I’ve spent the last two semesters taking courses outside the core Environmental Studies program and its now time to return directly concentration and start thinking about where I’m going to direct it vis-a-vis an eventual thesis. Over the course of working on my concentration in ENVS 220, I altered its focus fairly substantially. While I intended to work on the intersection of urban design, transportation networks, and politics from the beginning, I was initially rather vague in terms of what I would potentially be saying in that rather broad field. I tried to narrow the scope by adding the caveat that I would be examining “post-industrial” cities, but this ran into some rather murky theoretical debates over whether or not such a category exists and what it looks like. Eventually I settled on looking at transportation politics through a lens of gentrification, which I found much more interesting and truer to the notion of the “situated context” that the Environmental Studies program emphasizes.
Nevertheless, looking back on my concentration over a year later, I’m currently seeing too much evidence of my earlier research, which was based more on personal interest than my end concentration (e.g. too much focus on urban history and the role of streetcars and highways in shaping past dynamics). In the coming days I will update my summary, questions, and reference list to better reflect my current focus on the interplay between gentrification and rail investments and the ideas I’ve tossed around and absorbed over the past year. To this end, I’m doing additional research on both long-standing theories of gentrification and contemporary empirical examinations of gentrification in relation to transportation. This research will at least partially be informed by the courses I’ve taken since ENVS 220.
In the last two semesters, I’ve finished up my minor in Political Economy and started my concentration with a course in Urban Economics. While I was somewhat dissatisfied with the rather simplistic nature of Urban Economics (essentially being a spatially applied microeconomic course) and had been hoping for more presentation of diverse and conflicting viewpoints, the course did provide me with a reasonable economic framework for dealing with issues of land values in relationship to accessibility to job centers. Namely, it provided economic models to illustrate the tendency for land rents to be more expensive near the center, barring the effects of eduction and crime, with the slope of housing prices directly correlated with the ease of access to maintain locational indifference. While I don’t think this formulation is quite sufficient to fully explain gentrification, I think it’s a reasonable starting place. Such an economic foundation has the benefit of stopping us from just attributing the whole phenomenon to yuppies or hipsters and their associated consumption and helps elucidate where nebulous factors of aesthetics and culture and the effects of politically-directed economic revitalization projects play a role.
I also took Radical Political Economics last semester and that course will play a role in shaping my research moving forward. While the course itself had limited material directly relevant to my concentration, it greatly increased my familiarity with Marxist terms/concepts. I think that increased proficiency will aid me in parsing out the theory-heavy works of notable Marxist geographers dealing with gentrification and the spatial rent gap (e.g. David Harvey and Neil Smith), and I’m interested in researching the effects of transit on the uneven geography of a capitalist city. The course also raised my interest in the notion of contradictions within capitalist markets. In terms of transportation politics, urbanism and gentrification, contradictions abound. The expansion of transit into poorer communities for the purpose of equalizing mobility will tend to raise land values, perhaps negating the supposed social benefits of the project. Densification presents potential environmental and social benefits, and is undoubtedly key to economically efficient public transit, but within car-dependent metro areas, localized urbanity or suburban retrofits may have limited impact in terms of actually shaping lifestyle. And while massive construction of high-end apartments following transit investment is a particularly striking manifestation of this process (and one which existing residents tend to object to), the steady upward creep of rents in an economically growing and supply-constrained housing market presents no less of a threat to existing residents.