ABSTRACT
The consequential scattering of African American and poor populations amidst and into undesirable urban rings into a Bantustan-like existence, with the added lack of public transportation infrastructure, is what helped to create the Transit Desert, a desert where no guide book could get one through the vast void of opportunity or lack of access. Like deserts anywhere, Transit Deserts were not and are not permanently fixed on their edges in time and place, contracting or expanding as the social and cultural context of the desert shifts. Rather they are the sites of contested and oppositional and often illusive boundaries, signs, and spaces of negotiated ecosystems and urban living. The Transit Desert is an American invention most identifiable by race and neighborhoods as the central organizer of infrastructure, and the development of roads, housing, town centers, and urban cores from the beginnings of urbanism in the United States.
