LANDSCAPE INFRASTRUCTURE Introduction: Pierre Bélanger We are undertaking this symposium to explore the future of infrastructure itself, the glue of urbanization beyond the dogma of civil engineering and transportation planning. Discussions and lectures will focus on ways to address the predominate challenges facing urban economies today, which include climate dynamics, carbon and nitrogen wastes, population mobilities, and resource economies. These imperatives are inseparable. This is a key aspect to the work that we are involved in: they underpin the challenge of contemporary urbanization. That puts landscape architects in a privileged position to cut across a number of disciplines that have been dominant in shaping the discourse in the past. As an outgrowth of the recovery of geography and the emergence of ecology over the past two decades, several new horizons have come into focus, positioning the field of landscape as both system and strategy for current infrastructural failures and spatial economic challenges. We’re going to put into question the predominance of civil engineering on matters of infrastructure. That premise of civil engineers is based on federal funding, state planning, life-cycling of infrastructure, sustainability and resilience, and the pricing of infrastructure. Over the next thirty-six hours we’re going to put those notions into question and propose, perhaps, alternative ways in which we can think about infrastructure. To do this, we’ll develop a threestaged argument: historically, semiotically, and strategically, by looking at the redefinition, the representation, and the rebuilding of infrastructure through contemporary scholarship, research, and practice.
PIERRE Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s GSD, where he teaches and coordinates graduate courses on the convergence of ecology, infrastructure, and urbanism in the interrelated fields of design, planning, and engineering. As a member of the internationally recognized Harvard Project on the City, led by architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas, Bélanger completed graduate studies for the Masters in Landscape Architecture at the GSD, where he received the Janet Darling Webel and Norman T. Newton Prizes in design. Bélanger is professionally registered as a landscape architect and urban planner as well as certified in Canada as a surface miner, skilled in precision earthmoving and heavy equipment operations.
Keynote: Rosalind Williams, “Infrastructure as Lived Experience” I’d like to give a short introduction to the topic of infrastructure, first of all as a wording concept. I went to the dictionary. I’d assumed that “ infrastructure” was an old word and that everyone else besides me understood what it meant. The more I looked at the word, the more it reminded me of the keyword “ technology.” Infrastructure, like technology, tends to be a recent term, a promiscuous term, one that has no clean definition and is very liable to reification. Words are emerging and taking on new meaning in response to historical phenomena that they purport to be describing. So infrastructure as a word and concept is very tricky. Thomas Hughes, in Networks of Power, writes about technological style. He’s expanding the definition from railroads, which you can see so clearly as tracks, to electrical networks, which have huge implications for the landscape but not always so directly. They’re not like bridges, very visible in the landscape, but the fact is that infrastructure isn’t always that visible. Infrastructure is a rapidly changing term—there’s not a clear definition, you’re going to have to make it up as you go along—and in a sense I think that this conference is all about trying to define the word in the context of a rapidly changing world. In this world, it’s not clear which authorities design, construct, pay for, and maintain infrastructure. Are they national, supernational, or something else? And how do citizens participate in these projects?
ROSALIND WILLIAMS is the Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology at MIT. In 2011, Williams received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where she has been appointed as Distinguished Visiting Professor. Williams studies the origins and effects from the evolution of large, constructed systems and the acceleration of technology for human life in a predominantly self-constructed world.
WATCH THE CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPE INFRASTRUCTURE” on the GSD youtube.com channel
http://www.youtube.com / watch?v=OzoB5KAVHKQ 064
SYMPOSIUM LANDSCAPE INFRASTRUCTURE