Off the Map

Abstract

The New York City Subway is unusually fertile ground for transportation intelligence. It possesses a complex track network that allows trains to move along multiple overlapping routes, producing rare, and in some cases unique, qualities of rapid transit mobility. While its current information and computer technology (ICT) compromises the efficacy of those qualities, emerging smart systems promise not only to realize the full potential of what the Subway was built to do, but also to posit a new operational logic for it. The following is a provocation on urban mobility in the Information Age, a speculative reimagination of the Subway that considers a scenario in which, through the adoption of an advance mode of ICT, the Subway leverages the flexibility of its track network so as to forge a new logic of rapid transit. The provocation foregrounds the social implications of that logic, taking for granted the ability of technology to realize it. The objective is to catalyze critical thinking on transportation smartness at a time when technological hurdles are falling and social consequences are crystallizing. Its concerns include: how and why information is communicated to the public; how the public adapts to new modes of intelligence; how smarter environments both strengthen and weaken community; and, the collateral damage of optimization. Overall, it strives to illuminate a conundrum of smart transportation: optimization may both benefit the public and impair social vitality and environmental awareness.

Keywords:

• transportation
• mapping
• smartness
• community

Notes

1 The work of Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, Warren Sonbert, and Bill Morrison is especially influential to the methodology of the video.

2 Leonhard Euler, “Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis,” in The World of Mathematics, ed. James R. Newman. (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1956). 573–580.

3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 157.

4 Herbert Croly, “The New York Rapid Transit Subway, How It Will Affect the City's Life and Business,” The Review, (1904): 306–311.

5 Fred Lavia, “New York Rapid Transit Railway Extensions, Design of Structure and Track.” Engineering News, (1994).

6 New York State Public Service Commission, Dual System of Rapid Transit for New York City (New York, NY: Nabu Press, 1914). In these and other municipal documents, details of negotiations and constructions contracts reveal the long and chaotic process. Accessed along with other documents compiled at: https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Main_Page.

7 Clifton Hood, 722 miles: the building of the subways and how they transformed New York, (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 160.

8 Jane Somers, “Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks.” The Atlantic, (2015).

9 Emma G. Fitzsimmons, “Ambitious Plan to Fix New York Subway Is Already Facing Obstacles.” The New York Times, May 23, 2018.

10 Matt Flegenheimer, “Rare Choreography of Cooperation for Riders Caught Between an F and an M.” The New York Times, December 27, 2012. The author of this article began to document and analyze the state of affairs in the station long before and without knowledge of this reporting in the New York Times, though Flegenheimer’s references to dance did influence the language of the analysis presented here.

11 Antoine Picon, Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence, (Chichester: Wiley, 2015), 67, 81, 90.

12 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1994).

13 Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1996).

14 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hanna Arendt. (New York, NY: Schocken, 1969).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Forget

Thomas Forget is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a principal at Ciotat Studio, a multimedia design practice based in New York City. His teaching interests include: beginning design studios; advanced courses in history and theory; and housing design. His research interests include: architectural projection and media; housing; infrastructure; and the public space of the city. His design practice realizes projects at multiple scales: videos; multimedia installations; architecture; and urban design. His creative and scholarly work has been published and exhibited internationally.