the bridge town belt

From The National Library of Scotland

One of my most memorable Scotland experiences was seeing the Forth Bridge for the first time. For some reason or other I had never seen pictures of it or even heard of it until the moment when my Edinburgh bus drove onto the Forth Road Bridge and I saw it across the water parallel to me. I was fairly awestruck first because of just how big it is, making any bridge I'd seen prior look like a glorified log-over-the-creek by comparison.

by itmpa

Then I noticed that a number of small temporary shelters had been erected around its supporting piers above the water, which I've now learned were there because of the ongoing re-painting project on the bridge. Seeing the shelters strangely clustered about between the water below and the rail line above put an idea in my head: What if such shelters weren't temporary?

by itmpa

Could some form of habitation or development build up over time around massive bridge supports? Imagine a succession of trading communities, each clustered around a pier section of the bridge, perfectly situated to facilitate boat travel between the bridge towns and other  ports. The bridge could serve double modes of transport: it's original purpose as a linear carriageway above and as a more ad-hoc, accretionary artery below.

Perhaps the original purpose of the bridge's design would become obsolete as, say, the body of water it bridged flowed out or dried up (as was likely the case with the Mediterranean Sea in the geologic past) but the occupation of it's piers remained. Over time as the water level drops the inhabitants of the bridge might begin moving lower and lower down the supports, along the way harvesting the materials of the bridge's defunct superstructure to use in building around the bridge's substructure. Eventually only its inhabited supports might remain, looking like a strange procession of apartment blocks (or vertical communities, to use more open terminology) along a dry basin.

by itmpa

From The National Library of Scotland

The above image is from the National Library of Scotland's Flickr page, and the stages of the bridge's construction showing its supports going up pretty well match my picture of what a bridge like that might eventually look like.This "bridge town belt" concept is what I'll be running with for my next composite. I'd like to make a profile of these former bridge piers, now existing as a series of vertical communities, independent yet linked in succession from their original purpose of supporting a causeway now long gone.