Electrical systems are a central infrastructure of urbanisation, one which can raise living standards and which we need to help reduce carbon emissions. Electricity is a also business, its own fraction of capital, one with a captive market that profits from our everyday lives.
In this episode, Wan Smith and Nikkie Luke join Gareth Fearn to talk about the history and present struggles over electricity in Atlanta, Georgia. They discuss the formation of the monopoly, investor owned utility, its role in the city and the state, the relationship between the utility and government through the Public Service Commission, and how electricity fits into the wider political economy of the US South. We also discuss how citizens in Atlanta have long contested the utility, fighting the racial and economic injustices the utility had been complicit in producing from trolley-car segregation through to the present day fight over hyperscale data-centre development.
Guests
Nikki Luke
Nikki Luke is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee. Her research contributes to conversations around racial capitalism, social reproduction, and urban political ecology with a particular focus on energy in the US South.
She has more than a decade of experience with intersectional movements for a just transition and currently serves on the advisory boards of Knoxville Water and Energy for All and Labor at the Table.
Nikki is the author of Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy (MIT Press, 2026).
Wan Smith
Wan Smith is an urban anthropologist and PhD candidate at Georgia State University. Her research interests include emancipatory research, liberation movements, and racial capitalism.
Much of Wan’s purpose, preparation, and perspective comes as a result of being born in the 1980s and raised in the inner city of Cleveland, Ohio. As a former strategist, community organizer, and public theologian Wan is pursuing transdisciplinary ethnographic research to contribute to a community centric-model to address persistent poverty and income inequality in Atlanta that can be replicated in other Black cities.
Host
Gareth Fearn
Gareth Fearn is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. His research analyses energy, housing and planning by combining approaches from Political Economy and Geography. Gareth’s current project focuses on the British electricity system and the energy crisis.
He is the co-editor (with Güldem Özatağan & Ayda Eraydin) of a recent special issue for Urban Studies on ‘Authoritarian Neoliberal Urbanism’. A full list of his papers, writing and podcasts are available at: https://garethfearn.com/
Additional Links
Cleveland Avenue: Roots, Ruin, Resistance
Smith, W. R., & Phillips, K. D. (2026). Energy Justice, Electric Cooperatives, and the Postplantation Fight for Freedom. Transforming Anthropology.
Smith, W. R. and Luke, N. (2026). WE THE PLUG THO: Energy Democracy and the Politics of Social Reproduction in Atlanta. Int. J. Urban Reg. Res.
Jones, E. (2026, November 3). Democrats flip control of Georgia utility commission for first time in decades. WABE.