The Railway and Civil Society

Tony Judt's follow-up piece on trains is also worthy of comment as he posits some important further notions about trains, modernism and civil society.  Judt was a great humanist as well as historian - something that carried across in his final book Ill Fares the Land.   Judt's outlook as a historian was to try to exemplify those elements that advanced that humanism, the most important of these he felt was civil society.  Thus, in this peace on rails, Judt rightly equates the railway with civil society:

The railways were and remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit. They cannot exist without common accord (and, in recent times, common expenditure), and by design they offer a practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike. This is something the market cannot accomplish—except, on its own account of itself, by happy inadvertence. Railways were not always environmentally sensitive—though in overall pollution costs it is not clear that the steam engine did more harm than its internally combusted competitor—but they were and had to be socially responsive. That is one reason why they were not very profitable.

Thus the classical railway stations, many of them the product of the City Beautiful movement, were designed as great public monuments that would dominate the built environment and uplift the civic spirit. This notion is carried out in all of the great classical stations: Orsay, Grand Central Station, Gare de L'est, Waterloo Station, etc. Additionally, Judt makes the very salient point that trains exemplify comprehensive, rational use of public space.  The notion of public space is rationalist and highly modernist.  Thus the betrayal of public space is a betrayal of modernity:

If we cannot spend our collective resources on trains and travel contentedly in them it is not because we have joined gated communities and need nothing but private cars to move between them. It will be because we have become gated individuals who don’t know how to share public space to common advantage. The implications of such a loss would far transcend the demise of one system of transport among others. It would mean we had done with modern life.

It has been the US alone among Western Countries that has truly eviscerated in rail lines and allowed them to fall into absolute disrepair.  Additionally, it has further been the United States that has most fully advanced the ideal of the singularity and triumph of the individual over the collective.  Thus, the decline of civil society and the destruction of the Art Deco styled monuments to civil society are linked.  Robert Putnam's work Bowling Alone continues to serve as the most important study on the decline of civil society and community within the United States, and while Putnam studied the decline of community bowling leagues, he could have just as easily studied the disappearance of trains and train stations from the American landscape. While others such as Richard Florida have attempted to refute Putnam by arguing civil society has merely morphed into new skills-based "creative" communities, this argument does not compel and rather speaks to an increasingly individualistic vision of self-edification rather than of a wider community.

Thus, rail, civil society and public space are all inextricably linked.  The return of rail to the American landscape should be made pre-eminent.  It represents a compelling use of public space and the reestablishment of civil society, and the good of society, versus that of the individual as cardinal.  The railway is a means of establishing urban aesthetics and form, equity, regional linkage and civics in a very palpable way.  As Judt notes, most of the the railway stations that survive retain the purposes and forms that they were built for.  The generational failure of the baby boomers has been the taking of services for granted, followed by the eventual dismantlement of infrastructure and services in order to serve short term individual gains.  Rail encourages, due to it's longevity in form, for us to think in terms of long-term outcomes.  For civil society to prosper, perhaps railways must again prosper.

Suburban Railhead Aesthetics

Rain pours from the heavens and collects in sheets in the parking lot of the Willow Creek Transit Center. Impervious surface interrupted only by the odd pothole providing a low point in which the rain waters can collect. It is water constantly in motion but also stagnant, shimmering with the diaphanous light cast by the streetlights. A spine of track cuts through the darkness and pulls this desolate stretch of Beaverton, this sterile, paved and ordered stretch of suburban strip development into the maw of Portland. Here in the darkness, the fog and the rain there is almost something strangely beautiful if not otherworldly about the suburbs. That absence of human activity – the very feeling that many suburban dwellers wanted – is finally pervasive. It takes the fog to depress the sounds of cars and the bright hiss of neon-lights from the unerringly uniform commercial strip development to create this. It takes that dampening of sight and sound, leaving only that singular gleam of the railhead: this strip of infrastructure that seems to stretch on into the infinity.

Without the rail, Beaverton is just suburban America: as easily situated here as anywhere. The same shops reproduced, with slight variation across the sweep or North America. It is real estate without place - human settlement without identity, or even a distinguishing birthmark. It represents a sterile ideal, isolated from the other. Suburbs are designed to keep them out. They reduce us into a singular non-identity based on uniform consumer spending choices rather than through ideas. Great stretches of this country are those descended from the suburban idea. These are people who now may feel some form of gripping nostalgia for strip malls, white walls and stucco; people who come to lack imagination because their sense of the world comes from watching rather than by doing. Novelty is developed in the fringe of narrow, often technologically motivated confines, rather than in any holistic sense. The suburbs, though they may be very temporary exude a sense of unchanging permanence. National brands seek to create a sense of perfect consistency, and their presence further reinforces this sense of temporal and emotional fixedness.

