The Empire of the In-Between

Amtrak's Acela train passes through West Philadelphia. Photo taken by Alan Wiig, looking south from Woodland Cemetery. In the distance is the Grays Ferry neighborhood and a closed Dupont paint factory.

Stopping for a time in the Empire of the In-Between: Pieter Hugo’s photographs with an accompanying essay by Adam Davidson in the November 4 2012 New York Times Sunday Magazine look at how the Mid-Atlantic corridor between New York City and Washington DC has become such a devastated landscape. The images Hugo made during two weeks this fall explore the neighborhoods directly adjacent to the Amtrak railroad corridor connecting New York and DC and survey the “heroic wreckage” (p. 26) of the terrain with a sympathetic eye that also does not gloss over the desperation of the neighborhoods. Hugo’s eye hones in on scenes in a way that he has developed photographing strange, unique corners of Africa, such as hyena men in Nigeria or a computer waste dump in Ghana. The continuity of these African images with what was found in the Mid-Atlantic  indicate how removed these US communities are, even as they sit just outside the window of Amtrak’s Acela trains. By creating portraits of the corridor’s residents, and by visualizing the track-side landscape with a similarly vivid intimacy, Hugo’s images show the people and places that are more often sped past from on high, sitting in Amtrak’s air-conditioned rail cars. Even though, as Davidson points out, “for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey—New York and D.C.—were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between” (p. 26), today the in-between exists too often just as a backdrop. What is most compelling about Davidson’s essay is his discussion of  the recent history of the service-industry economy in the North-East United States and how it has affected a particular part of the region: the corridor of the Mid-Atlantic that borders the train that the Orgmen of the new economy take between New York and DC, a corridor that was built around the rail line but for an earlier, industrial economy that no longer has a part in the region, even as the formerly industrial cities and their citizens are still present, figuratively and literally watching the trains roll past. Davidson explains the situation in this corridor in as concise a manner as I’ve come across, writing:

...the train passes directly through or near 8 of the 10 richest counties in the United States, but all of this wealth is concentrated near the endpoints of the journey: Manhattan’s sattellites in northern New Jersey and the towns where lobbyists and government contractors live in suburban Virginia and Maryland. This is a geographic representation of a telling contradiction. For the past 30-plus years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, there has been much lip service paid to the idea that the era of big government is over. Long live free enterprise. And yet in the case of those areas surrounding the capital, wealth has gravitated to the exact spot where government regulation is created. Why? Because many businesses discovered that renegotiating the terms between government and the private sector can be extraordinarily lucrative. A few remarkable books by professors at NYU’s Stern School of Business argue that a primary source of profit for Wall Street over the past 15 to 20 years could be what I call the Acela Strategy: making money by exploiting regulation rather than by creating more effective ways to finance the rest of the economy. (p. 29)

Davidson’s argument succeeds because it does not single out one political party or another for failing to support the region, nor does the argument push ephemeral, intangible ideas such as outsourcing, the global economy, neo-liberalism or other similar policy decisions as the problem. These concepts and their underlying logic are complicit in the crumbling neighborhoods and empty factories, but blaming the situation on one or many issues would create a simple conclusion that does little justice to the corridor itself. Davidson identifies the places that today are successful economic zones, and those that are not, and makes clear that spatial proximity no longer leads to a distribution of jobs and a ‘trickle-down’ of profits. The present realities do not reflect a positive outlook for the near future. As Davidson continues, “calling for a return to the days when everybody who was willing could make a good living at the factory is a fantasy, maybe a lie and certainly an implicit acknowledgement that nobody has any idea what to do with the underemployed in the slums of Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Southeast DC” (p. 35).

