Panel 2: Systems Infrastructure
last five years, one of the major trends that we’re reacting to—at least as a whole and as an industry designing products—is the rise of the baby boomers. That’s go50
ing to drive changes across all products, and I venture to say that includes infrastructure. Tom Keane Let’s switch gears for a moment to talk about 18th century and 19th century models of infrastructure versus 21st century infrastructure. At the risk of over simplification, the old model of systems infrastructure was one huge system— big technology put together. Water and sewer may be deemed a classic kind of model. Today it seems there’s some change in that there’s a disaggregation that’s going on, and it’s potentially happening with power. I’d like comments from all of you on what that means in terms of how we think about designing these systems, and if in fact they are now becoming very dispersed. Clare Lyster The eighteenth and nineteenth century infrastructural model was a very centralized one, usually publicly controlled or at least controlled, designed and maintained by a small group in one or two places. But the systems of the twenty-first century city are highly distributed; they are very global and they have a huge scale or impact such that when something happens in one part of the world, it has incredible impact somewhere else. That produces a distributed society, so we can bring it back to what sort of urban organizations come out of that? On the other hand, if you read some global theory that the distributed systems are still accumulating in critical places in the world, so that you have incredible distribution but also incredible conglomeration (to use the Saskia Sassen term) in certain spaces. This is particularly true in the financial markets in Paris and New York and the super financial cities. It’s hard say how we design for that. I think we just have to make ourselves aware of how network thinking and contemporary systems are impacting patterns of globalization across the world.