An infrastructure of freedom : Atlanta, race, and the struggle over public transportation in the capitalist city

Abstract: This thesis provides a multiscalar analysis of the production and struggle over the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), the main transit system in metro Atlanta. It examines how the actions and visions of the state, capital, and transportation activists intersect to structure how and to what extent transit systems can be organized to realize their distinctive potential to allow urban residents to meet their basic mobility needs.In a city steeped in white supremacy, the development of MARTA is significantly constrained by how the lives of the Black residents, who comprise the majority of its riders, are inherently devalued, and by a racialized opposition to expanding the system more generally. What MARTA can be is also deeply shaped by the combined impact of a range of other forces, including both direct interventions in the transportation sphere such as the rise of ride-hailing services, as well as processes which profoundly impact transit planning even though they do not follow from attempts to do so, such as how capital circulates in the built environment. While MARTA’s planners endeavor to design a system geared towards the needs of transit dependent riders, the possibilities to do so are severely limited by the geography of transportation that these forces create. This geography also limits what merely expanding the system can accomplish. Concomitantly, the planning of MARTA is heavily influenced by the actions of pro-transit activists and transit skeptics, who propagate radically divergent ideas about what the transportation system should be, ideas grounded in differing conceptions of how planning practices are – or should be – conducive to freedom.What emerges is a picture of how the organization of public transportation is plagued by core contradictions which follow from how it takes place within the structure of the capitalist city in its totality, and how these intersect with the city’s broader racialized politics of mobility. Critically, the study draws attention to the merits of analyzing how transportation infrastructures are produced and struggled over by combining a decidedly material approach with an attention to the impact of imaginations about what amounts to a transportation system productive of freedom.