If Only it Could Speak: Narrative Explorations of Mobility and Place in Seattle

This chapter imaginatively engages with the ways in which place is understood by telling a story about urban transformation in Seattle. Empirically this is explored by “giving voice” to the reconstruction of State Route 99 (SR99) in downtown Seattle (a project estimated to cost in excess of US$3 billion). According to the 2010 census there are 608,000 residents in the Seattle city area and some 3.4 million inhabitants in the metropolitan area. SR99 runs 50 miles from Fife in the South to Everett in the North and in parts in parallel with the Interstate 5, however closer to the coast. The SR99 cleaves its way on the north-south trajectory through the city via raised ramps and elevated sections and carries about 110,000 vehicles a day. One of these sections, the Alaskan Way Viaduct, was built on old seawall structures and created a buffer between the city and the sea at Elliott Bay. The Alaskan Way Viaduct, colloquially known as the “Seawall,” was opened on April 4, 1953 and extensively damaged by an earthquake in 2001. The subsequent debate concerning plans for its reconstruction serves as a lens for understanding the complex relationship that exists between human and non-human elements and illustrates how infrastructures and mobility systems are simultaneously both material and cultural artifacts that need to be understood very differently from the utilitarian and instrumental perception that guides much contemporary urban planning and design. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s (1996) story of the aborted Aramis light rail project in Paris and Phillip Vannini’s (2008) account of the sinking of the Queen of the North ferry in British Columbia, this chapter embarks on a similar thought experiment of imagining how a redesign of a large urban infrastructure project like the Seawall in Seattle would look “if only it could speak.”