1. Greenwashed Atlanta

Framing Capitalism in Place:
A Marxist Travel Guide

Greenwashed Atlanta

Capitalizing on Sustainability

Introduction

Before diving into this essay, I need to explain why it is "way too long," as a photographer friend of mine whose opinion I respect has told me more than once. "Off-Green Atlanta" is the first photo project I undertook after returning from Italy, and my first attempt to write an essay for a gallery. Reading over it now, I can see that old habits die hard. It is very much a monographic case study of the sort I used to write during my academic career. Which is to say it is packed with details. You might find these interesting or tedious, depending on your tolerance for close analysis. If I had it to do over again, I would chop it in half.

Yet, writing this essay served two important purposes for which I am grateful. In addition to showing me that I would have to cut back on the word count if I hoped to write essays for the other galleries, it gave me something to do and a sense of direction during the outbreak of coronavirus. So if you find yourself wondering why anyone would feel compelled to go on and on about a rather insignificant creek, keep in mind that I was writing my way through the pandemic. "Whatever gets you thru the night," as the late John Lennon said.

A second point I'd like to make concerns the photographs in this gallery. I feel they lack something. What? I'll call it "pop," for lack of a better word. The same friend who urged me to condense the essay also advised me to bury the gallery at the end of the website, where it would invite less attention. (Ouch! that hurt.)

There are several possible reasons for lack of visual pizazz. One is that I was just getting back to photography after a trial separation and hadn't yet knocked off all of the rust. Another is that my heart has never been in nature photography, at least of the conventional National Geographic sort. But the most compelling explanation is that I couldn't get close to anyone during those narcotizing days of social distancing; strangers were especially off limits. Nothing gives me a more satisfying charge of adrenalin than flitting from personal space to personal space, exchanging pleasantries with some person I'll photograph and never see again, or going total Ninja so that I can silently steal a candid shot before vanishing into thin air. None of this was going to happen during the lockdown, and my pictures provide visual evidence that documentary and street photography suffer when they are deprived of the bump and grind of people moving in space.

Now that I have made my mea culpas and confessed my sins, let me introduce you to the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.

It is an unassuming body of water that flows fifteen miles through the east side of metro Atlanta, skirting the neighborhood in unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, where Allyson and I have lived for the past thirty years. Our walks along the creek's trails are a long-standing ritual and pleasant break from the daily grind. But they became something more during the COVID-19 pandemic, which arrived not long after the two of us retired from teaching with big plans to see the world. Those plans went poof as the coronavirus spread, leaving us, in the sage words of the singer Meat Loaf, "all revved up with no place to go." Not a good recipe for mental health or late-life marital contentment. Fortunately for us, the creek was there as an emotional lifeline. Each morning, right after breakfast, we put the pandemic behind us for an hour or two, and set out to explore the ribbon of trails, paths, boardwalks, and pedestrian bridges that run alongside the South Fork and two of its feeders, Burnt Fork Creek and Peavine Creek. It was as easy as stacking the dishes in the kitchen sink, walking to the end of our block, and turning down an unpaved trail that leads to Emory University’s Lullwater Preserve. A few minutes later, we were standing on the banks of the South Fork with miles and miles of urban nature before us.

If you read the "Italian Getaway" essay, you know that we returned to Atlanta in November 2019 after a month-long trip to Italy. While I continued to grieve the recent death of my parents and the miserable fate of the Task Force for the Homeless and its downtown shelter, photography turned out to be a good coping mechanism. One of the first things I did on our return was buy a camera that packed all the digital firepower I could ever want, need or desire into a body that was actually smaller than Allyson's smartphone. This inconspicuous piece of ninja technology was specifically designed for the kind of up-close street photography I did in Italy and hoped to continue doing now that I was back home.

Guess what? COVID-19 didn't give a good goddamn about my photography. No more street photography for me, not until vaccinations became available, herd immunity kicked in, social distancing protocols were relaxed, and I could safely jump back into the crowd. For the time being my pictures would be of the distanced, documentary sort. In other words, they would tell a story. The question was, what story?

