Panel 3: Green Infrastructure
nications is another thing, right? It’s privately funded and privately developed, and on the one hand decentralized, but also centralized. Really, we’re talking about 72
three infrastructural systems that can be characterized as nineteenth century systems, one of which is electricity. I don’t hear any great calls for bond issues to publicly fund electricity grids or the building of new power plants. Collectively there’s an exhaustion over this topic. So we’re down to water infrastructure, both supply and waste, and also transportation. In both of those projects we have great examples of the European welfare state taxing their populations and collectively agreeing to be taxed to deliver, not only those infrastructures, but also public realm improvements. We have a great canon of the last fifteen or twenty years, whether it’s the French or the Dutch or the Germans, and one of the reasons landscape has emerged in this context is that architects and landscape architects imagine that these publicly funded infrastructures can be drivers or carriers of these other goals for the reduction of carbon, the mitigation of sea level rise… The examples we all cite are Bloomberg’s New York or Mayor Miller’s Toronto. In Toronto we now have landscape architects, about a half of dozen of the leading landscape architects in the world, leading projects to decide where major infrastructural improvements will go. But I do think it’s significant that it would be the landscape architect, and not the architect, that would lead that team. Tim Love Though certainly when the architect leads the project for a building, they have to assemble a huge team of specialists to sort out all the parts of the building. In the context of this conference, when you talk about building the infrastructure that we’ve been looking at today—not communications, not the electrical grid probably, but transportation systems, the street, or the urban park— the question is what roles the different players play as designers, and not just as the managers of inputs.