Slide 1

Beneath the Arches: Re-appropriating the Residual Spaces of Infrastructure

Brian RosaDepartment of Geography, School of Environment and Development

Background

My area of interest is the role of industrial-era transportation infrastructure on thesocial and material (re)production of the post-industrial city, particularly in regardto Manchester. Through doing so, I aim to interpret the enduring effects thatrailway infrastructure has had on the socio-spatial shaping of Manchester.

Historically, above all, the Castlefield area of Manchester city centre has stood asa vector of transportation infrastructure to serve the political economy of a newmode of production: it was the central node in the circulation system of canalsand railways that fed the material and communication needs of theindustrialization of “Cottonopolis”. Manchester’s transportation infrastructure wasdescribed as early as 1844 a ‘spider’s web’ (Faucher [cited in Kellett 1969,p.171]) and an ‘outgrowth of accident’ (Engels 2009 [1844], p. 34). However, thecanals and railway viaducts remain to this day the most enduring symbols of theIndustrial Revolution and modernization, outlasting then the vast majority ofhistorical structures in the post-industrial reconfiguration of the city.

The railway viaducts, which undergird the Victorian elevated railways andinterweave the urban fabric, have been the focus of a number of urban designand regeneration plans within the past decade, particularly in London. Urbanistscontend that this infrastructure, created for the ease of mobility of people andcapital, represent visual and physical barriers as well as spaces of abandonmentor perceived under-utilization . Given the contemporary shift in the way railwayarches are conceived, they are ideal sites to examine how residual spaces of thecity are used, adapted, performed, negotiated and struggled over, revealingimplications much larger than the sites themselves.

There are a variety of terms that are used to describe this sort of in-betweenspace produced by infrastructure, but I am using the term ‘residual space’ tosignify the seemingly left-over or appropriated nature of many of the spacessurrounding railway arches are the by-product of a larger process of spatialproduction.

I will be investigating three regions of Manchester: Castlefield, Ardwick, andCollyhurst. The historical development of three regions have been heavilyinfluenced by the presence and effects of railway viaducts, and they are all indifferent stages of regeneration. In excavating the spatial history of these sites,my research design includes case studies employing archival data and qualitativeresearch methods and textual interpretations.

Theoretical Framework

The socio-spatial significance of networked infrastructures in cities (such thosesupporting transportation, water systems, electricity transmission, etc.) isunquestionable, and they are increasingly being theorized and studied in the socialsciences. However, much less frequently discussed is how they are understood andexperienced as built form, as a material aspect of everyday urban life.

My overall theoretical framework is informed foremost by the historical and dialecticalmaterialism of Henri Lefebvre. If ‘(social) space is a (social) product,’ (2009 [1974], p.26) then space is inextricably bound with history and temporality; it is produced, andthus does not exist as an independent material reality on its own. In endeavoring toconduct a Lefebvrian history of space, contextualized within a space that is bothabsolute and relational, “The uncertain traces left by events are not only the marks on(or in) space: society in its actuality also deposits its script, the result and product ofsocial activities” (p. 110).

Approaching an infrastructural network is an informing way to apply this theoreticalmodel. As networks represent the tension between fixity and motion, mobility andimmobility (Harvey 1982; Graham & Marvin 2001), I am dealing with the relationshipbetween the ‘sunk capital’ (Harvey 1982) of infrastructure, which functions in a both arelative, conceptualized space based on the circulation of capital, and an absolute,material space which the railway viaducts occupy. In examining the urban materialflows for which the railways were built to facilitate, I will engage primarily withgeographical political economy (Harvey 1982; Smith 1995), circulatory andmetabolical conceptions of urban political ecology (Heynen, Nik et al., 2006;Swyngedouw, 2006) and urban environmental history (Cronon, 1991; Gandy, 2003)which expand significantly on Lefebvre’s conception of nature.

