You might recognise this popular London museum from Marvel’s mega hit movie Black Panther.

It’s in a heist scene early on in the movie with Michael B Jordan’s character and, of course, it’s not in London at all, but like many of Black Panther’s filming locations, very much in Atlanta.

It’s the High Museum of Art (or just the High), and it’s one of the south’s leading museums.

If you were to visit at the moment, we can’t guarantee you would see any superheroes (or villains), but you would see some very good art.

As well as the permanent collection, there’s currently exhibitions including “look again” showcasing its 45 years of collecting photography and a powerful exhibition of Glenn Kaino’s works inspired by athlete Tommie Smith.

Earlier this month was the 50th anniversary of Smith’s black power salute at the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City.

Kaino’s works inspired by Smith include an incredible sculpture of Smith’s arm, Bridge.

Kaino is from Los Angeles.

But as we’ll report later this week, the Atlanta-based African American visual arts scene is also flourishing, and, perhaps more than in the past, increasingly integrated across the wider creative scene, whether that be with the movers in the music business, or the top tattoo artists.

As Atlanta-based writer Patrice Worthy will report, there’s talk of a “new Atlanta renaissance” of art from the city and, increasingly the Sweet Auburn district - where Martin Luther King Jr was born and now rests – is one of the centres of a thriving cultural movement.

Atlanta has the worst income inequality of any large city in America, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg based on US Census Bureau.

The AJC’s editor Kevin Riley said housing was a key inequality issue the paper covered. “There is this fear the average person, who has an average job, whether a police officer or firefighter or working at restaurant, can they afford to live in the city to live near where they work?

“It’s always the question, say in the Gulch development which is a political row of the moment, how many housing units will be set aside as affordable.

“But it really comes down to: are we going to be a city where wealthy people can afford to live conveniently – and only wealthy people.”

The AJC broke a big story about the BeltLine – the big urban regeneration scheme to turn 22 miles of abandoned rail track into walkable trails – missing its initial promises on delivering affordable housing.

“The details were complicated but the targets were missed.

“Folks with the BeltLine said we’re not the only ones responsible for trying to create affordable housing in the city, there are other institutions and interests … in a state where the tradition is to be a little suspicious of too much government.

“The debate is whether government should have anything to do with that at all. And I don’t think the debate about that is so different here to what it is anywhere else in our country or around the world.”

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in 2016 for what the committee called “an extraordinary series revealing the prevalence of sexual misconduct by doctors in Georgia and across the nation, many of whom continued to practice after their offenses were discovered”. The report was called Doctors and Sex abuse.

Editor Kevin Riley says: “What we found was Georgia had very loose standards for monitoring and punishing and examining doctors who had carried out sex crimes.

“Doctors get away with it because they move from state to state. So we said, if we’re going to do this story, we’re going to have to look at each state. Can we do that?

“Through a lot of innovation from our data experts in the newsroom, we were able to look at records of these sorts of things in all 50 states. We were able to examine more than 100,000 records and that showed that this was a big problem and that very few states have proper protections.

“It was a big decision for a regional newspaper to do national-scale investigation, but we felt the Georgia story couldn’t be told without it.”

Riley believes the result was “journalism that makes a difference and holds Atlanta and Georgia to a high standard.”

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution is metro Atlanta’s only major daily newspaper, and it’s a big deal. This morning we met its editor, Kevin Riley, at its HQ in Dunwoody, northern Atlanta. Riley, who joined from the Dayton Daily News, has been at the helm of the AJC for almost eight years.

We guessed, rightly as it turns out, that he would be a great, super-informed person to ask about the big current issues in Atlanta, its vibrant media culture, and how the AJC fits into all of that.

The paper, owned by Cox Enterprises, is one of the US’s oldest, dating back to 1868 when the Atlanta Constitution was first published; it officially merged with the Atlanta Journal into one morning daily paper in 2001 (their staffs had merged years earlier).

These are difficult times for all newspapers financially, but the AJC under Riley has been modernizing. He points to growing an audience of more than 800,000 daily online visitors, and successful podcast ventures with more than 8 million downloads.

Riley says that his approach at the AJC is for it to “provide depth and context and watchdog reporting” as Georgia, with its rising population, gains more political power.

“This is emerging as one of the most important states in the union,” Riley says.

A few years ago, Smart Growth America ranked Atlanta as the most sprawling large metropolitan area in the country. Many of the 5.5 million people in area live in low-density single family houses “outside the perimeter”, the concrete ring of Interstate-285. With few sidewalks and virtually no public transit, living in this vast sprawl means driving to work or school, driving to get dinner or meet friends, driving to shops and healthcare – if you can afford a car, that is. Another 2.5 million people are projected to move to the metropolitan area over the next 20 years.

Atlanta has an opportunity to change: the BeltLine – a 22-mile ring of abandoned and active freight rail lines. The project has been criticized for failing to meet its affordable housing targets and for displacing people in the city’s disadvantaged areas but it also offers Atlanta a different possible future of high-density housing and walkable neighbourhoods, of cycling and public transit. Last month MARTA agreed $570m of funding for light rail along 15 miles of the route.

You can read the full feature later this week, but here’s a taster of the full-loop tour I took with BeltLine activist Angel Poventud - abandoned and active rail sections included …

Atlanta has a reputation for knocking down historic buildings to put up parking lots, and I’ve just been to see a prime example.

This is Kimball House, a grand 360-room hotel which took up an entire Downtown block. Rebuilt in 1883 after a fire, it was known for its opulent decor and spectacular chandeliers.

And this is the site today … a multi-storey parking lot.

I’ve been speaking with Boyd Coons, executive director of the Atlanta Preservation Center about what the city has lost, and what is currently under threat from the wrecking ball. You can read the full article later this week

Atlanta was the last US city to host the Olympics. I’ve just been down to Centennial Park – one of the key sites of the 1996 Games – to find it is undergoing some renovation. The “fountain of rings” is still working, although the central ring is currently out of action.

When the city was chosen to host the centennial games (including over Athens) it was something of a surprise, but Atlanta 96 delivered some memorable moments. Muhammad Ali – battling Parkinson’s – took the roof off the Olympic Stadium when he made a surprise appearance to light the torch in the opening ceremony.

And Michael Johnson electrified the Games with gold medals in the 200m and 400m - setting a new world record in the 200m and breaking the Olympic record in the 400m.

Sadly, the Atlanta Games is also remembered for the bombing. On 27 July 1996 a pipe bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and injuring 111.

The FBI named security guard Richard Jewell, who sounded the alarm, as a suspect. As my colleague Bryan Armen Graham wrote, this miscarriage of justice haunted Jewell long past his exoneration to his death in 2007.

After the Games, the 85,000-seat athletics stadium was repurposed as the home of the Atlanta Braves baseball team and renamed Turner Field. Last year the Braves moved out of the city to a new stadium in Cobb County. The old Olympic Stadium was reconstructed a second time, and now hosts college football – but capacity has been reduced to just 23,000.

Some credit the Olympics with putting Atlanta on the map and for boosting business. The city was already home to Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, but Georgia-Pacific, General Electric, Newell Rubbermaid and UPS all opened corporate headquarters there in the 1990s. Now Atlanta is home to more Fortune 500 companies than Boston.

Atlanta magazine held out for almost a year after the first episode of Real Housewives before finally putting the cast on its cover, beneath the tagline (in hot pink against yellow): “COUTURE, CATFIGHTS, AND COLLAGEN”.

Search the magazine’s online archive for the show today, however, a decade to the month since its debut, and be served not 1,085 results, but 1,085 pages of them.

As The Real Housewives of Atlanta begins its 11th season next week, its influence reaches far beyond the actual audience for the show, thanks to its immense contribution to culture through slang, gifs and tweet-length comebacks – so popular with internet users that year-one star NeNe Leakes, with her irresistible unimpressed face, was the poster girl for criticisms of “digital blackface”.

“I don’t even know how to put it into words but Atlanta women don’t talk to each other [the same way] as any other women from any other franchise,” wrote one fan on Reddit. “I do think [Real Housewives of Atlanta] over the years has not only reflected the growing prosperity of Atlanta but the further awareness and engagement of the general public in black culture.”

I’ll have more on The Real Housewives of Atlanta and its relationship to the city later this week. If you have thoughts to share, you can reach me on Twitter on @mlle_elle or elle.hunt@theguardian.com

On my way to the CNN headquarters this morning, I scooted by this tangle of railroad tracks and parking lots known as “The Gulch”.

