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Globally, rapid population growth in cities, regulatory and governance failures, poor infrastructure, inadequate funding for urban water systems, and the impacts of climate change are each rapidly reconfiguring regional hydrosocial relations. In the United States, these hydrosocial reconfigurations tend to reinforce racial inequalities tied to infrastructure, exacerbating environmental injustices. More generally, according to a framework of racial capitalism, infrastructural regions and hydrosocial relations are always already racialized and structured simultaneously by capitalism and racism. In this paper, we integrate hydrosocial and racial justice perspectives with the literature on infrastructural regionalism to examine Atlanta’s position in the so-called tri-state water wars between Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Combining analysis of academic, policy, and legal documents, journalistic accounts, and semi-structured interviews with water conservationists and managers working in Atlanta, we examine conflicts over water use in the infrastructural region of the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint (ACF) river system. We emphasize that the ACF conflict reworks regional hydrosocial relations through territorializations of racial capitalism. We demonstrate how particular discourses that reify Atlanta as a monolith overly simplify the regional dimensions of the crisis, diminishing the views, roles and interventions of diverse actors in the ACF region. We argue that work on infrastructure regionalism and water governance can be deepened through attention to the hydro-racial fix.
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Powering racial capitalism: Electricity, rate-making, and the uneven energy geographies of Atlanta
In this paper, I bring together scholarship on racial capitalism and critical energy studies to investigate how electrification contributes to racialized uneven development. I work toward a theory of racialized electricity capital as a state-supported circuit of accumulation through corporate provision of electricity, which is basic need essential to everyday life. I develop a case study of the electrification of Atlanta, Georgia to examine the historical–geographical formation of the relationship between the city’s electric utility, Georgia Power, and the state agency that regulates the Company, the Georgia Public Service Commission. I ask how regulation functioned simultaneously to expand and differentiate electricity consumption across Atlanta and in so doing reinforce a racialized labor hierarchy and unequal access to affordable electricity. This case study emphasizes the importance of analyzing the central role of the state in allowing and perpetrating systems of energy provision that create racialized and gendered poverty. Drawing from the most recent hearings regulating electricity rates before the Commission in 2019, I bring to the fore the work of energy equity activists leading a campaign to Fight the Hike who enact demands for racial justice and a democratic energy system.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1932905
- PAR ID:
- 10319823
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
- ISSN:
- 2514-8486
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211016736
