Panel 2: Systems Infrastructure
Clare Lyster On one hand, you’re dealing with these global networks—very complex. On the other, there’s a kind of removed interest in local and what you 52
do at the scale of your own community in your own city. For example, there is a lot of discussion about food networks, trying to localize them. Not only for health reasons, but for economic reasons, sustainable reasons, whatever name you want to put on them. As designers, what are the spaces that then emerge from this new emphasis on local networking? The word icon came up before. We have to bring back a kind of identity to infrastructure in the city because if we’re just going to design on the basis on efficiency, we’re never going to change the way people think about how they live in the given urban environment. We have to bring the icon back to infrastructure—not as a way to show off, but as a way to use infrastructure as a means to re-identify the city. Beto Lopez I value people like Dean Kamen and anyone who wants to bring new ideas to create a divergent conversation around what ails our world today. Let’s look at the issue of clean water. From a systems thinking perspective, half the problem with water sanitation is the transportation from the clean source and back to people’s homes. There is then the use of that water in people’s homes. What clean water means to people is very culturally specific and very important to understand. Technology has a role to play. Understanding it from both a cultural and contextual point of view has a lot of merit, and architects can do something with that. It’s not just solving for needs, it is understanding the system’s success. Will Lark It’s important for us to divide up the sums of the systems and discover which ones actually make sense to stay centralized and where it is that we have a lot of opportunity to distribute. There is an opportunity for decentralized energy generation, but we really need to think about our infrastructure as far as how we’re going to move that energy around. We really need to think about our energy