The irony is, as Joel Kotkin notes, the most innovative technology centers are suburban rather than urban.  Sterile environs drive software and technology.  Technology thrives on consistency.  Just as cities hate stars, those distant nuclear orbs that remind them of their insignificance, technology hates the unpredictable daily innovation that takes place on city streets.  It is crippled by the constant re-colonization of urban space and ideas to fill needs, only to fluidly dissolve.  Technology, for all it's fluidity, for all it's willingness to dictate changes in how we live, thrives on static environs.

The rail line then is perhaps beautiful because it is subversive. It both reinforces and represents a real threat to the underlying order. It is deeply post-modern: infrastructure is order, but it represents an alternative order, open to definition, interpretation and inventiveness, while still providing a means of prolonging and reinforcing the suburban landscape around. It is a seed for nascent land-use reinvention.  It allows entropy from the city access to hardened suburban lines.

The rain begins to pour harder as the train slides effortless through the sea of darkness and to the platform.

Trains

More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity. No competing form of transport, no subsequent technological innovation, no other industry has wrought or facilitated change on the scale that has been brought about by the invention and adoption of the railway. - Tony Judt

The late historian Tony Judt has an wonderful piece about trains in the current New York Review of Books. Trains have historically served vehicles of modernization, affecting everything from how we think about time (with the advent of the train schedule dramatically rearranging the Western lifestyle) to how we have historically planned cities.

Trains have historically gone far to assert social mobility firmly on behalf of the downtrodden - it has been said of the creation of the rail network in India did more to emancipate low-caste Hindus than anything done to reform the caste system- while also driving intra-regional connectivity. At the same time, as Judt argues, the rail system imposed a whole additional set of social classes based on what types of rail seating one could afford. The connection of European cities to each other through traditional (and now high-speed) rail networks has done much to drive the regional economic and social linkages that have allowed the European Union to thrive. Meanwhile, lighter rail has historically been the vehicle that allowed cities to grow and reduced near toxic densities in Victorian cities - the first suburbs were, after all, rail suburbs.

Rail has affected cities in other ways. The construction of rail-centers within cities was a monumental challenge, and many traditional rail centers have further served as vehicles to produce monuments, being a favorite construction project during the City Beautiful movement of the early 1900s and later. The great spines of architecture and infrastructure with their off-shooting vertebrae on which the rail system rested, while costly, became, much like the docks to previous generations (and the airports today) the lifeline of the city.

While much of the United States' freight shipping is still done by train, the percentage of goods shipped by rail is diminished every year. Additionally, the good most overwhelmingly shipped on trains is coal. Low-cost airlines have supplanted commuter rail in all about a few areas (New York and New England being notable exceptions), however, a new push is being made to develop high speed rail corridors within the United States. Most notable among these include a proposed Midwestern line that would connect Chicago with Milwaukee and the Twin Cities as well as a San Francisco to LA line (with a hope that this line could eventually be expanded to reach all the way North to Vancouver, BC - passing through Portland and Seattle).

Spearheading passenger high-speed rail connectivity has been an important aspect of President Obama's infrastructure redevelopment push and has helped to reinvigorate the idea of rail in the United States. The notion of developing the type of high speed, efficient and modern rail systems found in Europe is certainly one that appeals greatly. Trains, especially the modern variety, are comfortable, attract wide multi-social class ridership and represent one of the more environmentally friendly means of transportation. While the infrastructure requires large up-front infrastructure costs - high speed requires new tracks to be laid as it uses different technology and different rail gauges than it's historical counterparts - the sort of regional connectivity afforded by a well-integrated rail system in invaluable. France has been a model in this, having decided to extend high speed rail service to almost every city in France, allowing for easy, rapid connectivity to regional centers resulting in wider cultural exchange and improved economic, social and other benefits to it's population.

There remains, however, a great deal of dubiousness about high speed rail projects within the United States, with many recently elected conservative governors, notably in Ohio and Wisconsin seeking to block projects, and to forgo generous Federal funding in order to do so. The Economist notes that rail is increasingly becoming an ideological issue upon which political parties are fighting tooth and nail over.  Many on the right have come to view high-speed rail as simply a Utopian liberal scheme, or worse, a white elephant for which the Federal government will simply endlessly pour money in the form of subsidy.  This apparently ignoring the billions spent annually on both road maintenance - subsidizing both suburban expansion and the commercial trucking industry, which chews up roads through with heavy cars but also requires highways to be kept pristine to avoid snapping axles - and on the airline industry through lucrative, and potentially needless defense contracts to airplane makers.

