Infrastructure and the Future
just setting up a system where different departments are meant to leverage the opportunities each has in a more interdisciplinary way. It’s not really setting up any kind of new funded system beyond the stimulus packages and things like that. Tim Love Now this is a different idea of advocacy than just going to the community meeting at night as an architect and making your voice heard. This side of advocacy involves understanding the potential funding mechanisms of projects after you’re already on board, and leveraging those so that things are actualized. Understanding, for example, that there is a revenue stream attached to the water supply that usually pays for storm drains and other things that could be tapped into is one of the takeaways for this conference. Understanding how the world works might be an important thing for architects or landscape architects to do. Charles Waldheim Among the ironies of our contemporary situation, I can’t remember a more compelling time for students in architecture and urbanism. We have this slightly unprecedented situation in which for thirty-five or forty years, both landscape architects and urban planners were radicalized. Many of them left design schools to pick up on Daniel’s point about 1957 and the ascendance of landscape architecture and urban planning as autonomous fields with their empirical social science or natural science base. That project had as its aspiration ecological knowledge and organizing it spatially so as to make better decisions about the shapes of cities. It’s floundered not because we don’t have the ecological knowledge, not because we don’t have the academy, not because we’re not advocates; it’s floundered because we’ve decided not to plan our cities. Our cities are the result of economic processes as much as anything else. So, ironically, in that context I and others have argued that in fact it’s design agency that gives the architect or the urbanist or the landscape architect a place at the table, and so that’s when you hear us saying, “Well, hold on. We’re in a post-advocacy age, it’s not that we’re simply jaded or have lost the good fight, it’s that we’ve fought the good fight for 40 years. It didn’t work.”
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