devlog

Wrote this a few months ago and forgot about it. Is scrappy, but a decent preface to the next post on the stack…

I seem unable to see a copy of Aramis without walking off with it. Frumin’s i returned the next day, Shekhar’s copy i half-advertently whisked 3000 miles away from where it needed to be, and now he wants it back; so one last-re-reading, a quick diversion via Berlin, and pronto in the post back to MIT it goes.

I feel strongly that anyone with an interest in public and collective transportation or civic infrastructure planning should read Aramis at least twice. First time round it made me cry, (though now I can’t remember why). The book is a tragical murder mystery; the investigators a grizzly and brown-raincoated academic sociologist and his intern, an optimistic graduate engineer. The victim is Aramis; Aramis is a “Personal Rapid Transit” system conceived in the white heat of the late 60s, and died an ignominious and apparently sudden death in 1987. Of all PRTs that were specified and almost existed, Aramis got the furthest.

It’s a moralising story about how a large scale and visionary infrastructure project failed; a Wodehousian comic story about self-protection and lapses in communication; and a love story about the most misunderstood kind of love, the love of technology. I’m interested in the dynamics of failure, having managed to extrapolate quite a lot from the history of community wireless networking projects in London - but that’s quite a different story.

One driver for my refascination with Aramis is, being back in London, the inevitably increasing angst being experienced here over the state of the Olympic Sacrifice Zone and the lack of open planning process or visible planning progress. 2012 looks every day more likely to be a civic eschaton that affects every London in a way they really notice - in their tax bills and the state of the transport network. Visionary transportation systems comprise a large part of the “Olympic Legacy” rhetoric; everyone, we are told, from spectators to athletes to IOC members, will be taking public transport into and out of the OSZ. There will be bullet trains; all will be multimodal and greenly fueled; this is a glorious future or a tragically collapsing one - the two visions can’t be unentwined.

2012 is a long or short 6 years away, and we’re already starting to see the pre-emptive PR brickthrowing expressed in this children’s rhyme excerpted in Aramis:

Il court, il court le furet             The weasel is running,
Le furet d' la politique,               The political weasel;
Il court, il court le furet             The weasel is running,
Le furet d' la technique.               The technological weasel.
Il est passe par ici                    He came this way,
Il repassera par la                     He'll go back that way.
Il court, il court le furet             The weasel is running,
Le furet d' l'economie,                 The economic weasel.

My experience of Shekhar’s scene at MIT, Columbia and beyond - researchers and theorists in the sociology of technology and planning - is as a retrospective scene (necessarily as it defines itself?) and can be very inward-looking - yet does not inevitably have to be. Has Jack Lemley, Alasdair Darling or Bob Kiley read Aramis? Are planners and engineers exposed to the profound and powerful conclusions arrived at by the sociologists of technology, the Latours, the Harveys and Castells? Or do our planners and our planalysts live in intellectual silos, missing so much learning from each others’ capacities and conclusions?

I want to be able to keep track of others’ tracks. The London Free Map project that got folded into OpenStreetmap originated in our collective GPS walks through the Olympic Sacrifice Zone.

I want the dynamics to be able to be understood; to construct the murder mystery and solve it before it happens - by an open planning process to be able to avert cultural atrocity. Now London is committed, the best we can hope and plan for the Lea Valley and all the networks that its development will effect, is a site that truly works for London.

(These are excerpts from the Catherine Porter translation of Aramis))

That is why the Context is such a bad predictor of the project’s fate, and why the tedious argument over “indivudual freedom” and “the weight of structures” does not allow us to understand Aramis… Where is the freedom of the individual actors? Everywhere, in all the branchings of the context. Where is the structure? Everywhere, traced by all the branchings and relationships of the context. - p155

Anyway, do you really know what the word “metaphor” means? Transportation. Moving. The word metaphoros, my friend, is written on all the moving vans in Greece. -p59