Additionally, critics within the environmental community, most notably peak-oil theorist and general Malthusian James Howard Kunstler, has argued that it may be too late for high-speed rail, the push towards the development of rail represents simply falling into a technology trap, and that the money would be better spent in improving and maintaining our existent rail infrastructure, which has increasingly fallen into disrepair.  Besides, Kunstler notes, few Americans even bother to take commuter rail as it is and the success of European rail lines likely has more to do with a long-established European culture of rail-ridership that does not exist in the United States.  This argument remains a persistent voice that must be considered when promoting high-speed rail.  Despite this, however, high-speed rail remains promising.

To me, the argument for high-speed rail trounces that against it.  Rail is a technology that, as Judt notes, in a very modern sense links communities.  While the personal car has always been viewed in the United States as the ultimate vehicle for personal freedom - Bruce Springsteen made a career of singing about ephemeral dreams of escape through the open highway - true cultural freedom, to me, lies with effective regional linkages that are accessible to the population at large.  The notion of promoting trains requires thinking increasingly collectively, or in thinking about the us as a society rather than thinking in terms of freedom of the individual.  More so than airlines, which are only open to the truly affluent and are hardly environmentally or economically sustainable to begin with, rail is the genuine vehicle of national and multinational linkage and connectivity.  They are a technology that was historically revolutionary in a positive sense, and are a technology that can again be salubrious to the very way we organize our society to how we think.

Gaddafi and the City

In continuing with the Gaddafi sub theme that has crept into this blog over the years, I came across the following Guardian article. While Gaddafi is best known, literarily at least, as the author of his Green Book, outlining the theory and practice of "Islamic Socialism", Gaddafi has also turned out a series of what are apparently supremely terrible short stories come rants.

A favorite topic of Gaddafi in these stories is apparently the decadence and evil of the City. Gaddafi, very much in the vein of Victorian-era Western European (especially German) literature portrays cities as inherently corrupting and corrosive to collectivism with it's focus on the individual. To Gaddafi, the City does little more than isolate the individual and drive a wedge between man and God.

From the Guardian article:

"This is the city: a mill that grinds down its inhabitants, a nightmare to its builders. It forces you to change your appearance and replace your values; you take on an urban personality, which has no colour or taste to it... The city forces you to hear the sounds of others whom you are not addressing. You are forced to inhale their very breaths... Children are worse off than adults. They move from darkness to darkness... Houses are not homes – they are holes and caves..."

Part of Gaddafi's anti-urban bent may, as the article notes, have to do with his Bedouin roots and his constant insistence of shoring up his Bedouin credibility, something made explicit to an almost stupefying degree by his insistence on erecting a giant Bedouin tent in New York during his visit last year to the United Nations.

Gaddafi's anti-urban reactionary stance, is, like all things with Gaddafi, perhaps in some way reasoned by largely given over to extreme bombast in parlance:

"Yesterday a young boy was run over in that street, where he was playing. Last year a speeding vehicle hit a little girl crossing the street, tearing her body apart. They gathered up her limbs in her mother's dress. Another child was kidnapped by professional criminals. After a few days, they released her in front of her home, after they had stolen one of her kidneys! Another boy was put into a cardboard box by the neighbourhood boys in a game, but was run over accidentally by a car."

In a way, Gaddafi's anti-urban tirades remind me greatly of the near propaganda films about the City Lewis Mumford made in the 40s and 50s as a vehicle to help sell Ebenezer Howard's Garden City and Patrick Geddes' regional city ideas to the United States. Indeed, the City in these films, is perpetually painted as a dirty place corrosive to man's long-term health, enlightenment and general edification. There was something to this, the conditions in early 20th Century major cities were in many places despicable, resembling the West African, Asian and South American slums of today. Much of the Urban Planning throughout this period centered upon redevelopment, de-densification, and generally how to disburse the urban poor population. A lot of these ideas did not change until Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a spirited celebration of traditional urban development and the hussel and bussel of downtowns, that encouraged planners to begin to view cities differently.

What is most striking about Gaddafi's anti-urban slant is that it has so much in common with anti-urban reactionary movements that have driven suburbanization. Many people in suburbs ringing decaying urban centers such as Detroit and Cleveland believe the city to be a place of evil, corruption and decay. In a way, Gaddafi has more in common with the Middle American suburbanite than perhaps either would like to admit.

