Urban Tomographies by Krieger Martin H.;

Author:Krieger, Martin H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 22B. Markings indicating the company doing the excavation. Also markings made subsequently by the utility indicating, in this case, that there are no Department of Water and Power lines here. The marking is in red, with a blue W.

These inscriptions will not be noticed if one is driving by or walking head-up having a conversation with a friend or colleague. You have to look down, and once you start noticing these phenomena, they seem to be everywhere, all the time. They are indicative of the built infrastructure, at our feet or just below our feet, capillaries of an artery system. In addition, of course, one might look up, sideways, and forward to note the innervating utility corridors, the adjacent agriculture and horticulture, storage businesses (including unsold new automobiles), and parks and recreational facilities. What is often seen fleetingly as you travel on a freeway is quite rich when you walk up to it and under it.

As for industry and infrastructure, a city is a delineated and inscribed and marked place: system and network, node and link, nerve and artery, indicated by an elaborate code that is the built environment, that built environment itself inscribed to mark what is otherwise hidden and distantly linked. The system is both economic and material, flows of goods and workers among industrial nodes and residential neighborhoods, and flows of electrons and energy and water among sources and sinks: the economic and material, the industrial and the residential and infrastructural, mirroring each other.

As we shall see in the next chapter, there are as well social systems housed in the built environment, that built environment itself inscribed to mark what is otherwise hidden and linked and, here, transcendent. The artifacts of economy and infrastructure are what provide that housing and the people for that social system. Hyperbolically, there is an identity of the various identities in the manifolds of profiles. That identity is the city.

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