Colorblind transit planning: Modern streetcars in Washington, DC, and New Orleans

Abstract

This article analyzes case studies of the H Street Streetcar in Washington, DC, and the Rampart Streetcar in New Orleans, two newly built U.S. streetcars that are part of a national trend of modern streetcar investments. We situate these investments within state-led gentrification that exacerbates racial disparities by expanding White privilege in Black neighborhoods and reshaping racial geographies. While supporters rationalize streetcars as economic development strategies, we contextualize modern streetcars within a broader framework of colorblind neoliberalism. We advance the concept of colorblind transit planning to codify a critique of current practices and advance an argument that colorblind transit planning minimizes the ongoing salience of institutionalized racism and exacerbates existing racial geographies and experiences of race, symbolically and materially reproducing a city of exclusion. Our findings caution against further public investment in streetcars, as they contribute to state-led gentrification and private accumulation, rather than address unequal modern public transit systems.

Black Geographies and Black Ecologies as Insurgent Ecocriticism

“…In pointing to the racial politics of movement and mobility, this work has shown how, in the United States for example, racism shaped programs of infrastructural development, such as the interstate system. Th e highways, therefore, functioned as a space-annihilating technology that exploited and reproduced the second-class status of African Americans (Brand 2021a;Brand et al 2020;Woods 2002).…”

The sedimentation of whiteness as landscape

“…Therefore, here I offer a scaffolding for how we might begin to think about making these multi-scaled geographical and temporal connections and therefore situate Lakeview within broader struggles over the development and futurity of the city’s racial geographies. Indeed, there has been much important critical scholarship on how anti-Blackness has worked post-Katrina (see Camp, 2009; Johnson, 2011b; McKittrick and Woods, 2007; Woods, 2009), including work that highlights how post-disaster property regimes reinscribed racial hierarchies across the gulf coast (Derickson, 2014; Lowe and Shaw, 2009) and how neoliberalism saturated post-Katrina policy-making (Johnson, 2011b) in and across the different domains of recovery and redevelopment, including public school reform (Dixson, 2011), public and private housing (Arena, 2011; Johnson, 2011a), public transportation (Brand et al, 2020), and urban greening (Anguelovski et al, 2018). Additionally, planning scholars have engaged the limits of public planning processes (see for instance Lamb, 2020; Nelson et al, 2007) and of the limited possibilities for equitable redevelopment within the larger context of post-disaster neoliberal planning (Brand, 2015; Brand and Baxter, 2020; Reardon et al, 2009).…”

Critical geographies of transport and mobility: Studying power relations through practice, academia, and activism

“…In the global North, where heavy rail systems may have been in place for decades, light rail or streetcar systems demonstrate a new dedication to “sustainable” modes of transport while reviving city centers (Culver, 2017; Olesen, 2020). These smaller, old‐fashioned systems operate with a touch of nostalgia while simultaneously driving gentrification through opening up disinvested neighborhoods for a new round of accumulation (Brand et al., 2020). In the Global South, investment in new, large‐scale metro or light rail projects signal a city's or country's openness and modernity, even if the rail network only serves a fraction of the population or even displaces transit‐reliant populations in the process of being built (Beier, 2020; Chava et al., 2019; Terrefe, 2020; Turner, 2020).…”