For the passengers on Amtrak’s Acela trains what matters is moving quickly between Penn Station in New York and Union Station in DC, then heading to offices on either end. For these passengers and the economy they work in, to quote the sociologist Bruno Latour: “between the lines of the network there is, strictly speaking, nothing at all” (from We Have Never Been Modern, 1993 p. 118). Yet there is plenty between the lines, places physically close but in reality very far from Amtrak’s rail network and the service economy it supports. This reportage shows what is present between the end-points of the rail network; it shows what exists today in these cities built for industries that no longer function, with road grids and housing and even citizens cut off from the dominant economic activities of the region, disconnected from political agency in DC and the economic action in New York City.
The success of this essay is that it locates the new economy not solely in its shiny new offices but in its opposite, in the places that have been left far, far behind even though they are in-between the two endpoints and for much of the nation’s history were a driver of the economy itself. The successful economy in the Mid-Atlantic corridor is now suburban, found in the bland single story machine shops and exurban office centers that line the freeway corridors, sitting outside of the cities that originally organized the growth and development of the region. The new economy is also embodied in the rail line itself, and just like the other businesses of the service industry, Amtrak requires relatively few employees to maintain these trains and the tracks themselves. If this were the whole of Hugo and Davidson’s work, it would sit as an interesting piece of quality journalism. But the work pushes further by considering the rail network as an active agent in the story itself. Davidson locates the problem in economic and policy decisions made in DC and New York, decisions made possible on and through the Acela trains as they rumble past these places that have been effectively abandoned.

Underlying this argument about the spatial outcomes of this political-economic muddle is the North-East railroad corridor itself, this transportion infrastructure that also play an active part of the photo-essay. The smooth movement between DC and Wall Street relies on the railroad. Davidson’s work ties closely with Keller Easterling’s analysis of what she has termed the extrastatecraft of the contemporary moment, where politics have become tightly intertwined with infrastructure and urbanism, where statecraft and economic activities are different from past formations; consequently these extra-ordinary new relationships rely directly on things like this rail corridor and the trains that travel it. Understanding the everyday poverty of the cities’ residents and the continued decay of the urban landscape cannot be separated from the Acela trains that pass through the corridor, this network that enables a contradictory set of political and economic relationships between DC and New York City that benefit the two cities and their associated economic services, but leave what is in-between to fall further and further apart. Telling a story of the blighted, post-industrial cities of Mid-Atlantic via slowly exploring the rail corridor that once served these cities but now facilitates their continued decay is a creative, honest, and bleak but needed story of the North-East United States today. 

pathholes and other hazards of walking

Looking down the top section of the Loma Linda path, at Queens Road.

The Berkeley Hills just northeast of the UC Berkeley campus have a number of short, often steep walking paths stitching between the more circuitous roads through the area. While the streets that automobiles drive on in the Hills are narrow, difficult to navigate, and a spaghetti-mess of more-or-less intact asphalt, the paths cut alongside seasonal creeks, at fence-lines and under bay laurel, oaks, and redwoods. Often the paths cut straight down toward the lower neighborhoods, eventually depositing the walker on Euclid or another main road that funnels traffic toward to the university campus, or drops further, toward the Shattuck Avenue commercial corridor and the Gourmet Ghetto.

In August I was in Berkeley for a day and was able to explore the La Loma Path, which is on an existing but newly opened section of public right of way. The paths are built, restored, maintained, and advocated for by a local group called the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, but a situation has emerged common to the NIMBYism (not in my backyard) often found in cities like Berkeley--especially in the very wealthy areas such as the Berkeley Hills--where this new path on public land has become a contested element of the landscape. The property owners adjacent to the path seem to feel that the occasional walker is a nuisance and a danger, as indicated in the hand drawn, chalk signs depicted below. Regardless, the trail is an excellent addition to the neighborhood and I encourage those readers in the Bay Area who have not yet explored the trails to do so. A map of Berkeley's Pathways is available at many bookstores as well as at the Path Wanderers website.

What follows is a short photo-essay of the walk, with some commentary in the captions.

A path-side fence note, indicating where either humans or perhaps dogs should shit.

More fence notes written in chalk on the newly opened pedestrian right of way, noting: "GO HOME PATHHOLES!!! WE WANT QUIET!!!" as well as "EMERGENCY + 12 kV [electrical power] lines = French Fried Path Critters! Yummy!". Electrical lines pass by overhead; the neighbors are either worried for people walking on the path, or threatening that walking the path could lead to death. But then wouldn't living next to the path also be dangerous?

