This special issue seeks to address the history of transit in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States from a multitude of perspectives. We interrogate how and why passenger rail transportation infrastructure, mostly in the form of train, tram and metro lines and stations, was revived in places where it had only very recently been dismantled. To comprehensively answer the questions posed by this subject, we welcome approaches from the history of ideas, political history, cultural history, and the history of science, as well as science and technology studies. The perspectives of practitioners and activists, politicians on various levels, as well as transnational networks of planners, builders, architects, and other experts help paint a varied picture of the ideological, practical, and political machinations that led to a resurgence of infrastructure planning and creation. This occurred at just the moment that, according to overarching narratives of neoliberalization, individualization, and the resultant lack of state funding for big infrastructural projects, rail transport in the United States was markedly at a decline. We look at such projects, both those ultimately completed as well as those only proposed, during the half century from ca. 1970 to 2020, centered on the 1990s, when several transnational developments in transportation infrastructure reached critical mass.
Opened January 1, 2021, New York’s Moynihan Train Hall, a vision in glass and steel, presents itself as an artistic, modern beacon for public transit. Built to expand and improve the aging underground Pennsylvania Station from the 1960s, it is just one example of various transit projects that came to fruition in the past years. These recent projects showcase a trend in urban planning and changing perceptions of public transit as once again modern infrastructure after decades of neglect in the late twentieth century. What is notable is the beginning of the planning phase for Moynihan Train Hall in the early 1990s. This is striking considering the declining interest in public transit on a national level after World War II. Yet, initiatives on the subnational level promoted funding for new projects from the 1960s onward. These initiatives came from a coalition of both local interests and a growing national and international environmental movement which promoted rapid transit as an efficient and environmentally friendly alternative to cars and ever-expanding highways.
Particularly influential in connection with urban planning were the 1991 Ahwahnee Principles by the Local Government Commission, a group of urban planning experts out of California. National laws like the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the Pollution Prevention Act in 1990 contributed to growing interest in public transit and intercity rail. Critics, however, were never far away. In particular, the cost of the proposed projects was often a point of contentious debate, halting some temporarily or preventing realization completely. Likewise, criticism frequently arose regarding who would ultimately benefit from new public transit. Issues of race, class, and political power were and are always intrinsically linked to the life and death of transportation projects.
Several countries, beginning with Italy’s Direttissima line in 1977, began emulating the successful Japanese experiment with high speed rail (the first Shinkansen line had been opened in 1964), notably France with its iconic TGV (1981) and Germany in the 1990s with its ICE network. On the local level, projects included the creation of new metro systems in multiple European cities, in addition to a bourgeoning of often innovative but usually unsuccessful “gadgetbahnen” such as the Detroit People Mover, the Berlin M-Bahn, or the Linimo near Nagoya, Japan. While such projects were often technology demonstrations more than useful modes of interconnected rapid transit, they nonetheless stirred imaginations and provided the background for successful projects such as the Portland Streetcar, planned in the 1990s and opened in 2001, and similar new creations or expansions across the world.
We situate ourselves within literatures addressing urban space and equality during the twentieth century and discourses prevalent in urban planning communities for the past fifty years. Examples include Alan A. Altshuler and David Luberoff’s Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment, Miriam Konrad’s Transporting Atlanta: The Mode of Mobility under Construction, Luca Bertolini and Tejo Spit’s Cities on Rails: The Redevelopment of Railway Stations and Their Surroundings, as well as the edited collections by Julie Cidell and David Prytherch; Transport, Mobility, and the Production of Urban Space, and by Kakuya Matsushima and William P. Anderson; Transportation, Knowledge and Space in Urban and Regional Economics. In addition, we contribute to a slew of recent works reexamining the “neoliberal turn,” such as Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams’s edited collection Shaped by the State, Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, or Quinn Slobodian’s The Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.
By addressing a variety of, sometimes interconnected, cases, we propose that while the reigning governing rationality during the time surveyed may have trended away from large state investment, this did not mean that large scale projects had become unthinkable or altogether impossible. Rather, they mapped onto existing and emerging discourses and patterns of political possibility, allowing alternative futures to what was then beginning to be regarded as the multiple failings of 1950s and 1960s utopias of spatial arrangement, racial, class and gender equity, and mobility.
Among the questions that we ask are: In which ways did projects like Moynihan Train Hall, the Acela system, or local light rail and regional links such as the Brightline project emerge? How did they move from idea to reality, and what were the specific levers of power and interest that made them possible in their specific local (or in terms of politics, delineated regional or national) contexts? What kinds of ideologies surrounded the creation of new infrastructure? How did such projects benefit from, or how were they hindered by respectively salient discourses of progress, economics, sustainability, or nostalgia? Who were the individuals, groups, organizations, and corporate and political entities involved in these projects, and in which ways did they make their influence felt?
These questions call for an interdisciplinary approach. We especially (but not exclusively) invite contributions from history, science and technology studies, and related fields on:
- specific cases of infrastructural development (such as stations, proposed lines, or the rejuvenation/recreation of local tram or regional train lines),
- popular imaginings of the future of mobility,
- political loci and thought horizons in which projects and ideas were discussed,
- the intersections of politics, race, space, transnational connections, and corporate structures,
- changes in public transit or rail proposals once they encountered the restraints of political reality and feasibility,
- political and societal discourses that influenced and in turn were influenced by transit projects
Please send abstracts of ca. 300–500 words and a short biographical blurb (ca. 200 words) by September 30, 2024, to intransit@uni-mainz.de and lina-isabelle.mair@uni-tuebingen.de