a definition of infrastructure

Sanford Kwinter's Requiem for the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010). For a fuller look at of the collection of essays, see Dan Hill's post at City of Sound. 

Sanford Kwinter provides a long, winding, but useful definition of what infrastructure is, in his chapter "Urbanism, an Archivist's Art?", on page 59 of the above-mentioned text:

By "infrastructure" one means every aspect of the technology of rational administration that routinizes life, action, and property within larger (ultimately global) organizations. Today it can be argued that infrastructures own a little part of everything. Infrastructure includes the systemic expression of capital, of deregulated currency, interest rates, credit instruments, trade treaties, market forces, and the institutions that enforce them; it includes water, fuel, and electrical reservoirs, routes, and rates of supply; it encompasses demographic mutations and migrations, satellite networks and lotteries, logistics and supply coefficients, traffic computers, airports and distribution hubs, cadastral techniques, juridical routines, telephone systems, business district self-regulation mechanisms, evacuation and disaster mobilization protocols, prisons, and subways and freeways with their articulated connections; it includes libraries and weather-monitoring apparatuses, trash removal and recycling networks, sports stadiums and the managerial and delivery facilities for the data they generate, parking garages, gas pipelines and meters, hotels, public toilets, postal and park utilities and management, school systems and ATM machines; it covers celebrity, advertising and identity engineering, rail nodes and networks, television programming, interstate systems, entry ports and the public goods and agencies associated with them (Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Security Agency, Internal Revenue Service, Food and Drug Administration, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms); it comprises sewers and alarms, the multitiered military-entertainment apparatus, decision engineering pools, wetlands and water basins, civil structure maintenance schedules, epidemiological algorithms, cable delivery systems, police enforcement matrixes, licensing bylaws, greenmarkets, medical-pharmaceutical complexes, internet scaffolds, handgun regulations, granaries and water towers, military deployment procedures, and street and highway illumination schemas; in short, infrastructure concerns regimens of technical calculation of any and all kinds. 

Kwinter's point is useful, that infrastructure is embodied in everything we use - that infrastructural systems touch all aspects of life today, from the scale of the individual to the globe.

exposed: #2 in a series

Corner of Cecil B. Moore Ave. and N. 13th St. Temple University, North Philadelphia.

a USPS facility on the back of a data center

Callowhill and N. 13th St., North Philadelphia. Spring 2011.

Terminal Commerce Building's eleven story high, square-block of data center space at 401 North Broad houses a small post office on the building's backside. After some brief research online, I am not sure if the post office is still in use. Likely the postal facility is a throwback to the building's original use as a furniture wholesale warehouse (click the first link above for more information). Even if the facility is still in use, I doubt this post office sees as much foot traffic today as it did when the building provided space for physical, tangible goods.  This shuttered post office provides an instance of one of the many juxtapositions present in our lives today, where the immaterial connections to other people and places provided through technologies such as a mobile phone and the Internet are more present than the physical connections maintained through a post office and the mail system. This small post office on the backside of the Terminal Commerce Building situates in one location two communication systems: the physical presence of a digital node in the Internet's infrastructural backbone, and a node in the USPS's mail distribution and logistics infrastructure.

AT&T fiber travelling alongside the Amtrak corridor

Woodland Cemetery, West Philadelphia. The wooden marker with the number 5 on top marks an AT&T fiber optic communication cable, possibly the one that travels between Washington DC and Boston. A map of this system is at the long-lines.net website here.   

exposed: #1 in a series

South Broad Street, Philadelphia.

the geography of the rings of Saturn

From W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn:

The small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich first climbed toward the sun before turning west. Spread out beneath us lay one of the most densely-populated regions in Europe, with endless terraces, sprawling satellite towns, business parks and shining glass houses which looked like large quadrangular ice floes drifting across this corner of the continent where not a patch is left to its own devices. Over the centuries the land had been regulated, cultivated, and built on until the whole region was transformed into a geometrical pattern. The roads, water channels and railway tracks ran in straight lines and gentle curves past fields and plantations, basins and reservoirs. Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity, cars glided along the lanes of the motorways, while the ships moving up and down river appeared as if they had been halted for ever. Embedded in this even fabric lay a manor surrounded by its park, the relic of an earlier age. I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals. Along a line that seemed to have been drawn with a ruler a tractor crawled through a field of stubble, dividing it into one lighter and one darker half. Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea. (pages 90-92)

Since the spring semester let out last week, I have been re-reading my favorite of Sebald's works, for the first time since 2004. Returning to this unique novel-travelogue-plus-plus with the geographic perspectives brought on by spending the last five years spent studying geography in graduate school, I wonder if all I am doing in my own work is attempting to take apart this long quote I typed out above. We have multiple, interconnected human and natural landscapes seen or imagined from a perspective of aerality, transportation infrastructures, networked ecologies, information flows, commodities, all tied together in space, in the absence of the human inhabitants.