Infrastructure and the Future
Sarah Williams Goldhagen Europeans tend to have much longer time-horizons, so how are you doing this? 29
Marcel Smets The basic aim would be is to say, ‘What is the basic obligation of the public government?’ It is not just designing and building; it is also setting the rules for what should be done in a public-private situation to work with the private sector. Sarah Williams Goldhagen Can you give a concrete example? I think it would help people to conceptualize. Marcel Smets Twelve years or so ago I organized a university-based design group, which helped design road networks, parking, railway stations, and so forth. The group also designed the urbanistic plans in order to develop the massing of the volumes, which basically was the price of the land, and so forth and so on. It worked because we were able to do these two things at the same time. Public investment in the infrastructure gives plus value to the land. If you don’t control the plus value that you create by your own means, you don’t create the civic environment. Sarah Williams Goldhagen Shaun Donovan, who’s now the secretary of HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development), spoke at the Graduate School of Design a few weeks ago. He said something that really struck me, which is that we can no longer talk about HUD as being the store of low cost-housing, because we can’t talk about low-income housing at all. It no longer works to take one typology for one social group, to isolate it, and to focus the government agency only on this typology and this social group. He said that we now talk about neighborhood development, which includes all aspects of the development as well as what is now called ‘affordable housing.’ I thought that was a useful analogy for how architects need to reconceptualize their role in society moving forward. It’s no longer just a building. You are the stewards of public environment.