The Atlanta Science Festival begins on Saturday … and looks amazing! Frogs, planetariums, robots, microbes, beer, and a gazzillion other things — some of which are book related.

Story Collider – storytellers offer personal accounts told on stage about how science has affected people’s lives, hosted by Ari Daniel and Erin Barker, Monday, March 24th at 8pm, The New American Shakespeare Tavern, $5 – details here.

Children’s Storytime – about our garden friends, Wednesday, March 26th at 10:30am, Atlanta Botanical Gardens, free (with admission) – details here.

Science Storytime – sounds from the kitchen, Wednesday, March 26th at 10:30am, Lovejoy Branch Library of the Clayton County system, free – details here (details about other Clayton Couny Library science storytimes can be found here, here, and here) .

The Science of Beer – nothing to do with books, but it is beer, Wednesday, March 26th at 10:30pm, Monday Night Brewing, $12 – details here.

Potato Chip Science with Allen Kurzweil – break open and munch your way through the areas of acoustics and aeronautics, forensics, and physiology – Thursday, March 27th at 7pm, Little Shop of Stories, free – details here.

This Week

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds, Thursday, March 20th at 6pm, Schwartz Center at Emory, free with tickets available at Emory and your favorite local independent bookstores.

Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings, Monday, March 25th at 7pm, Horizon Theatre, $25 (includes signed copy of the paperback edition).

A conversation with Sarah Lewis, author of The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the  Search for Mastery, and Emory poet Kevin Young, Tuesday, March 26th at 6:30pm, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.

In an article included in the March issue of the Decatur Focus, city staff recount how “History has shown us that development in Decatur comes in short bursts followed by lulls with little to no development.”  The article goes on to detail the various spurts of commercial development over the last 50+ years, before addressing current development projects…

Now after a five-year quiet period, we find ourselves in another development cycle that has folks asking the age-old question referenced in the first sentence above. Yes, there are several projects coming on line over the next few years. Many of these projects were in progress before the great recession hit and are coming back to life as access to financing returns. The 315 West Ponce apartment development is currently underway. Other apartment developments have been approved behind the Fidelity building and on the Trinity Triangle parcel between Dairy Queen and Twain’s. Like the condominium developments in the previous decade, the apartment developments are responding to a big hole in our housing market. The majority of these developments will be one-bedroom with some two-bedroom units and efficiency units included in the mix. Only a very few three-bedroom units are planned in one of these buildings. The primary market for these apartments is young professionals in an age group and income bracket that is finding the road to homeownership much more difficult these days.

It is interesting to point out that during the 1970s our city used a number of creative development options to provide different types of alternative housing in and around single-family neighborhoods. Townhouse developments along the eastern edge of Commerce Drive and in the area of Sycamore Drive provided a transition zone between single-family neighborhoods. Cutting-edge cluster home developments like Charter Square on W. Trinity Place and Wimberly Court off of Upland Road were successfully developed along with similar projects on Pinetree Drive and throughout other Decatur neighborhoods.

For the first time, a type of home ownership other than traditional single-family was possible in our city. New neighborhood developments like Swanton Heights, Rosewalk and Sycamore Ridge continued this trend in the 1990s. Although each of these developments was initially met with public skepticism they continue to be populated with some of our most active and supportive residents just as we found with the mid-rise condominiums constructed. We expect the same experience with the apartment units that will soon join our housing mix. These new residents are attracted to the Decatur lifestyle and will bring a younger demographic to help balance our diversity.

Decatur’s Catherine Lee writes on The Decatur Minute…

Thank you to everyone who has tweeted about wanting Google Fiber in Decatur. We love how excited everyone is!

While we’ll be working closely with Google over the next few months to see if Decatur/metro Atlanta is a good fit for their fiber product, we want to continue to show them how much we want Google Fiber in our community. We’ve created a Google+ City of Decatur page, so make sure to +1 us if you’re on Google+. Also, we want to hear from you. Send us photos, videos, drawings, etc. telling us how much you want Google Fiber in Decatur and we’ll share it on the City of Decatur Google+ page. We roped in some fellow City employees to take a photo (above) as inspiration – although we know you can be more creative than us. Here are a few more for inspiration.

You can either submit your photos/video/drawings via:

• Email:
• Dropbox (use the same email above)
• Post it on your Google+ page and link to @City of Decatur
• Post it on Facebook and mention @downtownDecatur
• Post it on Twitter and include @downtownDecatur in the body of your tweet

We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Photo courtesy of The Decatur Minute