Where the path cuts across Campus Drive there is a campaign asking people to "Join the Kindness [R]Evolution Today!" The smaller sign to the right implores  "Neighbors please be civilized and considerate: Dear Berkeley,
Please help our music teacher regain her essential privacy and safety in her own home and use the easliy available alternative walkway on Glendale Ave just across the Glendale - La Loma intersection (at the bottom) an only 3 houses north (at the top). She needs to have peace and no more disturbance (after 10 months of horrors) in order to recover from injuries of a car accident caused by a drunk driver and more recent police brutality during her unfair arrestes in her own home. May G-d (sic) allow you to fill your heart with the compassion to the suffering of those you meet on your path!" There is a link to the Kindness Revolution website as well. While it is unfortunate that the resident is suffering from many injuries of various natures, I wonder if directing anger and frustration about these issues is best done in through a sign that reflects more-so frustrations that what was considered a private part of one person's backyard is not part of the Berkeley's foot-based transportation network.

The path alongside the music teacher's house.

A dragonfly waiting on a not-quite-ripe blackberry for the August fog to burn off and the air to warm. The blackberries were not quite ripe.

As a perk for winning a Nobel Prize, UC Berkeley faculty are given access to the areas where parking is restricted only to Nobel Laureates. I'm guessing the house in the background here is the residence of an emeritus faculty member who took his or her sign with them upon retirement.

Bamboo acting to fence a property in, with a redwood in the background, banana trees and a palm of some variety in the middle ground.

Figs and apples ripening together, overhead. Berkeley and the Bay Area in general are such a mixture of ecosystems, including, in this case two fairly different types of fruit.

and the airports

Looking north at Philadelphia International Airport, from Hog Island Road. October 2012.

The very sites they were most drawn to--the business centres, the shopping plazas, the franchise restaurants, the tourist spots and the airports--would appear slightly illusory, never really experienced in spite of the photographs taken, the souvenirs bought and the money spent. -- from The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India by Siddhartha Deb (p. 52)

municipal adaptations, by humans and by vegetation

The sidewalk ends but a path continues. South Broad Street, far south Philadelphia. October 2012.

One of the more enjoyable Internet-based finds I've made over the last year has been the work of Chris Berthelsen and his Tokyo-based urban lab, a-small-lab. His weekend explorations to the metropolitan fringes of Tokyo, walking around and exploring for the tiny disruptions of gardens in the concrete and asphalt landscape of urban Japan, or the  creativity of Tokyo's residents to improve upon or fix small elements of their day-to-day lives is a window into the small details of living in a city and a country that has, for me at least, remained foreign aside from the writings of Haruki Murakami, the films of Hayao Miyazaki, and assorted articles about Japan's place global economy or awesome espresso. And perhaps Murakami, films, and articles all conspire to keeping Japan foreign. But Berthelsen's work opens up the urban fabric of Tokyo, the little pocket gardens along a sidewalk or the place of semi-mythological feral raccoon-dogs in the nighttime streets and back alleys is an enjoyable, informative, and highly insightful diversion from my scholarly research on and daily life in cities in the United States.

In the spirit of Berthelsen's work, I've attempted over the past month to first 'see' and then to document similarly unique and/or strange but normal elements of Philadelphia. In the photo above is a local adaptation of an poorly-thought out sidewalk situation. The road on the right merges into Broad Street on the left, the main north-south artery through central Philadelphia. Rather than continue the sidewalk to cross to its continuation, the planners just ended the concrete, leaving residents to continue the path themselves. The three photos below, while perhaps not fitting with the DIY impulse that a-small-lab seeks out, document vegetation overtaking views in Fairmount Park. The benches at one point presented a view of the Schuylkill River, along with the Delaware River on the eastern side of the city, one of the two rivers that define central Philadelphia's boundaries. The park's gardeners come through and mow the grass regularly, but the fringe of shrubbery and trees has completely overtaken any view, leaving the benches to present a scene of urban nature likely not intended by the landscape architects who located the benches where they are. The three benches are ordered with the first one furthest downstream and consequently closest to the city itself, and the other two progressing out and upstream toward the city's edge.