The gritty and underutilized area has been referred to as “downtown’s depressing pit” by Curbed, but it often pops up on the silver screen when film-makers need a depressing backdrop. The Hunger Games movies Catching Fire and Mockingjay: Part 1 both made use of the industrial wasteland, as did Captain America: Civil War.

Film-makers will soon need to find another post-apocalypse, however, if Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and developer CIM get their way. CIM plans a massive redevelopment of the area – covering as many as 15 city blocks and involving as much as 12m sq ft of new construction.

The deal, which would include as much as $1bn in public subsidy, is controversial. Critics say it includes very little in the way of affordable housing, and lacks a community benefits agreement. The mayor and CIM went back into negotiations last week, and the city council could vote on a revised proposal in the next few days.

The only good thing about traffic is not being in it. Which is what makes dockless electric scooters such a perfect fit for Atlanta, a city notorious for terrible traffic. Since I arrived in Atlanta on Wednesday, I’ve spent most of my exploring time aboard the ubiquitous Limes and Birds, taking full advantage of the fact that here (unlike in my home town of Oakland) it’s socially acceptable to scoot (scooter?) on the sidewalk. And the only thing more fun than scooting on Atlanta’s wide and often empty sidewalks is scootering past a long line of cars stuck in gridlock.

Scooters arrived in Atlanta in May, and from what I’ve seen, they’ve been adopted by Atlantans young and old. While there have been some hiccups – including a viral picture of a scooter on the interstate – the city appears to have been much more welcoming to the new transit option than San Francisco, where scooters quickly became a popular target for anti-gentrification protest.

One issue, however, is availability in different neighborhoods. Over the summer, an aide to Atlanta city council member Dustin Hillis pointed out that there were few scooters on the south side of the city.

As of this morning, when I took these screenshots, it appears that Lime has expanded service across a much wider swathe of the metro area than its rival, Bird.

While Atlanta has its own homegrown tech scene, the city was also chosen as one of the finalists for Amazon’s second headquarters. The city has put together an incentive package worth as much as $1bn, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, but some locals view HQ2 with trepidation.

Earlier this year, I spoke with the group Atlanta Against Amazon for an article about opposition to HQ2 across the country. One of their concerns is the potential for gentrification and displacement.

“The place I lived has doubled in rent in five years,” said an anonymous of his former home near the BeltLine. “It’s a real personal thing.”

I also spoke with black startup founders about it. Barry Givens, founder of the robotic bartender company Monsieur, was unenthusiastic, saying the company would “change the entire culture” of the city.

“Amazon is not 40% black right now,” Givens said. “I don’t think they would move here and become 40% black.”

That demographic change could also drive political change, warned Iziah Reid, another black technologist who I introduced you all to in the last post. Reid worried an Amazon influx of white techies could portend the end of a “long lineage of black mayors”.

“You see how they deal with homeless people in Seattle and San Francisco. What’s going to happen to our cousins on Pine Street if Amazon comes? They aren’t going to want to look at that.”

Later this week, we’ll be bringing you my report on the startup scene in Atlanta, specifically the black startup scene. Atlanta can feel like a photo negative of Silicon Valley, with coworking spaces and startup incubators dedicated to black and brown people in technology.

Ajo Kairu and Iziah Reid are both full stack developers running independent businesses. Kairu is originally from Mississippi and moved to Atlanta for college, first DeVry then Georgia State. Though he said he gets recruited by big name tech companies on the west coast, he prefers to stay in Atlanta.

“I don’t want to be part of the culture,” he said of Silicon Valley. “You would never go to a company and see 40 black people there.”

“Most of Silicon Valley looks at corporate America as stuffy,” added Reid. “My people look at Silicon Valley as stuffy.”

Staying outside of the bay area doesn’t mean that Kairu lacks for clients, however. One major aspect of his business: taking on work for subcontracting companies in India that are taking on work for US-based vendors. “They’re outsourcing to black America,” he explains. “We’re getting underground rich here.”

I also spent a morning at digitalundivided, which runs a startup incubator for black and Latina women founders. One of the founders I met was Farrah Allen, now entrepreneur in residence.

Allen’s startup, The Labz, is using blockchain technology to undergird a collaborative platform for musicians that automatically creates documentation for copyright and royalties. If that sounds complicated, I’ll just say that Allen can explain the utility of blockchain better and faster than anyone I’ve ever met. So don’t sleep on The Labz.

