TRANSITING INEQUALITIES: ON THE ROADS AND OF THE METROS

References:

New York Subway. http://projects.newyorker.com/story/subway/

Harvey, Penny and Hannah Knox. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lemon, A. 1997. “Talking Transit and Spectating Transition: The Moscow Metro.” In Ethnographies of Transition in East Central Europe and Russia. M. Lampland, M. Bunzl and D. Berdahl, eds. Oxford: Berg Press.

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Since we have talked about methodology with each book, I was thinking about how the ethnography in the Harvey and Knox book was so open-ended and organic - even as “serendipitous events” as described by the authors. “Roads” were in fact not originally the intended subject of study (it was the politics of languages), but “...the road could prove vitally useful… in demonstrating how a mundane material structure registered histories and expectations of state presence and of state neglect.” The authors’ gradual arrival at roads as the site of study speaks of the role of the ethnographic eye: the anthropologist’s ability to recognize the subject (object) of study that might not be at first so obvious. How can we keep that ‘eye' open and engaged and stay productive? How can we tell between ‘distraction' and true attractions that bring us to fruitful studies such as this (instead of accumulating MORE fieldnotes that would remain unused)?

From last week's discussion on affect in infrastructure, I reflect on how affect is a crucial part of infrastructure. The Pruitt-Igoe Project offers poignant windows into how affect remains long after the buildings were demolished or abandoned - through memories and lived experiences. The Lemon article on the Moscow metro certainly invokes how space and the built structures can register memories as well as social practices that might only be comprehensible to the locals. The metro as a public space holds contesting memories and is - to go back to a metaphor we have discussed earlier in this term - the palimpsest: of layers of built environment, of historical indexes, and of social negotiations. It is a space where racial and class tensions play out. The Moscow metro enables the “immediate spatial experience - contingent as it may be in time or place - [that] undermines the construction of ideologies about social order.”

Infrastructures are unequal and are developed unevenly. “Roads,” for instance, remind me of a piece we read earlier this quarter about how the waterways are less charted and paid less attention than the land routes. These inequalities are multifaceted and shifting. Harvey and Knox emphasize the ‘when' rather than the ‘what' of infrastructural formation to show the complex entanglement of intentions and actual practices. Moreover, “Our work on roads thus also attends to the imaginative and material practices that contribute to the emergence - the coming into being - of infrastructures as open-ended structural forms”.

From these strands of discussions, I chose the New York Subway's transporting of income inequalities. The statement on the website is simple and clear:

New York City has a problem with income inequality. And it’s getting worse—the top of the spectrum is gaining and the bottom is losing. Along individual subway lines, earnings range from poverty to considerable wealth. The interactive infographic here charts these shifts, using data on median household income, from the U.S. Census Bureau, for census tracts with subway stations.

Let's take Line 1. Here's the median household income:

Now, Line 2:

You can keep clicking on each line, 1-7, A-F, etc… Each of the 21 lines has its own fluctuation of median household incomes. Income is spatialized, and transportation infrastructure reflects the ‘zones' of wealth and poverty by its riders. What kind of ‘visual typing' (to use Lemon's phrase) can we get from the NYC metro lines?

The New Yorker’s “Inequality and New York’s Subway” stated, ““ The United States has a problem with income inequality. And it’s particularly bad in New York City—according to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, if the borough of Manhattan were a country, the income gap between the richest twenty per cent and the poorest twenty per cent would be on par with countries like Sierra Leone, Namibia, and Lesotho. Income changes dramatically between boroughs and neighborhoods. One way to look at it is by tracking the shifts along the city’s subway.”

Some highlights:

• $205,192—The highest median household income of any census tract the subway has a station in (for Chambers Street, Park Place, and World Trade Center, all in Lower Manhattan).
• $12,288—The lowest median household income (Sutter Avenue, on the L in Brooklyn).
• $191,442—The largest range in median household income on a single subway line (for the 2, which includes Chambers Street/Park Place, in Lower Manhattan, on the high end, and East 180th Street, in the Bronx, on the low end).
• $84,837—The smallest range in median household income on a single subway line (for the G, the only non-shuttle subway line that doesn’t pass through Manhattan).
• $142,265—The largest gap in median household income between two consecutive subway stations on the same line (between Fulton Street and Chambers Street on the A and the C lines, in Lower Manhattan).

Infrastructures of transportation can certainly embody (and continue) the ambivalence, the contestation, and the inequalities that can be found in the processes of creating them. As we traverse public transport scapes, Lemon offers a useful focus on transportation/the metro as “...a place-trope, a figurative setting in contesting ontologies of a society in transition, alternatively standing for totalizing glory or uniform repression, social chaos or freedom, conformity or cultured sociability. In pursuing this focus, I stress verbal, visual, and textual representations that juxtapose social activity with a spatial infrastructure, often in attempts to ‘fit' social activity to structure in an iconic fashion.”

I wonder: how would Lemon's discussion of the NYC metro unfold? What kind of 'vneshnij vid' would chart the political and social relations in the Big Apple's underground transportations?