At the Pace of Infrastructure
If you stand still long enough in most cities, you begin to notice that stillness feels slightly out of place.
No one tells you to move. There is no sign insisting that you cannot remain where you are. But the scale of the road, the rhythm of the traffic lights, the distance between crossings, the absence of somewhere to sit without explanation so all of it creates a subtle pressure. You become aware that you are interrupting something.
Cities were not always drawn this way. At some point, the measure shifted. Streets widened, not by accident but by intention. Distances stretched just far enough to make walking less obvious. Intersections hardened into calculations. The plan began to anticipate flow before presence. It began to assume velocity.
We rarely question this because it feels like practicality. Roads must carry vehicles. Signals must regulate movement. Zoning must separate uses. These decisions accumulate slowly, through studies and simulations and standards. None of them feel ideological on their own. They feel technical.
Gilles Deleuze wrote about systems that operate through modulation rather than enclosure, environments that do not confine you, but adjust the conditions under which you move. At the scale of the city, modulation becomes speed. The infrastructure encourages continuity. It smooths hesitation. It reduces friction. You are not forced forward; you are carried.
You notice it when a sidewalk narrows just enough to make lingering awkward. When benches are positioned more for order than comfort. When shade is incidental rather than intentional. When crossing the street requires waiting through cycles that seem calibrated for traffic, not for you. Nothing dramatic occurs. You simply adjust.
Michel Foucault described how space organizes bodies. At this scale, organization becomes infrastructural. Highways divide neighborhoods with a logic that appears rational. Parking lots spread outward with a logic that appears efficient. The distances between housing, work, and leisure expand until the car feels less like a choice and more like a requirement.
The body adapts quietly. Walking becomes secondary. Pausing becomes inconvenient. Gathering migrates toward edges under overhangs, along staircases, in the margins between buildings. These are not dramatic acts of resistance. They are small adjustments to a landscape that was not drawn with slowness in mind.
Jacques Derrida suggested that every structure contains what it excludes. In cities optimized for throughput, what is excluded is not people but time. Time to hesitate, to drift, to remain without purpose. The plan does not forbid these things; it simply does not accommodate them generously.
As architects and planners, we participate in this calibration. We run models that prioritize circulation efficiency. We adjust setbacks and turning radii. We calculate capacity before comfort. These are reasonable decisions, often necessary. Yet taken together, they create an environment where movement is privileged over presence.
The result is not hostility. It is indifference.
The city does not push you away. It does not confront you. It simply continues at its chosen speed. If you fall into that rhythm, everything functions smoothly. If you pause, you feel slightly misaligned, as though you have stepped outside an expectation that was never stated aloud.
And yet, people still pause. Not dramatically, not in protest, but in ways that accumulate. They gather where the plan did not anticipate gathering, at the edge of parking lots, on the steps of closed shops, along narrow strips of shade that were never meant to host conversation. They cross where the path feels intuitive rather than permitted, tracing faint diagonal lines across lawns and medians that slowly become permanent. They turn leftover corners into markets, overhangs into meeting points, vacant plots into play. The city suggests a rhythm, but bodies negotiate it.
These gestures rarely overturn the system. The roads remain wide. The signals continue to favor traffic. The distances do not shrink overnight. What changes instead is the surface, the way space is temporarily claimed, slightly reinterpreted, gently misused. A staircase becomes seating. A divider becomes a bench. A roadside becomes a gathering after dusk. None of it is planned, and yet it persists.
Perhaps what has shifted is not our ability to inhabit cities, but the amount of effort required to do so slowly. Slowness now feels intentional. It must be carved out against the grain of infrastructure. The city moves, and we move with it because it is easier to do so but occasionally, someone falls out of step. Someone sits where there is nowhere obvious to sit. Someone crosses early. Someone stays after closing. Someone builds community in the margins.
These are not revolutions. They are recalibrations.
Occasionally, we do not move at the city’s speed. And in that brief hesitation, the illusion breaks. The city’s rhythm was never inevitable. It was designed.
