On the train...

Trains are an interesting window on the world. If one takes a short break from either sleeping through the experience or (like I tend to do) treating the train as a mobile and temporary office, a number of elements come into view. While passing through several small to mid-sized towns across southern Michigan on the way to Chicago, I couldn't help but notice two striking features. First is the urban condition. The buggies gave way to cars, which have now become Ford F150s and SUVs. The roads are paved and have excessive signage and directions to tell us where to go. Strip all of those trappings away, and the houses, yards, blocks -- the patterns that they both describe and inscribe -- look like a photograph from eras past. It struck me that the way these towns create life through space and flow has not changed much since the 1950s, possibly even the 1930s or earlier. We place new technological faces, artifices, and structures of high (and often confused or confusing) semiotic value, as pointed out by Eco in "Travels in Hyperreality". But do these systems of elaboration, however intricate or attention-grabbing, fundamentally alter the statics and dynamics of living inside these infrastructures?

The second observation also relates to infrastructures. It should come as no surprise to anyone, given a moment of thought to our nation's history and the mechanisms of geographic expansion, that the railroad is a critical and long-standing set of systems that undergird the nation. This is the nature of infrastructure. I notice that so many other systems are linked by pure physical proximity to the railroad tracks; system artifacts that we do not normally see or attend to without a particular and compelling reason. Even outside the urban landscape, passing between cities and towns, I see electrical hubs and stations, refineries for various materials (corn, grain, gas and coal, etc.), water treatment, nuclear facilities, stockyards and grainaries, lumberyards, and the list goes on. What I didn't seen near the train tracks were schools, nursing homes, food markets, sports arenas, or other places that are for social consumption (To be fair, I did notice a large day care center and playground butting adjacent to the train track in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with its unreasonably high chain link fence ensuring that no children would aspire to scale it and find themselves on the tracks.)

The scene changes as we get closer to Chicago's Union Station and enter the urban construct itself. Limited space and other resource constraints place other sociotechnical systems in physical proximity and metaphorical juxtaposition to the railways. It's becoming a bit of a mantra as time goes on, but our tendency to talk about infrastructures (when we talk about them at all) as disembodied, ephemeral, abstract concepts of technological (and if we're being generous, social) networks completely disregards the fact that people actually live with these systems that link up across space and time, that real experiences are a part of, and could be the critical moments in the praxis of large sociotechnical systems.