Abstract
Reviewed by: Joseph FC DiMento, University of California, USA
I write from Milano, a city of 1.7 million people. Here, I commute to my office. First, I walk along a beautiful pedestrian street. Eighty-year-old men and women peddle by me, on their own or shared bicycles. I take a tram with teenagers, grandmothers, new immigrants and businesspeople on a car of dark woods and antique glass in service since 1927. I transfer to a gleaming subway line. Almost everywhere is accessible by public transit—predictable, efficient and affordable.
The contrast between the transport history of Houston, the subject of Power, to that of Milan is striking. Houston is a city with a population of 2.2 million; there are wide high-speed roads in the region but few dissect the city; Kyle Shelton writes that “a uniform definition of ‘good mobility’ does not exist” (93). In this important book he tries, mostly successfully, to be objective about fair transportation choices and who should make them.
Shelton describes the histories of Houston’s major road building projects during the 1950s and early 1960s, the voter rejection in 1973 of the Houston Area Rapid Transit Authority, and the approval in 1978 of The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Houston and Harris County (METRO), followed by development of a system of toll roads. The different outcomes of the transportation proposals in Houston, Shelton recounts, resulted in part from the actions of an increasingly effective Mexican American population and its occasional coalitions with African Americans, white middle-income people and white suburbanites. Houston is special also because it lacked a dense core and traditional zoning. It was characterized by the “absence of political machines or significant labor unions that could swing political contests [and that] meant that elites could ignore residents on most decisions” (12).
As a history of urban and transportation, Power is a valuable addition to our knowledge of infrastructure decision-making. But Shelton strives to do more. He introduces the concept of “infrastructure citizenship” to explain outcomes. He states that by “transforming elements of the built environment from inert materials into arenas in which they could claim and assert political power, residents crafted a set of rhetorical and political actions that constituted … infrastructural citizenship” (5). Contrasting his work with that on the influences of political elites (such as Jane Jacobs) Shelton writes that rarely have scholars joined these histories or viewed these fights as important conflicts within metropolitan politics and even less often have scholars addressed how residents responded to infrastructure after it was built (10). He attempts to do both.
Does “infrastructure citizenship” help to understand transportation history in Houston and, more generally, in urban history and politics? In places the concept is a bit awkward: “Transportation activists … practiced infrastructure citizenship” (96). On balance, I think that the idea adds value, pulling together understandings of what activities constitute politics and linking them to crucial decisions on how citizens get around and interact. It will be interesting to see if the term and its underlying concept hold up and are used; certainly the politics around the subject will remain important and studied, perhaps more often through other theoretical lenses. Whether it is an enduring construct, remains to be seen.
Power is impressively researched, the arguments being well-evidenced. It is based on comprehensive knowledge of the literature, including government and industry reports, detailed archival work, and appropriate interviews. It is well-written and engaging, and the detail provided makes the story compelling. For example, what was physically taken and condemned, so as to build infrastructure is not abstract: “fourteen beauty salons and barber shops, eleven restaurants and cafes … over 2,000 homes” (76). For the historian of Houston, Power is ideal; for the student of urban transportation, some of the story will not be of great interest. This is however a deep and detailed Houston history, a valuable topic in itself as the city has had an astonishing growth, an uncommon demographic history, and an interesting set of infrastructure challenges, from ports, to light rail, to toll roads.
The book is balanced, only occasionally suggesting a position on what should have been the correct decision on rail and freeways. And while it is tempting to paint the stories of American transportation history in environmental justice terms, as they often should be, it is a delicate matter to adjudicate which decisions have a significant racial animus. Shelton offers: The longevity of Houston’s elite leadership is a legacy of the city’s racist, discriminatory past and still confronts the city in the form of limited political participation and often opaque, elite-driven governance: wealthier, mostly white Americans win; black, Latin, and poorer Americans lose. (13)
Power is appropriately modest in its conclusions. Shelton describes decisions made over a period of decades in a changing city with changing technologies, and infrastructure capabilities and demographics. There is much to say on the subject, and he recognizes this.
How generalizable is Power? What stands out is the similarity in the histories of transportation decision-making in the United States beginning in the 1950s: absence of laws that just years later recognized the input of those affected by infrastructure decisions; the sometimes blatant indifference to the destruction of minority communities, seen as thriving from within and as blighted from the outside; desires to keep a central city vital by creating ways for the new suburbs to connect to the core; racially tinged urban redevelopment or removal; the termination of a functioning older transportation system (street cars); highway campaigns based on grandiose notions of human achievement.
With such an ambitious undertaking, there will be some quibbles; the legal interpretations of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Aid Highway Act and the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency are overly broad, suggesting alternative transportation outcomes (di jure reading) that were unlikely (de facto outcomes).
Ultimately, though, Power can serve as a supplementary text for courses on transportation, transportation history, land use decision-making, urban politics and Houston history. It is difficult not to be discouraged about the prospects of infrastructure democracy because of very different conceptions of the public good (and because of climate change, a result in great part of our transportation choices). But Power shows that democratically achieved positive outcomes, given the right conditions, can sometimes be the result.