Living Building

The 'living' building currently being advanced by the Portland Sustainability Center and the City of Portland brings to mind Daniel Burnham's famous injunction about making no little plans. Specifically Burnham said:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

For those not in the know, a 'living' building challenge is a green building advocacy tool in which is said to promote the most advanced measure of sustainability. The standards placed on a living building are incredibly rigorous, requiring the building to yield a net carbon reduction, to serve to eliminate toxins and to use exclusively renewable energy and storm water (or grey water) run-off. Metrics measured are to be based on actual performance rather than forecasts, thus, the proposed building would require a year of use prior to it's certification as a 'living' building. As it stands, there exist only two other certified living buildings in the world.

The building would represent an impressive statement on the part of Portland to extend it's 'green' credentials, while serving as marquee project for ongoing green development. The building remains controversial, Advocates believe that the building is exactly the type of project that Portland needs to advance to put the City firmly on the map, while critics have pointed to the high cost of the project ($65 million in public money) and fears that the project could become a white elephant. Further, many have also pointed to the idea that the money going into the project might be better spent on retrofitting existing buildings with many of the technologies involved and that a new office building is apparently the last thing that Portland needs at the moment, as the city has already an excess of office stock, and the building is so expensive, that the costs of renting the building are likely to price even the most ecologically minded of firms out.

The Willamette Week has published a lengthy editorial on the topic of the building including a discussion of many of these issues. It in the end argues that the building is precisely the sort of visionary project that Portland needs, however, I am not completely convinced if I share the assessment. Portland has traditionally been a city that has developed small-scale bottom-up style projects well, resulting in net environmental advantages. Further, much of the planning approach, specifically through the metropolitan governance model has been consensus driven. The idea of a large scale project is initially appealing, however, it is likely to to be highly problematic. The potential for cost over-runs (frequently associated with this sort of large-scale project) poses one set of problems.

More importantly, I am wary of the type of Utopian thinking associated with this style of large-scale project is equally worrying. Traditionally, many of the attempts at Utopian urban development, from the enormous Brutalist towers of Le Corbusier (and those projects inspired by Le Corbusier) to the large-scale motor car based redevelopment projects advanced by Robert Moses in New York, frequently attempts to create Utopia have resulted instead in dystopia, massive public expenditure and frequently, the marginalization or the poor. With all the verve for green building within Portland, the money being spent on this project could go far to rehabilitating existing downtown building stock, leveraged to incentivize renewable energy improvement and in developing better storm water management systems (including rain gardens) for existing buildings - reducing the loads on out already overtaxes storm water/sewage system. This is not to say that I do not find the idea of 'living' building to be a good one. It is more to say that the amount of public to be invested, taken with the capacity for large-scale failure (especially considering the newness of the technology being incorporated) seems to indicate that a project of this size is fool hardy. Indeed, the living building project almost seems like something out of a more eco-friendly Dubai, where hubris has largely served as a vehicle to advance increasingly grandiose building projects.

An alternative for a more modestly scaled 'living' building project, in the form of a multi-family bungalow housing unit, has been proposed by SERA Architects several years ago. This project seems to be of a more manageable scale to first begin to understand the associated technologies and to learn how to more effectively incorporate them prior to the development of a large-scale project. This project appears to have be, for the moment at least, derailed due to the current economic recession and partly due to a lack of support from the mayor's office, strikes me as being the more sustainable option. It is a project that could be built with modest outlays of public money and which would create an important learning experience that could eventually inform a larger living building project.

In the end, Burnham's notion or large-scale inspirational still has some resonance, however, it is no longer how planners plan. The emphasis on incrementalism, public participation and more human-scale redevelopment, frequently following traditional neighborhood design strikes me as being the best approach. With environmental development, the emphasis should also lie on making as many small-scale improvements to as many buildings as possible in order to mitigate net carbon emissions rather than sinking a great deal of capital into a large project for a building that does not appear to even be needed. A couple of years ago David Owen wrote an impressive piece (later adapted into a book) arguing that more traditional, human-scale development urban development results in the lowest per capita carbon footprint for urban dwellers. This sort of pragmatism is what is necessary to advance the environmentalist agenda and mitigate global climate change. The idea of a large living building appeals, however it lacks practicality. While the 'living' building project appeals viscerally, indeed 'stirs the blood', it represents sort of tyranny of rationalism given over to the most sanguine impulses. It is then, as Kipling would have it, a case of 'thinking with the blood'.