The answer, as you know by now, is the story of the capitalist production of place. My interest in capitalism goes back a long way. Coming of age in suburban Southern California during the Sixties, I became convinced that the two seminal events through which many of my generation came to know the world, the Vietnam War and the Watts Rebellion, had something to do with capitalism. Later on, I entered graduate school at Northwestern with vague ambitions of combining anticapitalist activism and historical scholarship. One of my sharpest memories of those years was getting on the L Train and making the trip downtown to attend meetings of the Young Socialist Alliance, where every male in attendance seemed to be doing his best Trotsky impersonation. A room bristling with Van Dyke goatees. (I preferred the full-bearded, Jerry Garcia look.) These youthful encounters with Marx's critique of capitalism were slapdash and superficial but no less meaningful for that. Anti-capitalism had somehow found its way into my bloodstream. Decades would pass, however, before I seriously engaged with Marxist theory as a way to analyze the internal dynamics of capitalism. This happened down the home stretch of my academic career when I was in my fifties and trying to understand the larger structures of power that had issued their fatwa against the Task Force for the Homeless. Thinking I could benefit from a refresher on the inner workings of the misnamed "city too busy to hate," I volunteered to teach a course on the history of Atlanta which was cross-listed with the Department of Geosciences. (Trade secret: professors often sign up to teach a subject not because they know a lot about it but because they would like to.) In constructing a syllabus and reading list that straddled the history/geography divide, I discovered Marxist geography. This was an epiphany on par with my discovery of photography. I was soon immersed in a rich body of theoretical and empirical literature, whose leading light over the last forty years has been David Harvey, and which explained to my satisfaction how the dynamics of capital accumulation shape the spatial formation of contemporary cities. Looking over the PowerPoint lectures I created for that course, I now realize they were a rough draft for "Places of Capitalism."

COVID-19 only strengthened my conviction that capitalist place production was a story worth telling on a photo website. When the new coronavirus came roaring out of Wuhan's wet market in early 2020, two years after I taught my last Atlanta course, it seemed to confirm everything I had learned from Harvey and his colleagues about the process of place production under capitalism. The zoonotic spillover furnished a textbook case of how capitalism shapes the physical landscape of the world in its own image, with no regard for the environmental and epidemiological consequences of its reproduction on an ever-larger scale. Propelled by the logic of endless accumulation, capitalism attempts to solve its internal contradictions through a combination of geographical expansion and spatial fixes, resulting in what ecologist Andreas Malm calls a condition of "chronic emergency." He is referring to the double-sided emergency of global sickening and global heating, whose epicenter is to be found in the world's endangered rainforests from Malaysia to the Amazon. Capitalist accumulation strategies of unregulated deforestation, corporatized resource extraction, and planetary urbanization (or slumification) create the enabling conditions for pathogens like coronavirus to jump from their reservoir hosts (bats above all) to human populations. Zoonotic spillover was the inevitable consequence of human settlements coming into ever closer contact with previously isolated wildlife, their habitats, and the microorganisms they carry around in their bodies like so many stowaways. As the escalating offensive against the rainforests continues to do irreparable harm to one of the globe's great carbon sinks, the floodgates are opened to more greenhouse gas emission, more biodiversity loss, more desertification, more ocean deoxygenation, more extreme weather, more rising sea levels—in a word, more environmental degradation at every register imaginable. Capital accumulation has fused global sickening and global heating in a lethal feedback loop as human, wildlife, and pathogen populations compete for planet Earth's ever-dwindling supply of livable space. Corona and CO2, it turns out, are two sides of the same capitalist coin.

What does all this catastrophic talk have to do with the South Fork? Quite a lot, as it turns out. As it courses through the densely developed northeast quadrant of metro Atlanta, this creek offers a good perch from which to observe the logic and limits of the capitalist production of urban nature.

