Stoplight Urbanism Pt. I

Many of the interventions that have most radically reconfigured the urban environment are also those which paradoxically have evaded examination and refinement through their ubiquity. On a walk or drive through the city recent interventions such as parking meters, traffic lights, signage and one-way streets remain out of mind due to their prosaic and common nature. While some degree of control is of course necessary, there has been little inquiry into the effects of the present systems and into the possibilities that exist beyond the current reality. The following series of writings on the traffic light seek to detail its history, to examine its effect on social life, and to explore alternatives to the automated device. While almost any such element in the city could have been chosen, the traffic light poses an intriguing subject at the confluence of philosophies of control, technologic determination, and modernization.


For millenia movement through cities and villages was regulated by mutual interest and rooted in a notion of common-law that began to be restricted with the enclosure movements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Under such a system no traveller had a superior right over another; no person or vehicle had dominance and all spatial claims to the space of the road were recognized to have equal value. Such informal systems did not end with the enclosure movement or industrial revolution, they continued decades into the early twentieth century.

While in many western countries the establishment of the primacy of the automobile led to a drastic shift in custom and space, in developing nations the assimilation of motorized transportation in society has been unable to change customs regarding road use. In this regard, Stanford Gregory’s comparison of the informal driving practices of Egyptians with the linguistics of pidgin languages is fascinating. As a modern western observer, Gregory paints the typical first impression of chaos but is able to “discern an order in the madness,” which he believes is clearly emblematic of “social interaction at a fever pitch” [Gregory, 337]. Such intense systems of concession, predicated in intense interaction, result in the ability to change formation instantaneously and avoid obstacles and stoppages as they occur. These fluid dynamics utilize the whole of human reaction and intellect and exhibit a complex relation of communication and instinct not present in the smartest mechanical control.

In the developed world the industrial revolution initiated an era of technological determinism in which centuries of developments in civilization were rejected or radically reconfigured by an increasing reliance on totalizing rationalism and a preoccupation with efficiency through mechanical means. The technological pace of development was far faster than ever seen in human history. As a result of this pace, nothing other than the easily quantifiable instantaneous result was considered to have value. In the face of the accepted perfection of the machine, humans, especially those of lesser breeding and education, were considered to have little value.

The first traffic signal in human history was installed on December 10th 1868, outside the Houses of Parliament in London. The signals were intended to protect Members of Parliament crossing the busy street. They also helped to afford them a degree of separation from those whose interests they ostensibly represented. Like many traffic control devices, it had its lineage in railroads, who had been using semaphores for several decades. The London signal was a combination of a standard railroad semaphore arms and gas warning lamps but was not automatically controlled. The signal acted as a mechanical appendage of the constable who stood on the traffic island by telegraphing his orders to the mass of carriages, carts, and pedestrians. The signal was a technological aid but not a technological determinant. The London Signal was also an epitomization of the uneasy relationship between human and technological control: less than a month after the signal was installed the gas lamps exploded injuring the police officer “who had thought he was in control” [Pile and Thrift, 262]
and the age of the machine in traffic control had begun.

To be continued in Part II.

Works Cited

1. Gregory Jr, Stanford W. “Auto Traffic in Egypt as a Verdant Grammar.” Social
Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 48, No.4. 1985: 337.

2. City A-Z. Ed. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift. New York: Routledge, 2000. p. 262.

A Modest Anarchic Proposal

No I have not abandoned the blog. I am reaching the midpoint of my graduate studies and am feeling the results of both my chronic over-commitment and my desire to start using this media as a vehicle to disseminate my research in a more serious way.

In short I have been hoarding content and will gradually begin releasing it as soon as I am confident in its readiness.

The first inquiry I would like to present is a series of essays is drawn from recent research into the nature of structured traffic control and the effect that such control has had on our cities.

Urbanist Zeitgeist: St. Louis Union Station Part I

It is relatively easy to pass by or through a specific place without fully comprehending the implications of the place on overarching patterns of urbanism or conversely the reflections of larger social and cultural patterns within everyday spaces. In this essay I seek to establish the specific site of St. Louis's Union Station in its current state as both a reflection of larger attitudes to urbanism and a destabilizing force on surrounding areas.




Union Station is a surprisingly late manifestation of the Victorian unease between tradition and rapidly changing technology. Like much earlier examples such as London's St. Pancras Station Union Station consists of a thin street building built in an overly traditional vocabulary (in this case halfway between Richardsonian Romanesque and French Chateau) which disguises a steel framed trainshed from public view. That the stone terminal building was built in St. Louis during the same decade as three muscular modern skyscrapers by Louis Sullivan points to a continuous thread of conservatism which continues to dominate the built environment here to this day.

At the time of its construction the 11 acre trainshed was one of the largest in the world and served a peak of 100,000 passengers a day. Fast forward a half century. The process of urbanization has become internalized. Physical urbanization is no longer necessary as increased communication allows connection by proxy and urban space has been supplanted by a decentralized urban society [see Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution] As physical proximity becomes unimportant and speed of travel increases de-densification increases and the confined vectors of rail transit become less effective; combined with the well documented collusion of government and the auto industry transit and rail foundered. The station officially was mothballed in 1978.

The phenomena of suburbanization and disinvestment in urban areas is also deeply rooted in American culture. In some ways the migration to the suburbs was the technologically aided fulfillment of the dream of Jeffersonian Democracy. As Witold Rybczynski quotes de Tocqueville "The spirit of equality has stamped a particularly uniform pattern on the habits of private life" (Rybczynski, 112.) Rybczynski interprets this as evidence of the United States having the first equally distributed urban society. Unlike Europe there has never been a sharp delineation between sophistication (urban) and rusticity (rural) rather the whole culture falls on a reasonably level ground between the two. Given this proposition (if culture is urbanized urbanization becomes to an extent superfluous) and the rootlessness of the American people (refer to Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis) it is reasonable to conclude that the speculative and impermanent nature of the American city is a direct result. As Lefebvre notes "Urban democracy would imply an equality of places" while the traditional urban concept of "centrality would produce hierarchy and therefore inequality" (Lefebvre, 124). Of course the enduring paradox is that once the undemocratic hierarchy of the city is broken through decentralization segregation (economic, racial, ethnic, and social) is the inevitable undemocratic result.


To be continued...



Part I Bibliography:

Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: the University of
Minnesota Press, 2003.

Rybczynski, Witold. City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World. New York:
Scribner, 1995.