We’ve just seen an outstanding example of live-work-play development, or new urbanism or whatever you want to call it. Atlantic Station, a 138-acre development in midtown Atlanta, is less than 10 minutes away from the city center by car. But the point is, the developers say, you don’t need a car to go there. In fact, they’ve purposely built it with fewer parking spaces than would typically accompany a complex of this size.

The site was formerly occupied by the Atlantic Steel mill, which closed in 1998. It now features an Ikea store, a Publix supermarket, a Dillards and other stores, along with a hotel, townhouses and single-family homes. A Target store is under construction, and several condo and office towers are in the planning stages. It’s eventually supposed to have 10,000 residents and 30,000 workers. The whole thing is about three-fourths of a mile from a MARTA rail station, and the Atlantic Station developers operate a free shuttle service that attracts 700,000 riders a year.

Brian Leary, vice president of the development company, said planners didn’t ignore the adjacent I-75/I-85 freeway, but neither did they want to build a typical offramp-oriented development. “While we have 21 lanes   of asphalt right next door, many times it’s 21 lanes of parking lot,” Leary said.

The Target, by the way, is not a typical big-box store. It’s a multi-story building, with parking underneath. The Ikea store, similarly, lacks the acres of parking that usually surround a 360,000-square-foot store.

Where does St. Louis have potential for similar development? I posed that question to Larry Salci, president of Metro, and he named three stations with development potential: DeBaliviere and, to a lesser extent, Belleville and Maplewood-Manchester.