Photos 1-12, The Golden Age of Capitalism

The South Fork snakes under, around, and through a physical landscape that has been accumulating layer upon layer like a coral reef since the late nineteenth century. Most of what you see in Photos 1-12 was constructed during the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism between 1945 and 1973. This was a historical moment when it could be truly said that capitalism delivered the goods for citizens from all walks of life: corporate earnings were robust and America’s competitive position in the world was unchallenged; union-negotiated contracts drove wages up each year along with overtime pay and benefits; Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies managed more often than not to find the sweet spot between acceptable levels of inflation and full employment; racial disparities of wealth and income, while deeply entrenched, loosened their grip as union representation and the Civil Rights movement increased black bargaining power and opened the doors to middle class status. Never before had so large a portion of a nation’s population experienced such dramatic improvement in their material standard of living. Yet the economic gains of the Golden Age came at a high cost when weighed against the environmental damage they inflicted. The two centers of economic growth during these years—the military-industrial complex and the suburbs—became increasingly co-dependent as weapons manufacturers migrated to small towns like Marietta, home of Lockheed Martin, less than twenty miles from the South Fork. Good jobs in mass-production industries enabled working-class families to buy suburban homes and cars. Lots and lots of cars. The Department of Defense and Levittown-style bedroom communities roared like a two-cylinder engine, consuming vast quantities of fossil fuel with little concern for the greenhouse gases pouring out the tail pipe. The building of the suburbs and the transportation system linking them to central business districts was a classic case of the spatial-political fix. It put Americans back to work, ginned up consumer demand, absorbed large quantities of surplus capital and labor which postwar policy-makers feared might precipitate a major economic crisis, perhaps even another depression.

During the Golden Age the built environment of Atlanta was increasingly reconfigured around the automobile. Any patch of green that stood in the path of progress was no match for the vehicularization of American life. Photos 1-4 tells the story. Originally constructed in the 1950s as a four-lane highway and expanded at regular intervals afterwards, Interstate 85 forms the central element of the concrete canopy that covers parts of both the South and North Forks, close to the “confluence” where the waters of Peachtree Creek proper begin their journey to the Chattahoochee River and, ultimately, to the Gulf of Mexico. The motorists who make their daily commutes from the northern suburbs to downtown and back can’t see the water below, just as nature walkers and wildlife can’t see the traffic above. Two tightly sealed worlds cohabiting the same space. This network of overpasses and flyovers provides an irresistible canvas for graffiti artists to display their work and, in the case of Nelson “Nels” Guzman, pay their respects to one of their own who was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 2020 (Photo 3). If you look closely at the upper-right corner of Photo 2, you might be able to spot one of the many homeless encampments which have become an established feature of the creek’s human geography. The same postwar infrastructure that enables some people to drive to and from home is, for others, home itself. The lightly regulated pattern of postwar growth turned many stretches of the creek into a simple drainage ditch as developers replaced the natural habitat of the banks and wetlands with a new ecosystem suburban housing, shopping centers, and apartment complexes.

The mainlines of accumulation dynamics in the Golden Age are encapsulated in Photos 5-8. What you see here is the parking structure of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a heroic architectural form testifying to the triumph of automobiles in postwar America. Wedged between Clairmont Road and the South Fork, the VA opened its doors in 1966, catalyzing a frenzy of commercial development in the surrounding area which until then had been, in the words of one reporter, a blanket of “green fields and dense woods.” The VA projected military might abroad, suburban comfort at home, social mobility thanks to the GI Bill, and an indulgent attitude toward the environmental costs of economic growth. Chiming with the Promethean triumphalism of the time, the architects and engineers who designed the VA parking structure, and the public officials who gave it their blessing, thought nothing of driving pilings straight into the creek itself, in “violation of local building codes, and ignoring the list of don’ts of flood prevention,” as David R. Kaufman observes in his useful book Peachtree Creek: A Natural and Unnatural History of Atlanta’s Watershed. I thought a lot about the best way to photograph this particular environmental transgression. The reflections of the parking structure in the creek (Photos 5, 6, and 7) will give you a sense of just how hellbent the VA was to pour concrete over every last inch of the creek bank.

