Beneath the Arches: Re-appropriating the Residual Spaces of Infrastructure Brian Rosa Department of Geography, School of Environment and Development Background My area of interest is the role of industrial-era transportation infrastructure on the social and material (re)production of the post-industrial city, particularly in regard to Manchester. Through doing so, I aim to interpret the enduring effects that railway infrastructure has had on the socio-spatial shaping of Manchester. Historically, above all, the Castlefield area of Manchester city centre has stood as a vector of transportation infrastructure to serve the political economy of a new mode of production: it was the central node in the circulation system of canals and railways that fed the material and communication needs of the industrialization of “Cottonopolis”. Manchester’s transportation infrastructure was described 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, the canals and railway viaducts remain to this day the most enduring symbols of the Industrial Revolution and modernization, outlasting then the vast majority of historical structures in the post-industrial reconfiguration of the city. The railway viaducts, which undergird the Victorian elevated railways and interweave the urban fabric, have been the focus of a number of urban design and regeneration plans within the past decade, particularly in London. Urbanists contend that this infrastructure, created for the ease of mobility of people and capital, represent visual and physical barriers as well as spaces of abandonment or perceived under-utilization. Given the contemporary shift in the way railway arches are conceived, they are ideal sites to examine how residual spaces of the city are used, adapted, performed, negotiated and struggled over, revealing implications much larger than the sites themselves. There are a variety of terms that are used to describe this sort of in-between space produced by infrastructure, but I am using the term ‘residual space’ to signify the seemingly left-over or appropriated nature of many of the spaces surrounding railway arches are the by-product of a larger process of spatial production. I will be investigating three regions of Manchester: Castlefield, Ardwick, and Collyhurst. The historical development of three regions have been heavily influenced by the presence and effects of railway viaducts, and they are all in different stages of regeneration. In excavating the spatial history of these sites, my research design includes case studies employing archival data and qualitative research methods and textual interpretations. Theoretical Framework The socio-spatial significance of networked infrastructures in cities (such those supporting transportation, water systems, electricity transmission, etc.) is unquestionable, and they are increasingly being theorized and studied in the social sciences. However, much less frequently discussed is how they are understood and experienced as built form, as a material aspect of everyday urban life. My overall theoretical framework is informed foremost by the historical and dialectical materialism 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, and thus does not exist as an independent material reality on its own. In endeavoring to conduct a Lefebvrian history of space, contextualized within a space that is both absolute 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 of social activities” (p. 110). Approaching an infrastructural network is an informing way to apply this theoretical model. As networks represent the tension between fixity and motion, mobility and immobility (Harvey 1982; Graham & Marvin 2001), I am dealing with the relationship between the ‘sunk capital’ (Harvey 1982) of infrastructure, which functions in a both a relative, conceptualized space based on the circulation of capital, and an absolute, material space which the railway viaducts occupy. In examining the urban material flows for which the railways were built to facilitate, I will engage primarily with geographical political economy (Harvey 1982; Smith 1995), circulatory and metabolical 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 economic analysis of what Lefebvre would call ‘representations of spaces’ through analysis of accumulation schemas, the circulation of capital, and fixed capital of material space. For this reason, I will also be employing theories and terminology more typically associated with cultural geography to engage with discourse on place (Massey 1995; Cresswell 2004) and landscape (Zukin 1993; Cosgrove 1998), and with architectural theory 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 the social and economic contexts embodied in the original construction of the railway in Manchester · 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 real estate 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 currently exist, and how they are imagined, I will employ visual methodologies and phenomenological investigations of the sites of my case studies: · Subjective photographic surveys of the sites in the context of classifying and interpreting the nature of residual space · Re-photography using archival images of these sites since the railway was built, to trace their material reconfigurations over time · Ethnographic investigations with urban explorers, graffiti artists, and guerrilla gardeners Aims To meld geographical political economy and cultural geographic conceptions of place and landscape to trace the enduring effects that railway infrastructure has had on the spatial, material, and social shaping of Manchester (and its city-region) since the beginning of the railway age (1840s). To situate the changing ways that the spaces within and surrounding railway viaducts are currently produced, appropriated, and transgressed within the major socio-economic shifts of de-industrialization (1940s-late 1970s) and the post-industrial era (late 1970s-present). Objectives · To excavate the spatial history of the railway in Manchester (and its city-region) as an entry point to engage with, and critique, emerging theories of networked infrastructure and to connect scholarship on infrastructure with the absolute space of the city that it inhabits. · To investigate and interpret the various ways that ‘residual spaces’ of spatially- embedded transportation infrastructures are produced, appropriated, and transgressed, focusing specifically on the shifting, historically contingent form and function of the railway viaduct. · To explore how ‘spatial practices’ of phenomenological methods and photographic representation might be used as heuristic tools to interpret everyday urban spaces, contextualizing specific sites within larger processes of spatial production. References Cosgrove, D., Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, Madison, Wisconsin: the University of Wisconsin Press. Cresswell, T., Place: A short Introduction, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Cronon, W., Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co.Doron, G.M., The Dead Zone and the Architecture of Transgression. City, 4(2), Engels, F., 2009 (1844). The Condition of the Working Class in England 3rd ed., London: Penguin Books. Gandy, M., Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graham, S. & Marvin, S., Splintering Urbanism: Networked InfrastructuresT echnologica Mobilities and the Urban Condition, New York and London: Routledge. Harvey, D., The Limits of Capital, Oxford: Blackwell. Heynen, N., Kaika, M. & Swyngedouw, E., In The Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, New York and London: Routledge. Kellett, J.R., The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lefebvre, H., 2009 (1974). The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D., Places and Their Pasts. History Workshop Journal,, 39, Rubio, I.D.S.M., Terrain Vague. In Davidson, Cynthia, ed. Anyplace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp Smith, N., The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London and New York: Routledge. Swyngedouw, E., Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures AND (Cyborg) Cities. Science as Culture, 15(2), Zukin, S., Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Pres Supervisors: Maria Kaika, James Evans 1910 Map of Manchester Railway network: public domain image from Railway Clearing House