Bench 1 in Fairmount Park along West River Drive. At one point this bench overlooked the Schuylkill River, but the riot of growth now interrupts the view.

Bench 2, also not overlooking the Schuylkill River.

...and Bench 3, looking out at trees instead of the river. These three photos from mid-September 2012.

utility boxes and cellular antenna in Paris

A telecom utility box in Paris alongside Boulevard de Sébastopol. Metal boxes like the larger one on the left house and organize the neighborhood's telephone and Internet connections. Note the cut in the sidewalk's concrete leading away from the box--perhaps new fiber optic cabling was connected to this box recently.

Telecommunications equipment in Paris exists as a visible but muted element on and above the streets, sometimes even acting as a billboard for advertizing. Behind the doors of these utility boxes and latent within the radio signals broadcasting from the cellular antenna, are a collection of the communicative circulations that make up a very small part of the city's social exchange at a given moment.

A second telecom utility box in Paris doubling as a canvas for advertizing. Note the Space Invader on the wall in the far left corner.

On the top-left corner of the red brick building at the center of the photograph is a cellular antenna. Cellular infrastructure in Paris was much less visible than the equipment in the US, at least in the areas I walked through. This photo was taken where Rue du Faubourg Saint Denis and Boulevard de Magenta come together.

an infrastructural field report from Autun, France

A cobblestone hillside pathway flanked by tall walls, with a black electrical or communication cable descending the wall in a steel pipe that emerges from its sheath to enter a junction box, then plunging straight into concrete to travel underground. All photographs by Alan Wiig, July 2012.

Located underneath or alongside the roads and paths of Autun, France, manhole covers, utility enclosures, and other containers represent entry points into the infrastructures around which cities, including small, historic cities with origins extending back to the Roman empire such as Autun, are organized. Considering the common, public elements of these infrastructural networks as components of a city or necessitates a reconsideration of what a city is, to include the many flows of people, goods, information and resources whose respective and often intermingled systems stretch far beyond any individual city’s territorial, political boundary. These infrastructural covers, enclosures, and signage are embedded within and alongside Autun’s streets, an interface with the material and digital flows that keep the city connected, watered, heated, cooled, entertained, cleaned, organized, and so on.           

What follows is a small selection chosen out of about 100 photos taken within a few blocks of Hotel les Ursulines on the hillside above Autun Cathedral in a half-an-hour lunchtime walk that the Lancaster University (UK) sociologist Elizabeth Shove and I took on Friday 20 July 2012. Elizabeth and I were in Autun for a conference, From networked to post-networked urbanism: new infrastructure configurations and urban transitions, organized by Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (LATTS), a technology, infrastructure and society research organization based out of Paris. The paradox of having discussions on urban infrastructures and post-networked, or as some participants put it, supra-networked urbanism at a conference held in a small city surrounded by Burgundian wine country led to our quick exploration of the things that connected Autun to the larger networks and flows that stretch across its region and beyond. We wanted to visualize what made Autun as much a part of a supra-networked urbanism as, for instance, Paris. Just as roads and other transportation networks connect Autun to places beyond the city itself, so do the other infrastructures we found embedded in the streets. In looking closely at these iron and steel covers, fiberglass and plastic boxes, small and large junctions, and cables of many sizes and colors, we found a whole culture of design and manufacture, maintenance, and repair of these quotidian things that are typically passed by and over the the way between places. Elizabeth later uncovered that “PAM/Saint Gobain makes manhole covers used in Autun, Paris, Saxmundham (a small town in East Anglia, UK) and Lancaster”. Networks of different historical eras, many different providers, and various systems are all intertwined in organized as well as haphazard ways, grafted alongside older buildings and walls, integrated into newer structures, and even, sometimes, waiting for a future use, as is the case with the coiled wire sits protruding out of the stuccoed wall in the last picture. The systems may change, evolve, or be removed, but these infrastructural things are as much a part of Autun as any other aspect of the landscape from the homes and businesses to the agriculture in the fields surrounding the city.

Thanks to Olivier Coutard and Jonathan Rutherford of LATTS for inviting me to participate in the conference in Autun. 