In Photos 9-12, we encounter the advertising industry, which grew in lockstep with the automobile industry and commuter suburbs, making its own distinctive contribution to the creek’s vehicularized ecosystem. It seeded the streets and major thoroughfares with billboards that sprouted like an invasive species in the sightlines of the South Fork. Here was more tempting canvas for law firms (Photo 9), storage facilities (Photo 10), plumbers (Photo 11), and highwire graffiti artists to leave their signatures (Photo 10)

Section 13-24, The Infrastructural Crisis

The Golden Age of Capitalism is over, but the physical infrastructures that were its crowning glory are still with us and getting ever closer to their expiration date. In this section, I present the South Fork as a microcosm of the infrastructural crisis facing American cities today. Photos 13-20 provide a glimpse of DeKalb County’s embattled sewer system. In 2010 federal and state regulators brought suit against the county for failing to address the sorry state of its sewers, which were prone to backups and regularly spilled raw sewage into creeks and rivers, all in violation of the Clean Water Act. The situation was especially dire for DeKalb’s predominantly black neighborhoods in the vicinity of the South River, one of the most heavily polluted bodies of water in metro Atlanta. In a 2011 consent decree, county officials were given until 2020 to make the necessary repairs and upgrades, which costed out at over two billion dollars. It soon became clear that DeKalb would never meet its deadline given the hefty price tag and the sheer magnitude of the crisis. Nor did it help matters when the Department of Watershed Management was caught in a pay-to-play scandal, while the county commission struggled to overcome the class and racial divisions that have long bedeviled DeKalb County politics. A new consent decree was hammered out in 2017, extending the deadline another ten years, threatening fines for non-compliance, and requiring the county to devise a system for identifying and prioritizing the most urgently needed projects.

One such project that jumped to the head of the line was a mile-long stretch of sewer main running along the South Fork and on land belonging to Emory University, an institutional powerhouse that has a reputation for being in but not of DeKalb County. With a price tag of $5.33 million and an estimated start-to-finish time of nine months, the Emory Sewer Project kicked off in early 2022. It proceeded in two stages. Photos 13-16 shows stage one: we see an official notice of a sewage spill from a manhole adjacent to the creek, work crews who rotated in and out from such faraway places as the East Tennessee Mountains and the Louisiana Bayou, and the temporary polyethylene bypass lines that were set in place to carry pumped wastewater around the one-mile-stretch of the sewer main while it was being worked on. Quartet 17-20 shows stage two: the crews used a heavy-duty winch and strong backs to insert a resin-saturated felt tube lining into the aging 48-inch ductile iron sewer main. The tube was then inflated with steam, causing the lining to adhere to the inside of the iron pipe as it “cured in place,” to use the industry jargon. The final step in the process was the removal of the tube, bypass lines, and pumps.

What, then, does $5.33 million buy a county government caught in the crossfire of an aggrieved public, an impatient judge, and a rundown sewer system that pollutes the waterways? Lipstick on a pig is what a cynic might say. And when we consider the thickness of the cured plastic lining—about a tenth of an inch—it’s hard to deny that the cynic might have a point. Industry spokespeople will tell you that the plastic lining can last up to a century, which might be true if tree roots don’t find their way into the pipe as they are known to do, and if ground movement doesn’t cause the pipe to crack as it often does, and if the old iron pipe doesn’t continue to rust and fall apart from the outside in as the laws of physics tell us is altogether possible. I’m no chemical engineer, so I won’t weigh in on the technical pros and cons of curing in place as an answer to the problem of DeKalb’s crumbling sewer system. But all sides agree that the most persuasive selling point of this particular panacea is that it’s cheaper—a lot cheaper—than digging up and replacing the old sewer line. The truth of the matter is that in today’s political climate of low taxes, lean budgets, and a hollowed-out regulatory state, the infrastructural crisis is here to stay. Barring a radical change in the way we build new physical infrastructures, maintain old ones, and finance all of them, the crisis will only get worse. Everybody knows this, but don’t expect anyone in a position of authority to say it out loud. While physical infrastructures can serve as a spatial-political fix for the overaccumulation problem, as they did during the Golden Age, they can also become a barrier to future fixes when the cost of tearing down the old built environment to make way for the new is prohibitively high. In the present conjuncture of permanent infrastructural crisis, spatial fixes no longer offer the same bang for the buck, setting the stage for more, and more severe, crises of overaccumulation.

