Toward The Livable City
Edited by Emilie Buchwald
(Milkweed Editions, 2003)

Includes The Backside of Civility by Emily Hiestand

Combining firsthand accounts of the attractions and distractions of city life, Toward the Livable City introduces a range of perspectives — including pieces from Bill McKibben, Emily Hiestand, Jane Holtz Kay, and James Howard Kunstler — about creating successful, livable cities, with examples from across America and around the world.

Review by Linda Piwowarczyk
”It's time to make some changes. Sixteen experts and writers take an educated look back and forward, envisioning a user-friendly city. Emilie Buchwald has gathered their writings in Milkweed Editions' Toward the Livable City. Emily Hiestand lifts the hood on a city's infrastructure in "The Backside of Civility," creating excitement and respect for the "unglamorous shadow city on which the fashionable city rests." The cartooning of Ken Avidor pokes our consciences and our auto mania with his "Selections from Roadkill Bill," and the Congress for the New Urbanism concludes with an appeal to connection in its "Charter of the New Urbanism."

Excerpt from The Backside of Civility
by Emily Hiestand


”Growing up in the 1950s South, I received a strong dose of the idea that certain things — anything with an engine, anything that shot flames, anything that involved lug wrenches or voltage— need not concern a young lady. Ditto the town water tower that looked like a flying saucer on very long legs; the interesting grey transformer boxes ringed with coils; and, of course, the super secret atomic plants into which our fathers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee disappeared each weekday to split, or fuse, or manage the atom.  It was a surprise then, even to me, when I grew up to be a public works hound, the kind of person who likes to poke around bridges and dams, shipping terminals, power plants, rail yards and processing facilities, and waterworks — the kinds of hefty infrastructure operations that are the bones and muscles, and sinew and spine (not to mention the GI tract) of every industrialized community on earth.

I like the word infrastructure too — a robust double trochee with a slight syncopation. “Infra,” from Latin, means “underneath” or “lower down than.” As “infra dig” means “beneath one’s dignity,” “infrastructure” means “beneath the structure.” The way I am using “infrastructure”— to mean the public works and sub-services of an industrial economy — evolved from more specialized meanings. When the word migrated from French to English, in the 1920s, it was used chiefly to describe military installations such as naval bases, cavalry barracks and the like. In American English, the word began to be applied to the tunnels and culverts of railroad lines, and once it was linked with the railroad — whoosh— infrastructure was free to travel. Soon the word could be found signifying the subparts or underlying system of just about anything, even something as ephemeral as sound, as the metrical frame of jazz.

Luckily, my husband Peter is also fond of the bastions of the utilitarian. Together, we have gone behind the scenes at the Niagara Falls power station, where a operator allowed us to touch a chrome turbine generating the power for the Northeast corridor, explored a windpower generating station in the North Sea, a French wafer fab, one of the facilities that make the silicon chips that make the information society go). We were awed by a Vermont dairy that purifies its whey runoff in a bed of aquatic plants that emulates a marsh; and again in a Tokyo train yard, where we learned that the Japanese have named their fastest train for the speed of the mind. The engineer on the Nozomi train explains that the name means Wish.

As a partisan of physical infrastructure, I have noticed that if the example is ancient and lying in ruin, if it is a Roman aqueduct or the cistern at Mycenae, it is considered fascinating and highly visitable. But with a few exceptions (the Parisian sewer system for one) current-day infrastructure is rarely featured in portraits of our cities. Do we overlook these monuments to human ingenuity and nature’s forces on purpose, because they are the unglamorous shadow city on which the fashionable city rests? Well, sure. And yet, as the poet Amy Clampitt plangently asks, “What’s landfill but the backside of civility?”

Some of my most memorable expeditions to the backside have been to facilities in my own metropolitan region. Close to home it is easy to connect the dots — from substation to living-room lamp, from holding tanks to bathtub, even from the present to the past. The spring day that Peter and I paddled our canoe down the local Mystic River, locked through the Amelia Earhart Dam, and debouched into the Atlantic Ocean, we were following the annual spawning route taken for millennia by the alewife, the tiny silver fish that Squanto taught the Pilgrims to use to fertilize their New World cornfields. 

By their very nature, facilities responsible for delivering many basic human needs — water, energy, warmth, food, mobility, recreation, connectivity — embody our reigning proposals, for better or worse, for conducting life on earth. Maybe that’s why a few hours chatting up operators at a lock, a toll bridge or a fish processing plant reveals insights about a metropolis that you will not discover in its cafés, shops, and museums. Because infrastructure is an embodiment of political will and cultural vision, it is a litmus of our values. Every ordinary power plant is revelatory on a great range of matters.”

Order the book at Milkweed Editions
More travel stories in: Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems