Since my initial concentration draft, I have revised the summary to include in-text citations of all of the literature I cite as references, and I have changed the situated context from democratic, postindustrial cities to gentrifying cities. In the first paragraph of my summary, I cut down on the background information given on the development and importance of transportation, and elaborated on the political elements of transportation, drawing attention to the historical role of public subsidy and the contested geography of transportation.
Most of the alterations to this first paragraph centered on the inclusion of citations; as I read through each of the sources I listed as references in the draft concentration proposal, I discarded some sources which focused too narrowly on specific movements. I also became aware of how dated some of my draft references were; a history of urban transit operations that extends only to 1980 leaves out the massive shifts in idealist and materialist realities in cities over the past thirty years, which can largely invalidate the narratives given. While an analysis of these texts and comparison to contemporary ones could be extremely interesting, that is well beyond the scope this summary. I made a conscious effort to find more recent general sources, and found the Blackwell Companions to be useful tools in this search. The whole process of textual research changed my summary somewhat; in this revision I shifted from the kind of introduction which could precede a paper on transportation politics to a more systematic introduction of the politics of transportation through a citation of relevant literature.
In the concentration draft feedback, Jim Proctor called attention to the need for me to look more deeply at the term “post-industrial.” I had been using the term to get at the situation faced by many contemporary municipal planning organizations—the idea that developed cities still have access to tremendous wealth, yet must also include local stakeholders in any transportation development. My earlier situating context was only marginally more substantial than saying American cities, as my true focus was on the politics within those cities that I predetermined as interested in, rather than the politics which arise from that particular situated context. Upon further research of the term “post-industrial,” I found that it was connected more with shifting international economics, rather than directly with municipal governance. Looking at how post-industrial is used in a couple of approved concentrations also drew my attention to the fact that I needed to alter the my situated context to deal more directly with transportation politics. Both students who are using “post-industrial” call attention to how post-industrial aesthetics and international relations affect their topics.
Upon reflection, I realized that it was the material side of deindustrialization that I wanted to focus on, and that gentrification more neatly defines this material context of transportation politics in cities such as Seattle. Gentrification is closely associated with post-industrialism, but more closely pertains to urban politics and highlights the issues of class and race which some neoliberal theories of post-industrial societies conceal. Shifting the context to gentrification also prompted me to foreground discussion of a split within progressive transportation politics—the so-called green vs blue politics that Publicola has diagnosed in Seattle. Discourses of green urbanism and social justice differ strongly in their emphasis, and in my revised concentration summary I outlined the inherent conflicts between these ideologies, regarding transportation politics in gentrifying cities.