Photos 21-24 shifts our perspective from below- to above-ground infrastructure. The pair of bridges in these photos carry vehicles across the South Fork, trains in one case, and cars in the other. Wear and tear on the CSX trestle bridge at Old Briarcliff Way led to the decision to upgrade and reinforce one of the support columns flanking the creek (Photos 21 and 22). It was quitting time when I took the pictures of the man in the blue shirt climbing up the scaffolding and walking along the trestle. I had been watching him for a while, my feet planted safely on the ground, as he went about his job, suspended between heaven and earth. He was not a young man, and I tried to imagine myself in his shoes, doing such dangerous work. (I also thought about my kid brother who almost fifty years ago got a summer job as a roofer after graduating from college. He fell through a sky light opening that, according to Occupational Health and Safety Administration guidelines, should have been covered by a sheet of plywood. He broke his back and has been in a wheelchair ever since. This was about the same time Ronald Reagan was elected president on an anti-regulation platform that included gutting OHSA.) As this CSX project was nearing completion, the City of Atlanta elected to tear down and rebuild a ninety-year-old bridge on Cheshire Bridge Road after it was damaged in a fire on August 4, 2021 (Photos 23 and 24). The fire might have been contained were it not for a nearby gas line that suddenly erupted in flames. The Fire Rescue Department reported afterwards that it had found an abandoned homeless encampment, butane gas stoves, sofas, and other combustible materials at the spot under the bridge where the fire began. As this case reveals, the synergies of aging infrastructures and ravaged social services are strung along the creek like beads on a string. Dealing with them is a formidable task, one that is routinely assigned to people who labor in anonymity. Consider the scene I came across and captured in Photo 23. In January 2022 a two-person work team was dispatched by the City of Atlanta’s Department of Watershed Management to remove a champion-size tree floating downstream in the direction of an aerial sewer line that had been left in place after the structurally compromised bridge on Cheshire Bridge Road was torn down. If this hardwood battering ram shattered the pipe and caused a torrent of raw sewage to befoul the creek, city officials would be looking at a new round of EPA fines and a public-relations nightmare. They were already under the gun not only for delays in the completion of the bridge project but also for their failure to make progress on the homelessness crisis. When I asked the stoic in Photo 23 how he felt about having to give up his Saturday to clean up the mess, he told me simply, “It’s what we do.” Eight months later, private contractors sent out another crew to prepare concrete pilings for the new bridge, which would be nested in one of the densest concentrations of homeless encampments in the city (Photo 24). Anyone who knew the first thing about homeless survival strategies would have predicted that this state-of-the-art bridge would end up being, like the one it replaced, a roof over someone's head.

Photos 25-36, Neoliberalism and Green Capitalism

Is there a connection between the South Fork's aging infrastructure and its homeless population? The answer is yes, and it provides a good segue from the last section to this one. Beginning in the 1970s, cities across the US were the target of federal cutbacks that resulted in the drastic reduction, even wholesale elimination, of many programs affecting both physical infrastructures and social services. No longer would Washington pick up the lion's share of the tab for interstates, and the salad days of Great Society social welfare programs targeting black inner-city neighborhoods were over. The resulting urban fiscal crisis devastated the low-income housing market in downtown Atlanta as single-room occupancy hotels charging $5 a night for a room closed down never to reopen again. Thousands of units of affordable housing on which predominantly black day laborers and other precariously employed Atlantans depended vanished virtually overnight. City government, which was headed by a succession of African American mayors after 1973, was helpless in the face of the sea change marking the end of the Golden Age of Capitalism. Today, the legacy of this traumatic transition is visible under the bridges spanning the South Fork.

In Photos 25-36, we follow the creek as it meanders from the Golden Age into the Neoliberal Age. But before beginning our walk through time, I should take a moment to unpack the slippery term neoliberalism which has many interlocking meanings. As political ideology, neoliberalism equates individual freedom with the free market, building on an intellectual tradition associated with Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman. As class politics, it supports capitalist class interests in their battles against unions and other institutional bases of working-class power. As institutional governance, it seeks to create a post-political state on the foundation of public-private partnerships of “stakeholders” who are shielded from direct democracy and committed to market-driven solutions to every problem imaginable, be it economic, social, or environmental. As individual subjectivity, it celebrates the entrepreneur who conflates a person's life with a business enterprise requiring round-the-clock management of one’s own personal stock of “human capital.” And as a form of capitalist urbanism, neoliberalism interweaves ideology, politics, governance, and subjectivity into a structurally coherent if contradictory way of life. While the economic recession of 1973-1975 marked the dividing line between the Golden Age and the Neoliberal Age of Capitalism, neoliberalism as a distinctive regime of accumulation did not come fully into its own until the Eighties and Nineties, when free-market ideologues set up camp in the Reagan-Clinton White House. From there they sallied forth as the bipartisan vanguard of a movement to dismantle the postwar Keynesian welfare state. The end game of the neoliberal "counter revolution" was, and remains, the creation of a world market in which capital moves freely in search of fresh profits.

In the years since 1973 cities like Atlanta have become a central site of the neoliberal counter-revolution and its associated spatial fix. They have provided a testing ground for post-political forms of governance as well as long-term investment outlets for huge masses of surplus capital that have accumulated with the financialization of the economy, the globalization of production, the rise of a rentier class, and the inherent tendency of capitalism to overaccumulate. Cities have also become ground zero for the ever-deepening financial crises and economic inequalities that have kept global capitalism on a knife edge throughout the Neoliberal Age. In the face of these challenges, capitalism has once again revealed its extraordinary capacity for reinventing itself. The years since the Great Recession of 2007-2008, the worst financial and economic crisis in half a century, have witnessed the rapid rise of "green capitalism," a new discourse and model of urban development predicated on the idea that economic growth and environmental protection are not only compatible but profitable as well. The growing popularity of green speak among major policy-makers and powerful business interests has also reflected a calculated strategy of containing the crisis of legitimacy that threatened to spin out of control as anti-neoliberal protest movements like Occupy Wall Street gathered momentum at the local and global levels. The South Fork might seem a long way from these massive structural shifts but no place on earth, no matter how small or remote, was immune from the political-economic crisis precipitated by the Great Recession.

A trio of new development projects hugging the South Fork puts neoliberal urbanism and green capitalism in full view. All three required the demolition of physical structures dating from the 1960s, and thus show how the reinvention of capitalism in the Neoliberal years entailed the creative destruction of the postwar built environment. In Photos 25-28, we see a dense, multi-family housing development that includes the independently-owned and operated Piedmont Heights Apartments, Sorelle Apartments, and Sera Townhomes. They are built on the site of what used to be Lindmont Apartments, which you might remember me mentioning in "My Italian Getaway." In case you don't, this was a postwar complex that in its final years housed an immigrant colony from the small Mexican town of San Marcos in the state of Guerrero. When I visited San Marcos in 2005 to interview family members of Lindmont renters, the recently elected mayor told me that he had made a transnational campaign stop at Lindmont, or San Marquitos, as he called it. San Marquitos is no more, its people having returned home to Mexico or flocked up Buford Highway and into Gwinnett County, searching for the steadily dwindling stock of rental housing that is within their means. Four miles east of old Lindmont is the second project, Parkside at Mason Mill (Photos 29-32), a townhouse development that is nearing completion on the site of another older apartment complex built in 1965. It is doubtful that the displaced tenants will ever return to Parkside, where townhomes start at half a million dollars. In Photos 33-36, I aim the camera at the third project, North DeKalb Mall, two miles east of Parkside. Opened with great fanfare in 1966, this was the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned mall in Atlanta, and included a movie theater that eventually became one of those rare spaces in DeKalb County where the races gather and socialize together. While blacks live disproportionately south and east of the mall, whites north and west of it, and Indians in both areas, on any given weekend night you’ll find all three groups mixing and mingling at the cinema. Most of the mall is closed now and slated for demolition in 2023, but in a concession to local racial sensibilities the developers have given the movie theater a reprieve and promised to save it from the wrecking ball. This mixed-use project is the largest of the three developments considered here, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to “revitalize” the area, as one member of the county commission describes it. When the project is completed eight to ten years from now, the 70-plus-acre site will include 1,700 multi-family apartments, 100 townhomes, a 150-room hotel, a grocery store, and more than 500,000 square feet of office and retail space.

