The Bridges of Nassau County

Far from existing in a neutral state, ready for use by various publics for good or ill, technologies often emerge ready to privilege certain political or social arrangements by their very existence. To find out how this might be true for a given technology, we must look beyond the instrumental use of the thing to the meaning behind its design and how it rearranges or holds in place other technological artifacts, human interactions, or ways of thinking. Take a striking example from Long Island, NY: the major public works projects brought to fruition by Robert Moses.

Much of the built environment that those who grew up on Long Island regarded simply for its functionality, the Long Island Expressway, the BQE, the roads heading to Jones Beach, among other elements, was developed or brokered by Robert Moses, the master builder (named New York City's construction coordinator in 1946) who influenced much of the city's planning for more than three decades. While we can stand back and admire certain projects for their utility and, in the case of buildings such as Lincoln Center, their beauty, Moses' biography, Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York demonstrates how some of their designs were also political in nature.

In general, Moses led the charge to encourage the suburbanization of the region, a process reliant in large part on his highway and bridge projects (other cities hired him to design freeway networks of their own starting in the 1940's). He mocked public intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford, who tried to point out the dangers in the trend toward a homogenized suburban living experience. In 1961, Mumford described postwar suburbs as

"a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold" - The City in History, p. 486.

Moses replied that "The little identical suburban boxes of average people, which differ only in color and planting, represent a measure of success unheard of by hundreds of millions on other continents" ("Are Cities Dead," The Atlantic, 1962, p. 57). Turns out Robert Moses had something particular in mind when he envisioned the "average people" inhabiting his suburbs, because he did what he could to make sure that they would be white families with access to automobiles. Have you ever driven under an overpass on one of Moses' parkways on Long Island? Notice how they rise as little as nine feet from the curb? This is because Moses wanted to discourage the use of mass transit, such as buses, on his highways. Buses, even back in the middle of the 20th Century, were about 12 feet tall. Not only did he design the overpasses to keep buses from venturing from low-income portions of the city to the suburbs, but they also made it difficult for low-income (disproportionately minority) families to reach Jones Beach. Moses also opposed adding a stop on the Long Island Railroad near the park that Robert built.

The distribution of cities, suburbs, and exurbs and those who live in them profoundly effects our social interactions, economic opportunities for the privileged and the underclass alike, and our political orientations (much has been written, for example, about how a surge in the creation of exurbs has facilitated continued Republican dominance while Democrats have made inroads in many of the nation's close-in suburbs). But what is not given as much attention is how something as simple as an overpass can stand for more than its functional role in a large-scale infrastructure project. More than a means of facilitating the movement of traffic, it stands for a social arrangement in the suburbs of New York. It's important to give more than a cursory glance to such mundane elements of the built environment, so that we may begin to unpack the values that they are trying to promote.

Innovations in urban design and their influence over our daily lives will be a recurring theme of this blog. What examples come to mind?

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence