This second round of concentration revisions has been (thankfully) far less intensive than the first, with only relatively minor revisions necessary. The ENVS Steering Committee gave me several pieces of constructive feedback on my concentration, largely centered on the situated context I have chosen. They took issue with my treatment of gentrification, and advised me to make the theories behind gentrification more apparent in my summary. Upon reflection, I realized that I did need to pick apart the term slightly, in order to look at the potential drivers and more concrete connections with transportation planning. I already had the source to provide such a summary of the academic disagreements on this subject, and provided a sentence or two on how gentrification is driven by a combination of production-side (disinvestment, and reinvestment to collect greater rents) and consumption-side (increase in middle-class desires for an urban aesthetic) causes. The steering committee also advised me to make the direction of causality between transportation and gentrification more apparent. In my view, the relationship is not simply one-directionally causal; transportation infrastructure directs the geography of gentrification (with both consumption and production-side forces in play), but gentrification has its own marked effects on the transportation politics, and thus on the transportation infrastructure. These two are closely linked, and it is the existence of the former causal aspect that generates the latter.
Concentration Revisions
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.
Musings on My Concentration
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.
Preliminary Annotated Bibliography for Concentration
Posted below is an annotated listing of nine key sources on urban and transportation planning for my prospective concentration. I compiled these sources through a combination of preexisting exposure (as in the case of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Crabgrass Frontier, two sources which are both informative and historiographically important) and a broad search for relevant sources through Google Scholar. In my search, I used key terms like “urban planning,” “transportation planning,” “urban history,” and “street design,” to find sources which stood out as interesting and academically prominent to me. Finding sources broadly relevant to my concentration topic was not particularly difficult, though I was unsure as to the disciplinary bents which should be represented; are we looking only at sources with an interdisciplinary focus, or would disciplinarily narrow works be welcome at this stage of concentration development? Additionally, it was difficult to find sources with the kind of situated context that is used in ENVS; while there are plenty of city-specific urban histories, the focus in that research seems to be on the place, rather than what one can learn about the topic from situating it. In some ways, the least academic and most qualitative works in this bibliography are the most suited to further situated context exploration; Jane Jacobs situates The Death and Life of Great American Cities in an incredibly detailed and personal way in the neighborhoods of New York (with some more infrequent examples from Boston and Chicago), and Allan Jacobs seems to illustrate how streets vary by context in an interesting way.
Let’s Get Concentrated
Over the past few years I have become increasingly interested in cities and urban/transportation planning; reading Jane Jacobs and following several urbanist blogs has nurtured an passion that seems like the most obvious avenue to follow in choosing a concentration topic. Within this admittedly broad subject, I am particularly interested in street design and the political economy of transportation. I find information on how transportation and street use are altered by both political and cultural forces fascinating, and I look forward greatly to exploring the historical and geographical contexts of these changes. I am pretty undecided in terms of how to situate this topic; while I generally know the most about the American urban landscape, and would like to deepen this knowledge, I am also attracted to the idea of broadening my scope geographically. Additionally, I think a comparative situation could yield fruitful results on this topic, especially considering how vastly the urban built environment can and has varied. A nuanced treatment of similarities and differences across spatial dimensions seems like it could be the best way to learn about each of those spaces.