24 Feb 2010
Back to the future
Continuity and change are age-old themes running through history. Looking at the infrastructure realm for the past one-and-a-half century, change has been dramatic. There are few measures by which infrastructures have not improved overwhelmingly. Speed, capacity, cost, and safety: each of these measuring rods for infrastructure quality shows better performance now than it did in the mid-19th century. While the first users of the telegraph paid astronomical amounts for poor service, we now text messages the world wide over on mobile phones without much trouble at comparatively very low costs.
This should not lead us to believe, however, that all has changed. Some old things have received a new life. In these days of industrial heritage outdated infrastructures blossom by assigning them new functions. Last autumn I was in New York. In an unexpected corner of Manhattan, a defunct elevated tramline had turned into an elevated walkway running through the city as a green ribbon. Suddenly birds appeared in the midst of the concrete skyscrapered metropolis where one would least expect them. Benches and plants provided a welcome diversion from the huzz and buzz for which the Big Apple is famed.
At one point the walkway, the High Line, integrated theatre-like benches looking down on the busy avenue underneath. As I sat down and watched the shiny gas-guzzlers passing by, I wondered which infrastructure represented the future and which one the past. The gasoline car will die out somewhere this century, or so the pundits predict. By contrast, walking is now a welcome weapon in the wars against green house gas emissions and obesity. In combination with compact cities and good public transport it can provide a real alternative to the automobiles that have taken over the city. Cycling too seems to be undergoing a revival. From New York to Paris cities are trying to turn themselves into bike-friendly environments. What used to be a transport technology pertaining to the once-upon-a-time bike craze of the late 19th century (notwithstanding exceptions, like most Dutch cities) has become a harbinger of mobile modernity once more.
Such developments render the boundaries between the old and the new obsolete. The categories are reinvented and reworked continuously. Only when we take a long-term look we start to appreciate some of the longer lines that have remained remarkably the same over time. Many today talk about the degenerative impact of mobile communications on language as if it were something new. Complaints about linguistic degeneration or lack of courtesy were, however, as much a response to the telegram style as they are today to the sms’d CU l8r.
A Dutch columnist recently hit the nail on the head. He had just been on holiday by plane. How handy, he said, are the on-line purchase of tickets and the check-in for flights. What a relieve after decades of paper tickets that could get lost, dependence on travel agent intermediaries and the need to reconfirm flights by phone days in advance with all the risks associated to forgetting – or being unable for lack of phones– to do so. Yet as the information society spreads its tentacles, the reconfirmation problem has simply been replaced by another. Those who enjoy a well-deserved holiday and decided to disconnect themselves completely face some remnants of the past. As planes are still overbooked, the need to find a phone and remember to reconfirm has transformed into the need to be on-line and print a boarding pass. An airport check-in fails to ensure a seat on the plane in these digital days. In short, infrastructure novelties have delivered many boons, but the tenacity of the past can never be underestimated.
You can visit the High Line at http://www.thehighline.org/. Those interested in the continuity and change theme should read David Edgerton’s marvelous Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London, 2006).