Nature, the creek, and green sensibilities are big selling points at these properties. Developers are in business to make money, needless to say. If giving their projects a “green sheen” allows them to raise the asking price of their townhomes and charge more for their apartments and commercial space, we shouldn’t be surprised when hardened capitalists suddenly start sounding like doe-eyed members of the local Sierra Club. Neoliberal urbanism targets the millennial market, the age cohort that is featured in promotional advertisements at the three South Fork projects: the yogi in full lotus at Piedmont Heights (Photo 25), the youth and beauty brigade sharing a drink at Parkside (Photo 29), even the megachurch pastor and his wife enthroned in a movie poster at North DeKalb Mall (Photo 33). The real estate industry is betting big bucks that millennials will pay top dollar for the lifestyle vibe of “live-work-play” communities where shopping, dining, entertainment, recreation, and work are all close at hand. These wholistic oases, according to the hype, enable young professionals to trade in their cars for bicycles, scooters, rollerblades. Goodbye road rage and gas-guzzling commutes, hello centeredness and connection with the natural word. Here's a typical sales pitch from one of the developments: “Parkside at Mason Mill, located in-town, with plenty of outdoor amenities. This new construction community is made for city and nature-lovers alike.” The best of both worlds is the promise of green capitalism.

Developers know that the pitch won’t sell without a slice of greenspace within walking distance of their properties. Photo 28 shows the $2.5 million Confluence Bridge, whose ribbon-cutting ceremony took place on December 14, 2021, giving the residents of Sorelle, Piedmont Heights, and Serra access to the South Fork’s network of paths and trails. On a smaller scale, the Parkside development has a rusticated entryway to the South Peachtree Creek Trail (Photo 32), provided by DeKalb County as part of its effort to open up the trail to apartment and townhome developments along the Clairmont Road and North Druid Hills Road corridors. The stairs and hand-hewn stepping stones that cross Burnt Fork Creek are designed to withstand flooding without obstructing water flow. The county has installed an identical structure a few miles downstream for the homeowners of the nearby Medlock neighborhood who demanded easier access to the creek and Mason Mill Park, in no small part because such access promised to lift property values which were still reeling from the effects of the Great Recession. The strategy of leveraging the creek to subsidize commercial development and satisfy neighborhood demands for greenspace is evident in the recent announcement by the county commission that it will pony up half a million dollars to extend the South Peachtree Creek Trail from Medlock Park, where it currently ends, to the future mega-development at North DeKalb Mall. For developers, the county, renters and homeowners, the creek is a win-win-win-win. Green capitalism has no place for losers.

