Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure
I want to talk about civic infrastructure, what it is, and how we can move it forward. I don’t think that we should spend our time today talking about maintenance, but 20
rather about how to use infrastructure in the United States and Europe and Asia to move societies forward in interesting ways. So, that’s just one framing issue. I would like each of you to begin by telling me what you think civic infrastructure is. Guido Hartray All infrastructure is civic infrastructure. We could think of infrastructure as the thing that functionally connects the different kind of uses, the different people that occupy the city, and the different neighborhoods of a city. Civic space has always had the role of creating this kind of functional, experiential tie between the individual citizens of a city and the city as a whole. When we think of how a typical neighborhood operates, it’s very evident that you share a street with other people and that the street has multiple uses. So it’s very clear how that is both infrastructure and civic space. As we get into pieces of infrastructure that we might be tempted to think of as having a single role that idea breaks down. Sarah Williams Goldhagen I think that one of the things that Amanda Lawrence and George Thrush and I were discussing in preparation for the conference was that maybe you can think about infrastructure you can see and infrastructure you can’t see. I do think that’s actually a useful beginning, even if it’s kind of a dumb beginning. Hubert Murray Whether it’s visible or invisible, I’m thinking of it in terms of the hard and the soft. As a foreigner in this country, what strikes me as the most fundamental infrastructure that holds this country together is the Constitution. And I would call that, on the soft side, a really fundamental piece of infrastructure. Sarah Williams Goldhagen What do you mean?