matches are being played.
Because while the matches are all taking place
downtown in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Metro Atlanta
Chamber President and CEO Katie Kirkpatrick said the
World Cup is an event for the entire Atlanta metro. “Our
The Georgia Department of
Transportation is opening its “special event playbook,” usually reserved for big weekends but now
for an entire month as Georgia’s
capital city braces for more than 500,000 soccer fans to
arrive. “We’ll be full of engineers, operations to execute
on this playbook that we have specifically developed to
handle ingress and egress,” said GDOT Deputy Commissioner Andrew Heath. “Again, whether you’re driving,
walking, biking, taking MARTA, we want to make sure
that you can get where you need to go in a timely way
and that you do it safely, and that’s our approach.”
M AY /J UNE 2026
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