If you are interested in seeing more of the photographs in the set, leave me a message in the comments section and I'll see what I can do.

 how the wavy design of the cover on the top left of page 4 holds gravel and sands like a rill on a creek-bottom.

Patched holes, remnants of earlier covers.

This is a close up detail of the cable descending the wall in the topmost image in this post.

At some point in the near or distant future, this cable will be put to use.

fiber optic cables passing through the Trenton Train Station

The orange-topped post indicates the path of the fiber-optic cables traveling between alongside the Amtrak corridor between Washington DC and New York City. Photo taken from the end of the platform at the Trenton Train Station, Trenton New Jersey. The path people and goods take between metropolitan regions is often the same as the path information takes. Photo by Alan Wiig, May 2012.

A Book Reading for Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

Andrew Blum's Tubes on top of a buried Level 3 fiber optic (that is what the LVL3 F/O stands for) at Lancaster Ave. and 38th St. in West Philadelphia. At this location the Internet that Level 3 provides is heading  from Drexel University and central Philadelphia out the Main Line.

For those readers in the Philadelphia area, architecture/urbanism/technology writer Andrew Blum will be speaking about his brand new book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet this coming Thursday June 7 at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Details here.

The event starts at 7:30 at the Central Library, and is free as per the library's mission and name. This is the description from the library's events page:

Andrew Blum is a correspondent at Wired and a contributing editor at Metropolis, whose writing about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art, and travel has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, and Popular Science. Blum studied English and architecture history at Amherst College, and received his M.A. in human geography from the University of Toronto. From tiny fiber optic cables buried beneath Manhattan’s busy streets to the 10,000-mile-long undersea cable connecting Europe and West Africa, Blum chronicles the intriguing development of the internet in his new book, Tubes.

Once I finish Tubes I will write up a complete review, but from what I have read, Blum has succeeded in both untangling the multitude of complex relationships between places, people, corporations, and of course digital technologies that comprise this thing called the  Internet. The stories he tells are engaging and grounded in the  both of this network of networks and of the geography surrounding it. Technologies never exist without people to keep them functioning; a central point of the book--perhaps the central point--is to affirm how the Internet exists in specific places and is maintained through human relationships.

I've been waiting for this book ever since Blum published this piece in Wired a few years ago tracing the path of an email across North America. Anyone interested in the subjects I cover in this blog should read Tubes, and if you live in Philadelphia, come out on Thursday to the talk.

If you don't live in Philadelphia, Blum is continuing his book tour, details here.

pervasive connectivity through add-on antenna

Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Philadelphia, with two white cellular antenna in the upper right corner of the image.

The Crowne Plaza Hotel at 1800 Market Street in downtown Philadelphia has two cellular antenna wedged on the edge of their parking garage above the hotel's entrance. Providing cellular connectivity in dense urban areas can often entail this sort of creativity of placement for cellular network equipment. Maybe hotel guests were complaining as they parked their automobiles that their mobile calls were being dropped. This situation represents an addition of a cellular site to the built environment, plugged in as an opportunity to further develop the pervasive connectivity users have grown to expect, without any direct modification of the building's architecture itself. I expect sightings of equipment plug-ins like this will continue as more established rooftop locations are exhausted. Urban responses to network culture's needs for always-on connectivity have impacted the built environment very little compared to the urbanism of earlier eras. In the twentieth century, tall office buildings were enabled in part by telephone systems connecting the different floors;  will wireless, mobile communication lead to the development of new types of buildings, or just more creative re-use of existing structures, as evidenced by what the Crowne Plaza Hotel has done on their parking garage? 

sidewalk advertizing of a data center

Digital Realty Trust advertizing for their data center services at 833 Chestnut St., Philadelphia. April 2012.

Digital Realty Trust manages a data center at 833 Chestnut in central Philadelphia; this is one of the few, if not the only, data centers I have found that actively advertizes their business to passerby on the outside of the actual building in which the data center is housed. I wonder how much business the company has received through this sidewalk advertizing.

A view of 833 Chestnut Street from Market Street. April 2012.