Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

This paper argues that the forces that reshape cities today are not simply the “byproducts of conflicting social, cultural and economic forces”. Nor are they the result of anonymous, impersonal, free markets. Rather, they are intentionally generated by the interaction of capital and historical actors, both local and global, at particular moments in particular places. It uses recent urban developments and the political dynamic of planning and development in Atlanta to make this case. Atlanta is a palimpsest of US urban, social, and racial history — a hub of transportation networks (rail, road, air), a crucible of Civil Rights, and the birth place of the “Atlanta Way”, a governing collaboration between Black political and white economic elites. Since the 1996 Olympics, the foreclosure crisis of 2008, and the 2014 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the collaboration between the two elites, has become especially close, a textbook case of racial capitalism. In the last few years, post-Covid, private equity has radically changed the landscape and political economy of the city as well. The transfer of wealth from households to investors, the growth-above-all development ethos, the “public-private” projects promoted by the city of Atlanta, exemplify what Samuel Stein calls a “Real Estate State” (2019). In the case of Atlanta, governed by what Glen Ford called the “Black misleadership class”, in political power since 1973. Atlanta’s scores — 95/20 in 1980 and in 2019 — in the National Equity Atlas analysis (ratio of household incomes in the top 5% versus the bottom 20%). This unchanging inequality ratio, the highest in the country, is readily evident in its public spaces, amenities, and the quality of life.