However, political economy approaches place the most emphasis on an economicanalysis of what Lefebvre would call ‘representations of spaces’ through analysis ofaccumulation schemas, the circulation of capital, and fixed capital of material space.For this reason, I will also be employing theories and terminology more typicallyassociated with cultural geography to engage with discourse on place (Massey 1995;Cresswell 2004) and landscape (Zukin 1993; Cosgrove 1998), and with architecturaltheory to contribute to the theorization of residual and left-over spaces (Rubio 1995;Doron 2000).

Methodology

· Assessment of primary archival materials and significant secondary data on thesocial and economic contexts embodied in the original construction of the railway inManchester

· Textual and visual discourse analysis of documents dealing with, and representing,the planning and development processes in these sites since the post-industrial era,starting from the end of World War II.

· Semi-structured interviews with elites within planning, regeneration, tourism and realestate industries, as well as everyday users of these spaces (shop owners, etc.).

In addition, to trace the ways in which these spaces have changed, how they currentlyexist, and how they are imagined, I will employ visual methodologies andphenomenological investigations of the sites of my case studies:

· Subjective photographic surveys of the sites in the context of classifying andinterpreting the nature of residual space

· Re-photography using archival images of these sites since the railway was built, totrace their material reconfigurations over time

· Ethnographic investigations with urban explorers, graffiti artists, and guerrillagardeners

Aims

To meld geographical political economy and cultural geographic conceptions of placeand landscape to trace the enduring effects that railway infrastructure has had on thespatial, material, and social shaping of Manchester (and its city-region) since thebeginning of the railway age (1840s). To situate the changing ways that the spaceswithin and surrounding railway viaducts are currently produced, appropriated, andtransgressed within the major socio-economic shifts of de-industrialization (1940s-late1970s) and the post-industrial era (late 1970s-present).

Objectives

· To excavate the spatial history of the railway in Manchester (and its city-region) as anentry point to engage with, and critique, emerging theories of networked infrastructureand to connect scholarship on infrastructure with the absolute space of the city that itinhabits.

· To investigate and interpret the various ways that ‘residual spaces’ of spatially-embedded transportation infrastructures are produced, appropriated, andtransgressed, focusing specifically on the shifting, historically contingent form andfunction of the railway viaduct.

· To explore how ‘spatial practices’ of phenomenological methods and photographicrepresentation might be used as heuristic tools to interpret everyday urban spaces,contextualizing specific sites within larger processes of spatial production.

References

Cosgrove, D., 1998. Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, Madison, Wisconsin: the University ofWisconsin Press.

Cresswell, T., 2004. Place: A short Introduction, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.

Cronon, W., 1991. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York and London: W. W. Norton andCo.Doron, G.M., 2000. The Dead Zone and the Architecture of Transgression. City, 4(2), 247-263.

Engels, F., 2009 (1844). The Condition of the Working Class in England 3rd ed., London: Penguin Books.

Gandy, M., 2003. Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

Graham, S. & Marvin, S., 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked InfrastructuresT echnologica Mobilities and theUrban Condition, New York and London: Routledge.

Harvey, D., 1982. The Limits of Capital, Oxford: Blackwell.

Heynen, N., Kaika, M. & Swyngedouw, E., 2006. In The Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and thePolitics of Urban Metabolism, New York and London: Routledge.

Kellett, J.R., 1969. The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Lefebvre, H., 2009 (1974). The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.

Massey, D., 1995. Places and Their Pasts. History Workshop Journal,, 39, 182-192

Rubio, I.D.S.M., 1995. Terrain Vague. In Davidson, Cynthia, ed. Anyplace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 118-123.

Smith, N., 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London and New York: Routledge.

Swyngedouw, E., 2006. Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures AND (Cyborg) Cities. Science as Culture, 15(2),105-122

Zukin, S., 1993. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University ofCalifornia Pres

Email: brian.rosa@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Supervisors: Maria Kaika, James Evans

1910 Map of Manchester Railway network: public domain image from Railway Clearing House