Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure
For me, it does mean public investment in accordance with public will. Public will comes in different forms in Europe and in Asia than in our very democratic place. 24
Nonetheless, I think one of the things we’ve been failing to do over the consumer decade is to figure out what that public will is that leads us to strategies and the accomplishment of larger goals. Sarah Williams Goldhagen Is public will the same thing as public good? Marilyn Taylor Public will, in my mind, is that which endorses leaders in the public sector to make their investment. I have come to realize that we, as architects and urbanists, can have great dreams for infrastructure, but unless there’s public leadership to make public investments supported by public will, they simply don’t happen. I don’t mean to say that infrastructure that is civic is exclusively public, but without that clarity of vision—which, at least in the United States, we have to broadly embrace and focus on in the long term—then we won’t get to what I call civic infrastructure. Sarah Williams Goldhagen There have been attempts to privatize certain elements of the infrastructure in the United States, the most famous of which I know is on a certain section of the highway right outside of Chicago. It was sold off to a private company because they didn’t have the funds—or didn’t want to come up with the funds publicly to fund it—and then the company immediately slapped on a toll of about eight or nine dollars, making it impossible for the lower income classes to use the highway. Ultimately it failed and reverted back to public ownership. It’s enormously problematic. Marcel, this is one of the things I’m very interested in getting from you, because I know in Europe you’ve done a lot of public-private partnerships. Could you tell us more about that? In the United States, most would agree that we haven’t quite figured out how to do it yet, and we need to.