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An Infrastructural Regionalism Reading of Atlanta’s Water Crisis

Jean-Paul Addie


On the morning of 31 May 2024, a major water transmission line below Joseph E. Boone Boulevard west of Downtown Atlanta burst, leaving much of the city without water. Overnight, two further (unconnected) water mains breaks in Midtown and another on the city’s eastside compounded the issue. Failures across Atlanta’s water infrastructure impacted critical services, with several of the city’s hospitals, the Fulton County Jail, major tourist attractions, and multiple neighborhoods experiencing water outages and low water pressure over the following days. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens (eventually) declared a state of emergency on 1 June, releasing additional city resources to help address the situation. Maintenance crews from City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management worked diligently over the following hours and days to complete emergency repairs and gradually restore pressure to the system. Boil advisories issued by Atlanta Watershed remained in effect for much of the city until 6 June when sampling finally confirmed public water met federal Environmental Protection Agency standards and could be used for all purposes.


A map of the area affected by the Atlanta boil water advisory June 3, 2024.
Atlanta Water Outage Update, from City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management https://www.atlantaga.gov/government/departments/watershed-management/dwm-boil-water-emergency

While the results were dramatic, Atlanta’s bursting water pipes were hardly a surprise. The city frequently jerks between short-term interventions to deep structural crises (Borden, 2014). Boil advisories, sinkholes, and flooding are chronic occurrences. Atlanta’s combined infrastructure system is antiquated. The City itself has been under a consent decree from the federal government since 1998 in an attempt to ensure it provides safe drinking water for residents. Violations to the Clean Water Act have resulted in fines running into millions of dollars. Water management issues and a brief failed privatization have left Atlantans paying some of the nation’s highest water rates (Milligan et al., 2024, p. 872). Under Shirley Franklin, Mayor of Atlanta from 2002-2010, the city invested $2 billion to address sewer overflow issues and an additional $1 billion to improve drinking water. This included major capital projects but, as Franklin noted when commenting on the summer 2024 failures, the operation and management of a function water infrastructure requires on-going investment and maintenance; “We built a reservoir. We built a water treatment facility. We lined pipes. We bought equipment. We did training… But those are things that you have to continue to do”. Subsequent mayoral administrations have struggled to keep up this challenge, even if elements of city leadership are aware of the issues. As Atlanta’s current Chief Operating Officer LaChandra Burks put it, “Our infrastructure is crumbling, and we do know that and we take no arguments against that”. Galvanizing political support for banal infrastructural maintenance and upgrading is rarely a winning political issue – that is, until they stop working (Graham, 2010).


Atlanta’s pipeline story is indicative of wider trends. The U.S. and Canada experience approximately 260,000 water pipe breaks per year, with an annual cost of $2.6 billion (Barfuss, 2023). The frequency of such break is a clear reminder that water – and other vital infrastructures – across the United States are aging (Walling, 2024). This is problematic on a number of fronts. First, a lack of investment and system upgrades means the infrastructures through which drinking and waste water flow are reaching the end of their functional lifespan. The average of age failing water mains is 53 years – and a third of American and Canadian water mains (roughly 770,000 miles of pipes) are over 50 years old (Barfuss, 2023, p. 6). The corroded pipes that failed across Downtown and Midtown were installed close to a century ago, with one laid in the ground as early as 1883. As the cases of Flint, Michigan and Jackson Mississippi have tragically shown, the consequence of aged unlined pipes can be deadly (Silver, 2021). Second, the design and capacity of Atlanta’s water and sewerage infrastructure was not intended to accommodate demands of a sprawling 21st century metropolis. Decades of expansive urbanization and population growth across the Atlanta metropolitan area have ramped up demand for water while the pouring of concrete and asphalt exacerbates the challenges posed by stormwater runoff. The desire it increase population density in the city of Atlanta, in addition to the impacts of global climate change – rising temperatures, extended drought, heavy storms and urban heat island effects – will all place further strain on the 2,000 plus miles of sewer lines that run under its streets.


This spatial and demographic growth discloses the importance of taking a regional look at Atlanta’s water pipeline crisis, contextualizing the city’s experience between immediate local impacts and broad national trends. Alongside the city’s bursting pipes, the Atlanta region is embroiled in an on-going ‘water war’ with surrounding states and agricultural communities downstream over access to water in the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint (ACF) river system over access. These crises are connected through the intertwining of infrastructure provision (or the lack thereof), racial disparities, and uneven development of multiple overlapping regionalisms. Milligan et al. (2024) note that while questions of Atlanta’s racial diversity have largely been absent the regional imaginary of the tri-state catchment area, the region’s hydro-social relations remain fundamentally structured at the intersection of racism and capitalism. The history of water management in Atlanta is one of environmental racism. Jim Crow engineers attempted to control water flows in the city to ensure wastewater from Black communities would not follow into white neighborhoods (Elmore, 2010). Historically Black neighborhoods like Summerhill subsequently developed across Atlanta’s flood plains, meaning low-income communities of color were disproportionately prone to flooding events. These racialized water geographies were worsened as white flight through the mid-20th century deprived the City of the funds needed to maintain (let alone update) its water and sewerage systems at the same time as it spurred ecologically unsustainable suburban expansion. Metropolitan growth into the 21st century continued to place more demand on the region’s water resources, but now this is matched by the rapid gentrification of historically black and flood-prone neighborhoods. Green-infrastructure projects, including the development of stormwater parks and reservoirs like Westside Park, catalyze further displacement in the city’s communities of color.