The gargantuan Hartsfield-Jackson airport isn’t the world’s busiest because of passengers (although hundreds of thousands flow through here every day). It is also crucial for modern American logistics – the crux of the economy of just-in-time production and consumer-oriented distribution, and the reason so many Fortune 500 companies are based in Atlanta. It also directly employs 63,000.

One of them is Murray.

For nearly half his life, Murray, 4, has worked eight-hour shifts at the International Arrivals baggage claim, sniffing out contraband, from oranges to cow skins. “He had a very high food drive and he is very high-energy,” says his partner, K9 handler A Gella. “He’s very sociable.”

Before each shift, Gella swings by Murray’s kennel and picks him up to carpool to the airport. On average Murray sniffs 15 flights a day. Each time he has a successful sniff, Murray is treated to a snack and a break.

The phenomenally popular and surprisingly heart-wrenching Queer Eye reboot portrays an idealised vision of Atlanta living.

The loft is in a renovated warehouse in a part of town where property values are soaring. Much of central Atlanta is gentrifying rapidly, particularly around the BeltLine (of which, more later) – with both positive and negative effects.

And, although Atlanta’s gay scene is among the most open and welcoming in the US – particularly in the south – it remains extremely segregated along racial and economic lines.

The reality for many black gay Atlantas remains a challenging one, as the Guardian’s Leah Green found:

Next stop: the Tributes’ living quarters in Panem, or, if you’re not a Hunger Games fan, the John Portman-designed Marriott hotel.

No architect has made such an impact on his home city as Portman did on Atlanta. His either dazzling or gaudy designs, depending on your taste, dominated the city’s 20th century architecture – and pioneered a particularly kind of “interiority”: unremarkable from the outside, gasp-inducing on the inside.

As Rowan Moore writes this morning:

His buildings became known for their “Jesus moments”, those times when, emerging from a deliberately understated entry into some architectural emulation of the Grand Canyon, a visitor would reliably exclaim, “Jesus!”

Lauren Holley took this shot of Portman’s abstract sculpture Belle outside the 230 Peachtree building, which Portman also designed.

Atlanta magazine asked some locals what they made of it on its installation in 2016. Their responses varied from “an acorn” to a fertility statue. Two people compared it to the Venus of Willendorf. What do you make of it?

To achieve the most Guardian morning possible, my colleague Tash Reith-Banks and I attended a goat yoga session at the Serenbe community on the outskirts of the city. It was pretty ridiculous, if I’m being honest – though Nigerian dwarf goats are a popular choice as emotional support animals. And they really are cute as hell.

But Atlanta is also home to an inordinate number of goat-rental businesses. I count at least 12. Why? Well, goats love to eat the invasive plants that have plagued Atlanta – particularly kudzu, which they nibble right down to the root. So they’re a highly effective way to clear brush from your acreage or pasture. Lacking an acreage or pasture, we reckoned goat yoga was the best way to experience Goatlanta for ourselves.

What’s more, the city’s chief resilience officer, Amol Naik, has also encouraged the use of goats to address a major nutrition problem – “food deserts”, parts of the city that are dominated by fast-food chains and served only by convenience stores, making fresh food impossible to buy. The city’s Aglanta strategy pushes urban farming as a partial solution, including goats.

I, for one, welcome our new goat overlords.

Morning y’all!

Jamiles Lartey here. As a Guardian staff reporter based out of the US south, it is my pleasure to welcome you to Atlanta, Georgia for a special, live, in-depth report from the unofficial capital of the “new south”.

All this week, Guardian US and Guardian Cities have joined forces to dive deep into the ATL: Increasingly a frontline for issues of culture, race and urban design in the US. Indeed, it often feels as if Atlanta has all the ingredients to be to the 21st century what Chicago was to the 20th – a quintessential American city of its era.

That’s especially true because Atlanta is also the unsung “media city” of the US. There’s CNN, of course, but Georgia’s booming TV and film industry has turned Atlanta into the Hollywood of the south, with the Marvel movies and the Hunger Games filming in and around Atlanta – not to mention hit television series such as Stranger Things, Donald Glover’s Atlanta, the phenomenally popular local Real Housewives franchise and the reboot of Queer Eye.

So today we’re thrilled to have a team of reporters hitting the streets to learn how the city stacks up in reality – and hoping to give you a “snapshot in a day” of life in Atlanta on this day in 2018.