Panel 3: Green Infrastructure
Norwalk, Connecticut is building a new waste water treatment plant right on the Norwalk River. It costs a gazillion dollars to do this and I think it serves the whole 74
Fairfield County area or something. To get the project approved, it came bundled with an enormous landscape project. There are questions about whether Norwalk needs another park there when it already has a fairly large park system on the other side of the river, but that’s the price of doing business today. For major infrastructure projects today, you have to do a large open spaced project at the same time. You would not have to do that in 1963. You would just build the waste treatment plant and move on. Is that a good thing, is that a bad thing? It probably is a good thing, but it is the context in which these most noxious infrastructure projects are being built. They are packaged within the mitigation pillow that makes it all possible. Daniel Barber This question of the architect’s role is a squabble to some extent. Obviously I’m not a practitioner so it’s easy for me to say these things, but this distinction between sustainability and environmentalism is very important to us because environmentalism is about conflicts and lack of a possible resolution. Whether they are ecological or human or political, there’s usually a cost to be paid. The notion that we’re somehow resolving problems through multidisciplinary collaboration doesn’t sit well with me in the context of the history of environmental time. Martin Felsen My experience working with cities or municipalities is that the decision maker at the municipal level would assume that all of us designers would take a leadership role in a very fluid way over the lifespan of the project. I’m a little uncomfortable with this “Who’s in charge? thing because the people that are really in charge don’t necessarily want us to choose or make that decision. They want us to work very tightly in a very integrated team.