Uneven Public Transportation Development in Neoliberalizing Chicago, USA

Abstract

IntroductionPublic transportation, as one crucial component of a city's transportation network, enables the mobility and flow of people and goods that make cities livable. Public transportation plays a vital role in the urban economy in that it creates place-based advantages, facilitates the circulation of capital, and attracts investment in local real estate markets. At the level of everyday lived experience, public transit shapes and constrains opportunity (time it takes to access jobs, schools, and services) and sociospatial relations into the built environment. In many places, public transportation is also wielded as an instrument of power, dominance, and social control, entrenching the privileges of the affluent and the disadvantages of working people into the built environment (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Therefore, trends in public transportation infrastructure and service levels constitute one dimension of uneven geographical development in urban areas. My research considers the ways in which neoliberalism and global city building are shaping new patterns of uneven geographic development in the public transit sector by focusing on public transportation planning and investment in the city of Chicago. The purpose of my paper is to contribute to the scholarship on the politics of infrastructure (Keil and Young, 2008;McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008) emphasizing the ways in which infrastructure and cities are produced and transformed together in a global context as well as how these processes contribute to urban fragmentation and inequality.The second part of this paper positions my study in the literature on entrepreneurial urban governments, neoliberal public transportation projects, and emerging sociospatial relations of inclusion and exclusion in the global city. The third part examines public transportation planning and new construction projects taking place in the city of Chicago in order to illustrate the impact of neoliberalization on the geography of uneven public transportation development. The narrative was assembled through a combination of documents produced by government, transit and planning agencies, secondary sources (mostly journalistic materials and documents produced by nonprofit groups), interviews, and nonparticipant observation of community meetings. My investigation of Chicago's

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