Yet these neoliberal projects embody a contradiction. While marketed as models of environmental sensitivity and sustainability, they put the creek’s health and well-being at risk by overloading the carrying capacity of infrastructures that cannot handle existing demands, much less those of densely packed, live-work-play clusters that seem to be the wave of the future. A developer seeking an immediate return on her investment, and subject to what Karl Marx called “the coercive laws of competition,” has powerful incentives to offload environmental costs on the community rather than budgeting for them. Of course, elected officials are well aware that continued growth along the creek will increase the strain on an already buckling watershed management system, but none of them is going to question the growth imperative, which is a sacred cow for private developers and public officials alike. If the ideology of growth is the universal common sense of the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism, Photo 31 provides visual evidence of where this common sense can lead. What should we make of this stormwater discharge pipe, which is located at the lowest point of the steeply sloped Parkside property and empties directly into Burnt Fork Creek? The Parkside developers tout their “storm water quality program” in sign postings on the site, warning building contractors and workers that any damage done to “sediment and erosion control measures” is punishable by fines and imprisonment. Strong words. But this ominous-looking pipe, which seems to be biding its time until the next downpour and messy discharge, does not inspire confidence in the storm water management measures put in place by the Parkside developers and approved by the county. Offloading the environmental costs of private development is not the monopoly of green capitalism or any particular regime of capitalist accumulation, golden or neoliberal. Nor is it symptomatic of some moral failing on the part of capitalists and officials. Externalizing costs is what capitalists do, and must do, if they want to turn a profit. It is what county officials accept, and must accept, if they want to balance their budgets and keep their jobs. And it is what most of the rest of us ignore, and must ignore, if we want to get a good night's sleep, comforted by the belief that everything will work out because capitalism benefits everyone in the end. Not to put too fine a point on it: this is how the capitalist mode of production works.

Section 37-48, Green Infrastructure

In this section, we take a closer look at the latticework of new infrastructure that has been creeping like a wild vine around the creek since the Great Recession. And as we do so, let's also remember that capitalism finds a temporary remedy for its tendency to overaccumulate in spatial fixes which displace surplus capital into the urban built environment generally and into physical infrastructures in particular. The spatial fix of the Golden Age produced, as we have seen, steel-reinforced, concrete infrastructures like I-85 and the VA parking deck. What we see in this section is a new iteration of the spatial fix operating under conditions of capitalist restructuring and the neoliberal counter-revolution. In contrast with the transportation infrastructure of the Golden Age which served to corral and conceal the creek, today’s pedestrian bridges, stepping stones, boardwalks, multi-use concrete paths, and unpaved trails seek to pry open the South Fork and make it visible to multiple publics. But as the cases of the Sorelle, Piedmont Heights, Parkside, and North DeKalb Mall projects suggest, it would be a mistake to think that green infrastructure represents a technological, environmental, or moral advance over the hulking brown infrastructure of the postwar years simply because its declared aim is to conserve and visibilize an "authentic" nature. No less than its Golden Age predecessors, the green infrastructural projects of our neoliberal times are less about conserving nature in its original and pristine state than about molding it into a form compatible with capitalism's need to reproduce itself on a larger and larger scale.

Green infrastructure exemplifies the concept of the political fix that was discussed in "The Theory and Concepts." To refresh your memories this is what I wrote there: "The triumph of neoliberalism over the last forty years has shifted the locus of capitalist governance from state managers, competing interest groups, and citizen voters to public-private partnerships, quasi-public entities, and non-governmental organizations whose legitimacy rests on their claim to speak for so-called community 'stakeholders.' Imported from the business world, this last term imagines politics as a consensual negotiation among asset holders who are not quite public, not quite private, and certainly not accountable in any strict democratic sense. In the policy arena of place-making, the neoliberal reconfiguration of governance works in favor of a small circle of stakeholders—real estate interests, financial institutions, large corporations and their philanthropic arms, and other groups endowed with the necessary economic and political resources to navigate the ins and outs of what Harvey calls 'urban entrepreneurialism.'" In the realm of green infrastructure, mainstream environmental nonprofits serve as both creatures and creators of the political fix. Not only are they ultimately beholden to corporate donors, which keeps them from straying too far from business priorities, but they operate in a shadowy domain of governance where it is de rigueur to forge working alliances and collegial relations with the privileged stakeholders whose growth-at-any-cost outlook is at odds with any environmentalist agenda worthy of the name. The temptation for all environmental nonprofits is to play the growth game in the hope of winning small concessions—a trail extension here, a pocket park there, a pedestrian bridge somewhere else. Co-optation is an ever-present hazard under neoliberal governance because, as we all know, if you play the game long enough, you forget it’s a game.

(Continued in Part 2)

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Framing Capitalism in Place: A Marxist Travel Guide

Greenwashed Atlanta

Capitalizing on Sustainability

Framing Capitalism in Place:
A Marxist Travel Guide