Relaxation Labeling · a city that moves like water

Atlanta — the Great Water Cycle

The metro's commute reimagined as a hydrological cycle. Two monumental gyres circulate the city: an outward, clockwise Skywheel above and an inward, counter-clockwise Undertow below — breathing riders in to downtown each morning and out to the suburbs each evening — all threaded onto a real WARTA water network of rivers, canals and daylit creeks.

← the portfolio The HRL Lab HRLized
🌅 morning · the Undertow draws the city in
🌀 tide   🌪️ swirl
🚦 flow   👥 riders
inbound rider outbound rider downtown reservoir MARTAWARTA line CobblincanVroome river/creek canal buried creek daylit creek water hub bike path walkway ecological niche logistics junction congestion eddy
How it's an HRL model. The metro is a grid of cells (the objects); each relaxes toward a circulation roleinward-conduit · outward-conduit · reservoir · congestion-eddy · off-network (noise) — under a compatibility that conserves flow, follows the demand gradient, and honours the two gyres' opposite winding directions. Riders are droplets advected by the blended gyre field; MARTA / Cobblincan arms are fast conduits you paint onto the field, and Vroome jets fire express currents point-to-point. The congestion layer is a density field relaxed (neighbour-smoothed) each frame — the red eddies are where capacity is overrun.

The WARTA water network. WARTA is the Water-MARTA: transit that runs on real water. The rivers & creeks (Chattahoochee, Peachtree Creek, South River) and the canals you draw form a navigable network; drop water hubs on it and lay WARTA lines that snap to the water, and ferries shuttle between the hubs, calling at each. Riders near a WARTA line are caught by the current and carried along it — inbound on the morning tide, outbound on the evening one — a water express woven into the gyre. And Atlanta's buried creeks can be daylighted: click 🌞 Daylight on a culverted stream to reopen it to the sky, and it joins the living water network — reconnecting the flow through the city core.

The green-blue web. Along the water run 🚲 bike paths and 🚶 walkways — a BeltLine-style greenway that draws a share of riders off the roads into a gentler current. Every stretch of open water and every greenway feeds an 🌿 ecological niche field — a relaxed (neighbour-smoothed) habitat layer that blooms greenest where blue and green infrastructure meet, and which a daylighting project visibly revives. And the same water carries goods, not just people: drop 📦 logistics junctions on the network and freight barges haul cargo along the WARTA lines from junction to junction. Same engine as the rest of the portfolio (hrl_generic) — a whole city labelling its own flow.
Atlanta 2045 · SupraHydra. The speculative next layer joins watershed, mobility, habitat, energy, heat reuse, computation, and public judgment as interdependent systems—not as one autonomous super-system. It is a fiction and planning vocabulary, not a forecast or construction proposal. Read the SupraHydra Accord, then enter its optional story branch through the Master Board.