The hydro-racial fix in infrastructural regions: Atlanta’s situation in a regional water governance conflict

ABSTRACT

Globally, rapid population growth in cities, regulatory and governance failures, poor infrastructure, inadequate funding for urban water systems, and the impacts of climate change are each rapidly reconfiguring regional hydrosocial relations. In the United States, these hydrosocial reconfigurations tend to reinforce racial inequalities tied to infrastructure, exacerbating environmental injustices. More generally, according to a framework of racial capitalism, infrastructural regions and hydrosocial relations are always already racialized and structured simultaneously by capitalism and racism. In this paper, we integrate hydrosocial and racial justice perspectives with the literature on infrastructural regionalism to examine Atlanta’s position in the so-called tri-state water wars between Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Combining analysis of academic, policy, and legal documents, journalistic accounts, and semi-structured interviews with water conservationists and managers working in Atlanta, we examine conflicts over water use in the infrastructural region of the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint (ACF) river system. We emphasize that the ACF conflict reworks regional hydrosocial relations through territorializations of racial capitalism. We demonstrate how particular discourses that reify Atlanta as a monolith overly simplify the regional dimensions of the crisis, diminishing the views, roles and interventions of diverse actors in the ACF region. We argue that work on infrastructure regionalism and water governance can be deepened through attention to the hydro-racial fix.

KEYWORDS:

• Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint (ACF)
• urban water governance
• hydrosocial
• infrastructure regionalism
• Atlanta
• racial capitalism
• water infrastructure
• hydro-racial fix

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) [award number 1853809] and an International Collaborative Urban Research grant from the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University.