Infrastructure and the Future
Jason Schreiber If you look at the history of civilization, all cities were completely self sufficient. Villages and caves were all self-sufficient initially. And then the systems became more interconnected because it was more efficient. That continues today, but as we look to the future—and I think lots of us recognize this for many systems—it would make more sense to be able to bring all that self-sufficiency back into more individualized units. Package sewer treatment, which many people argue is a part of sprawl, may be appropriate if done differently. We could look at localized energy production or the distributed energy systems that are starting to develop here and there in cities. Transportation, in particular, has a little bit more of a hurdle. Obviously a part of what makes a lot of those systems work well is that we can move the freight on trucks long distances and we can interconnect commerce, but then we have an issue with fossil fuels. For instance, the airline industry is going to be gone. There’s just not going to be enough fuel, so there will have to be a high speed rail network. Many people argue that if you live in a mixed-use community with fields around you, you’ll be more self sufficient in the future when we can no longer truck food into major cities. So are we going full circle? And what does that imply for our infrastructure systems? I think the only infrastructure that really will not be impacted much by distance is information. Kazys Varnelis There’s a great fascination right now with distributed systems. Distributed is now valorized as an inherently more democratic system, and there are problems with it. One is that some distributed systems—like let’s say the idea of everyone producing their own electricity again—don’t always take into account issues like the fact that the grid is in horrible shape. Many of these network technologies that we have may be distributed, but they’re based on increasingly centralized systems. Let’s take the internet and telecoms, where we’re having these companies like Google getting bigger and bigger and bigger…
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