Infrastructure and the Future
goals. We’re not going to have a large scale impact on the public process unless we have a very, very, very clear sense of what our goals are so that they can be explained to the public policymakers. Tim Love But that suggests that we all share the same vision. Sarah Goldhagen I just think we need to talk about it. Charles Waldheim On the one hand, we have so many of these conferences that focus on the best practice, right? There’s a lot of bandwidth, a lot of attention being spent across a lot of disciplines—both in research and practice on these very questions. As I took the framing of this event, it was to take a step back from the breech and to say, “Ok, how does the architect fit into this?” Eight or nine months ago, there was a conference called Ecological Urbanism across the river. At the end of three days, there was this one MArch candidate, a lovely guy, completely earnest. He raised his hand he said, “Well, what is it for the architect to do?” Because you had three days of ecologists, fluvial geomorphologists, instructional engineers, and mayors—literally all disciplines arrayed—and the architects, this one student representing the field, felt lost. And so, I took the premise of this conference to be, “Well, let’s take a step back and let’s take a look at architecture.” That’s why we had so much pedagogical discussion. Let’s start with one very modest thing. We could agree pretty quickly by a show of hands… How many of you would like to see gas taxed to a level that begins to more closely approximate its actual cost? We’re not going to talk about wars and the Gulf States, we’re not going to talk about actually raising the… Tim Love On issues of transportation, I vote where Jason votes. Charles Waldheim By acclamation, we agree as a subculture that we want to
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