Panel 3: Green Infrastructure
ter plans begin with the buildings and the real estate deal. This is not to suggest that this is a linear process, but the ideologies of interest in the city work at cross 60
purposes when the architect leads the master plan because it’s deemed to be pro development. Charles Waldheim I would say “maybe” but there’s this unique hybrid practice now between landscape architects who enjoy a visibility as design figures in their own right, and who have a moral high ground as a result of their green credentials. They have a moral standing combined with private development capital markets… until eighteen months ago, at least, and certainly with private philanthropy. If you look at the most recent kind of boutique urbanism of the High Line in New York, or Millennium Park’s Lurie Garden in Chicago, these are great examples of cultural extortion where a local community group uses its economic force to persuade a mayor who is likely to be persuaded that this is the good thing to do. At the larger scale, whether it’s Waterfront Toronto or the Downsview Park in Toronto or Fresh Kills, we see another great irony invoked in the panel this morning about the presidential election and the ways in which the Obama administration might be able to deliver on our great hope of public infrastructure. Of course it was in the high water mark of the New Deal era… I mean, we have to recall that the last moment when we had the national consensus on the left to enact public policy around infrastructure, we produced a set of planning and infrastructural precepts that we’ve now abandoned as a disappointment. Now that’s both ironic, but also maybe telling. I’m both happy and proud that we’ve elected a government which is empirical, at least. But, having said that, I share the previous panels’ anxiety over how little we’re doing. In a culture where we don’t even agree to pay for health care and education collectively, my argument is that one of the reasons that infrastructure has emerged in the last ten years is that it’s our last gasp, it’s the last thing that we’ve agreed to pay for collec-