Potholes of Philadelphia: Seasonality, Infrastructure, and Environments Above and Below Ground

Abstract

In cities with a continental climate, potholes are such an integral part of the transition from winter to spring that they have become their own season in the urban calendar: pothole season. In Philadelphia, “pothole season” became an annual regular feature with the expansion of the automobile age after World War II . Local newspapers used the phrase to mark the city’s transition from winter to spring and also to mock governments’ failure to mend roads or respond to dangerously sized craters on local streets and federal highways. For Philadelphians, the cyclical appearance of a thawing and freezing underground that made road surfaces break, eventually creating craters in roads that weredangerous to urban motorists and cyclists alike, became a way to understand how nature worked upon their city at a particular time of the year. Annually, pothole seasonality was a reminder that urban infrastructures failed when they ignored the dictates of nature that had environments above and below ground closely entangled. As a research perspective, finally, pothole seasonality helps to uncover slow but regular environmental changes and to extrapolate how urbanists and city governments cope, adapt, and transform in response to these reoccuring events.