I read a number of headlines this week about failing physical infrastructures in big cities. Yesterday there was an article about how heavy trucks could no longer use two Montreal overpasses, this article talks about how the 30 year old overpass structures in Canada no longer meet current building codes. We have to recall there was a collapse not too long ago in Montreal where 6 people were killed. Today I read an article about a bursting steam pipe, the kind used in New York to cool office towers. It just randomly exploded killing one and injuring others. Seems like this is not the first time either! There is the train derailment in the Ukraine that resulted in the diffusion of toxins in the environment, residents warned to stay inside and not drink the milk from their cows or the vegetables on their farms. Then of course we are seeing the photos of Japanese officials from the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant (the world’s biggest!)bowing in shame to the mayor of the town for having under-reported the extent of the damage of the plant after the earth quake and the degree of radioactive spillage in the sea. Funny how officials everywhere never want to fully report the extent of nuclear damage to the public! Think back to Chernobyl in the Ukraine, 3 miles Island, etc.
I am a bit focused these days on infrastructure. I am fascinated by the systems we build to maintain our human city habitats, and how we let those systems just recede into the background while we go about doing our business in the foreground. We only really think about infrastructure when something goes wrong otherwise tax dollars get sunk into their maintenance, creation, privatizing, extending and well we just never ask to see the bill nor are we asked to participate in thinking about them. I mean what would have happened if we had the Tesla model of power generation instead of the Edison version we have now? Would we have configured our lives, habitats and consumption patterns differently? Also when we talk about cyborgs we think of people like Steve Mann who wears computers all the time to extend his physical capabilities, but we rarely reflect on the fact that we are always in our urban environments extending our human capabilities with our infrastructures. We are also cyborgs always connected to a technological system or another for our daily survival in the urban habitat.
I have just spent the last 2 days transcribing quotes and information from Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. An excellent book that critically examines how our urban infrastructures are being splintered and the dream of national infrastructural unification and public good becoming bits for some and less for others. Here are a few quotes that come to mind in relation to the latest news worthy bouts of infrastructure failure:
“infrastructure networks, and the sociotechnical processes that surround them, are strongly involved in structuring and delineating the experiences of urban culture and what Raymond Williams (1973) termed the ’structures of feeling’ of modern urban life. Networked technologies of heat, power, water, light, speed and communications have thus been intrinsic to all urban cultures of modernity and mobility” (Graham and Marvin 2001:12).
infrastructures are a city’s root system (Graham and Marvin 2001).
“the tendency to obscure the management and development of infrastructures within highly technical and technocratic institutions, driven by supposedly depoliticized, instrumental rationalities of engineering cultures, has served further to obfuscate the worlds of networked urban infrastructure (Graham and Marvin 2001:20). This is often the case as it is just assumed that the state will take care of the public good, and thus captured in the idea of public works.
“For many Western urbanites, certainly, using a phone, driving a car, taking an airline or rail trip, turning on a tap, flushing a toilet, or plugging in a power plug, is so woven into the fabric of daily life, and so ‘normalized’ and banal that (whilst they function adequately) it scarcely seems important” (Graham and Marvin 2001:21).
a number of factors such as “disciplinary failures and the neglect of networked infrastructures , their hidden and taken-for-granted-nature, assumptions of technological determinism, and the panic effect of networked collapse – mean that attention to infrastructure networks tends to be reactive to crises or collapse, rather than sustained and systematic” (Graham and Marvin 2001:30)
It is exactly this point i want to highlight! We are sleepwalking through a human built environment, a fantastic feat of engineering, planning and design, pipes, wires, concrete, fibre, asphalt, mechanism, all huge interconnected networked systems that we rarely think about until of course something goes wrong! In the case of nuclear reactors lots of people forecast the problems and dangers being experienced in Japan right now. In fact there is a huge anti-nuclear movement in Japan with thousands upon thousands of people who have protested the construction and Japan’s reliance on these plants. These are also the Hibakusha - the survivors of the nuclear bombs dropped on them. And well, we are all complicit, how else do we expect a country of 130 000 000 in a space the size of Vancouver island +/-, with few energy resources to produce so many of the cars, electronics and gadgets we consume? Marvin and Graham also speak of the shift from infrastructure for the public to how now infrastructures are simply the means to move capital. The question then is, who is in charge of their maintenance? Private sector? Government? In Canada which level of Government? Are they still a public good?
Graham and Marvin reveal the “subtle and powerful ways in which networked infrastructures are helping to define, shape and structure the very nature of cities, and indeed, of civilisation” (Graham and Marvin 2001:30)
What does it mean to urban civilizations when the infrastructure starts to crumble? When neglected infrastructures become dangerous? When we no longer know who the central authorities and centres of responsibility are? When infrastructures no longer serve local needs and only centres of power on a global scale? When infrastructures are no longer the cohesive physical structures to glue a nation together? What happens when the public no longer has a say…