The overlaying of regional housing markets, water systems, and urbanization trend and Atlanta’s local jurisdiction until illustrates how water infrastructures are imbricated in complex political, economic, and environmental systems. They regional dimension either transcend neat administrative boundaries (as in the case of watersheds) or importantly situates distinctly placed events and experiences (as with pipeline breaks and disrupted service) within a wider spatial and historical context (Glass et al., 2024). NOIR’s analytical framing of “infrastructural regionalism” (Addie et al., 2020) helps identify and describe have ostensibly urban infrastructures, like Atlanta’s, are brought into being through uneven territorialization processes (Karvonen, 2024) while also forcing us to consider whose interests are centered, or excluded, in debates over water infrastructure and regional futures. The Biden Administration’s flagship ‘Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’ (H.R. 3684) – commonly known as the ‘Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’ – for example, offers a tantalizing opportunity to access the large-scale capital needed to undertake vital renovations to America’s decaying pipelines, but local governments – typically fragmented in the United States – still need to invest to bridge infrastructural funding gaps. Raising water rates or implementing stormwater fees is one way to attempt to keep pace with infrastructural repairs and maintenance, but as Milligan et al (2024) argue in Atlanta, the city’s already high rates are currently contributing to racialized displacement pressures. Privatization is another approach that has been attempted in Atlanta with disastrous implications for residents (Hardy, 2014). More broadly, Ponder’s (2021) work on racial capitalism and municipal bond markets in North America reveals that since 1999, Majority-Black cities have been charged disproportionately more than Majority-white cities to finance infrastructural improvements. The conflation between territorialized Blackness and financial risk engenders both spectacular instances of racialized infrastructural violence and more abstract instances of financial violence that reveal the embedded historical inequities of urban infrastructure and perpetuate racialized injustice into the future (Ponder & Omstedt, 2022; Silver, 2021).


June 2024’s water mains crisis has put the question of fixing Atlanta’s water system back on the city’s political agenda. Adopting a regional perspective discloses the geographies of racism and histories of uneven development have fundamentally led Atlanta to this current juncture. Atlanta’s water crises, both historical and contemporary, have impacted differing communities to varied degrees. Infrastructural vulnerability in Atlanta is raced and classed. These inequities will likely be reinforced by the deepening impact of the global climate crisis, acceleration of gentrification, and the geography of investment through which staged repairs and upgrades are rolled out into the future – water systems cannot be replaced wholesale at once. The task of financing infrastructural repair work and materially upgrading Atlanta’s water system poses one set of challenges. The interdisciplinary orientation of infrastructural regionalism, though, should attune us to the concomitant environment justice concerned illuminated through diverse regional lives, and the political terrains of representation, mediation, and partnership over which they need to be met (Glass et al., 2024).


References:

Addie, J.-P. D., Glass, M. R., & Nelles, J. (2020). Regionalizing the infrastructure turn: A research agenda. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 7(1), 10-26.


Barfuss, S. L. (2023). Water main break rates in the USA and Canada: A comprehensive study. Utah State University.


Borden, S. (2014). Thirsty City: Politics, Greed, and the Making of Atlanta's Water Crisis. SUNY Press.


Elmore, B. (2010). Hydrology and residential segregation in the postwar South: An environmental history of Atlanta, 1865-1895. The Georgia Historocal Quarterly, 94(1), 30-61.


Glass, M. R., Nelles, J., & Addie, J.-P. D. (2024). A region runs through it: representation, mediation and partnership in regional water infrastructure governance. Territory, Politics, Governance, 12(6), 713-724.


Graham, S. (Ed.). (2010). Disrupted cities: When infrastructure fails. Routledge.

Hardy, E., M. (2014). Maelstrom: Contextualizing the failed privatization of Atlanta's water system. In H. F. Etienne & B. Faga (Eds.), Planning Atlanta (pp. 277-286). Routledge.


Karvonen, A. (2024). Relations, territories, and politics of infrastructural regionalism. Territory, Politics, Governance, 12(6), 884-889.


Milligan, R. C., Adams, E. A., Wheeler, C., Raulerson, S., & Vermillion, N. (2024). The hydro-racial fix in infrastructural regions: Atlanta’s situation in a regional water governance conflict. Territory, Politics, Governance, 12(6), 866-833.


Ponder, C. S. (2021). Spatializing the municipal bond market: Urban resilience under racial capitalism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 111(7), 2112-2129.


Ponder, C. S., & Omstedt, M. (2022). The violence of municipal debt: From interest rate swaps to racialized harm in the Detriot water crisis. Geoforum, 132, 271-280.


Silver, J. (2021). Decaying infrastructure in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3), 756-777.


Walling, D. (2024). Governing infrastructure, development and inequality around deindustrialized US cities. Territory, Politics, Governance, 12(6), 725-745.

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