Over the past week I have further refined by concentration topic and have developed a more appropriate situated context. I have narrowed the topic to “The Politics of Transportation,” as the power relationships around transportation planning, and the specifically the effect of politics on urban geography through transportation infrastructure, stood out as the most interesting pieces of urban and transportation planning to me. I am very interested in highways and rail lines are planned with regards to local communities, both historically and contemporarily; there are an array of fascinating political discussions and geographical effects of each spatial choice regarding where we place or align any given infrastructure project. Within my concentration, I am most interested in investigating the contexts I know best—essentially major American cities and especially Seattle and, to a lesser extent, Portland. To create a more refined and inclusive situated context, I was asked what attributes laid behind those contexts, especially regarding their transportation politics. I realized that the urban contexts which I was most familiar with are those characterized by the existence of both central planning agencies with access to large resources and (unevenly) influential neighborhood groups with the power to resist change in their locales. In such a context, cities are both able to outlay billions of dollars for new construction of light rail or highways, but must also compromise heavily with the local process. With Professor Jim Proctor’s help, I classified such cities as Post-Industrial, Democratic Cities, a categorization which lends itself to a focus on American cities, but does not preclude examination of Canadian, Australian, European, or potentially Japanese cities which are subject to a localist aesthetic, regional planning, and democratic politics.
Descriptive questions will play a large role in developing my understanding of the current and historic shape of transportation politics. Assessing how politics have altered transportation and thus urban geography is a huge endeavor, and I will need to pose both broad questions to start to untangle the processes, and more focused ones to generate actual answers. The broad questions will likely be of an extensive and historical quality, attempting to get at the relatively recent history (last fifty or sixty years) of transportation infrastructure planning processes, especially in regards to the political realm. I will then move onto descriptive questions looking at the relationship between communities and macro-transportation design. This will lend itself well to a descriptive study of issues around where highways and elevated rail lines were planned in industrial cities, and where current infrastructure investments are targeted now. From here, I will seek to explain patterns and disparities in infrastructure through explanatory questions. In my explanatory questions, I will highlight the role of class and race in the notion of community power, as well as the cultural conceptions behind the political forces driving transportation investment. In addition, I will look at the economic side of this infrastructure. Private developers have a huge stake in public investment, and their continued growth depends entirely on the public expansion of transportation and zoning (whether vertically or horizontally). This makes them actors with a vested interest in the politics, and it may be interesting to track down their role in the public process.
Through evaluative questions, I intend to focus on the effects of transportation politics on local communities, with an eye to the ways that right-of-way expansion is a systematic violence. Highways require massive strips of land; their construction through urban areas necessitates heavy-handed condemnation and leaves a permanent gash in the urban fabric. At the outskirts of urban areas, highway expansion is an encouragement of greater exurban growth and further uprooting of rural or wild areas. An analogous politics is at play with transit expansion, where sticky issues around gentrification and up zoning come into play; transit is by far the most efficient in dense, connected-areas, and its economic feasibility depends quite directly on the degree of urban intensification which is permitted around stations. This change is frequently vehemently opposed by established neighborhood groups, and evaluating their motives may yield insights on transportation politics. Overall, there are vast inequities in the beneficiaries and victims of infrastructure and its associated development, and looking at the composition of those groups should help enlighten us as to the politics of transport. Additionally, evaluating transportation politics will require some degree of quantification; I plan on examining the transportation mode share of various cities and neighborhoods, and the transportation associated carbon dioxide emissions, to asses the effect of different transportation regimes on end use and direct environmental degradation.
With all of the above in mind, my instrumental questions will focus on current transportation planning practices, identifying ways in which cities have created a more equitable and environmentally-friendly transportation politics. In looking instrumentally, I think it is most important to focus on those post-industrial cities which have invested heavily in new mass transit systems (including, but not limited to, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, B.C., and Washington, D.C.) and those expanding long-established systems. Questions on the political strategies used and challenges faced by these cities may help illuminate ways we can shape cities for the better. Central to this instrumental discussion is the notion that urban density, made possible by public transportation, is an important (but not all-encompasing) part of how we make cities more vibrant.