Jihadism in Portland

Events can sometimes compel one to respond. In this case, the foiling of an attempted attack on a city that I care deeply for and call home has proven to have the sufficient gravitas. My initial feeling was of anger and alarm that someone would undertake a violent plot against Portland's citizens was tempered by almost a sense of schadenfreude as I invisioned the absolute feeling of betrayal and hatred that Mr. Mohamud would have felt in the moment that he realized that he had been set up for months by the FBI. There is something delicious about that moment when it most surely would have dawned on him that rather than harming any of his supposed enemies within the decadent West, he would be spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison. That thought alone sated any appetite for revenge that may have troubled me.

More importantly, the desire by Mr. Mohamud to inflict death and destruction upon a civilian population, his apparent verve at the knowledge that his actions would likely weigh most heavily upon children is especially chilling. That Portland is a liberal place that, as a whole, has resisted and even protested American Imperialist activities in the Middle East is immaterial. The underlying feeling of wasted life on the part of Mr. Mohamud's is also jarring. Here was a young man, reportedly from a good, upstanding family, in which he was an academic high achiever. He could have done something of good within this community and further helped to make Portland a more multi-cultural understanding place. Instead he decided to reject everything and attempt a nihilistic assault upon this community. That Mr. Mohamud was unable to find common humanity with other Portlanders is deeply sad and speaks to mental illness. It is also sufficiently telling that religious extremism tends to be a vehicle through which the mentally ill can seek justification for their desire, if it exists, to harm the wider population. It is abundantly clear that the ideology that underpinned Mr. Mohamud's action is disgusting but it is also one that requires the dehumanizing of ones victims.

It is easy to fall back on the crutch of pretending that we are in some war for civilization, but I don't think that is the case. My views on organized religion tend towards the dim, however, I fear for collective reprisal against Portland Muslims. I hope deeply that things will not come to this. Most are as shocked and appalled as the rest of us, and must now bear the further burden of having their loyalty and integration into this community indefinitely questioned. This is not in any way fair. Indeed, the greatest disservice that Mr. Mohamud did may very well be towards his fellow Muslim immigrants. Those that would undertake the action that Mr. Mohamud planned represent the slenderest of minorities, however fear and shock makes that a nuance that becomes easy to overlook.

One must assign great credit to the FBI. It has emerged that they had been tracking Mr. Mohamud for months and had prevented him from posing any genuine risk to the population long before the attack and for that I am deeply thankful. What should be learned from this is that we are far safer than we believe we are. Our law enforcement agencies managed to pre-empt and track Mr. Mohamud every step of the way, and to effectively disarm him in the planning phases of the attack. The repugnance one feels towards the violence that might have been wrought should not change the way we feel as a society, and indeed, the foiling of this attack reinforces the importance of the public sector both in the provision of services and for it's protection of the population.

Finally, Mr. Mohamud's proposed target of Pioneer Square is especially telling - an urban public space that has served as a point of common dialogue, compassion and exchange. There is enough thoughtfulness, understanding and decency within Portland that I do not feel this thwarted attack will dramatically alter the views of this community. If we let this change us, then Mr. Mohamud's bereft ideology will have triumphed.

Colonel Q: The Saga Continues

Colonel Qaddafi of Libya has been making headlines as Libya re-engages with the Occident, most recently yesterday with a 100 minute tirade presented before the UN. According to The Guardian:

He tore up a copy of the UN charter in front of startled delegates, accused the security council of being an al-Qaida like terrorist body, called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be put on trial for the Iraq war, demanded $7.7tn in compensation for the ravages of colonialism on Africa, and wondered whether swine flu was a biological weapon created in a military laboratory. At one point, he even demanded to know who was behind the killing of JFK. All in all, a pretty ordinary 100 minutes in the life of the colonel.

For those that don't remember my experience meeting the Colonel, it can be found here. I argued that he is more reasonable than he is given credit for, and despite his public bombast, I still think this is very much the case. Qaddafi has an outrageous persona, but that he has held power and popular support in Libya as long as he has speaks to his shrewdness. Qaddafi needs to make headlines through accusation in order to feed the propaganda he constructed around himself. This does not necessarily mean he expects what he has demanded. It merely means he has given himself a stronger negotiating hand. Sure he is re-engaging; however his speech gives him the ability to appear as though he is doing so on his own terms rather than those of the Western powers, an appearance that will play well throughout the greater Middle East and much of North Africa. As always, the Colonel is far shrewder than you think. There is, after all, ample reason that Qaddafi remains a political survivor.