‘ARE WE JUST KILLING PEOPLE?’: Centering Racial Capitalism in the Green Gentrification of the Atlanta BeltLine

In this article I argue that any analyses of the manifestations of urban natures within urban political ecology must center racial capitalism as a theoretical framework and account for how these manifestations, which rely upon the co-constitutive workings of race and nature, reproduce anti-Blackness and unequal productions of space. I engage urban frontier imaginative geographies as a lens through which to view the ongoing regimes of dispossession within the historical context of the founding of what is today known as Atlanta and the contemporary greening project of the Atlanta BeltLine. Race and nature intersect to function as instruments of power and converge in the spaces of the Atlanta BeltLine to (re)produce an urban green frontier.