Infrastructure and the Future
I love the title, and if it had said “assessing the designer’s role” so we didn’t argue about landscape architecture and architecture, but rather the thought of it as a common cause, that would have been a little more helpful to me. Let’s review the last six years, because what’s happened is that we’ve learned the hard way that all of our building forms and all of the other things that we have been entranced by in our various professions haven’t gotten us there. Planning and redevelopment have proven to be completely ineffective. The market, which we all just turned our fascination toward, has proven to be very inequitable unless we adjusted it. The environmental scoring systems also leave us cold. For me what makes this new discussion on infrastructure so fascinating is that we’re finally forced to accept that the systems for infrastructure are the best shot we have at shaping urban form in a different way. Do we know what that form is? Not completely. Do we know that the New Urbanists have a good thing going but in no way deal with the scale of the issue we’re talking about? I think so. So what have we got? We’ve got typology and hydrology. Super-systems. So many of our urban places have been laid against them, rather than with them. Is that restorable? What does that do for us? Our city planning commissioners and directors are trying to figure out what to do with post-industrial land. Philadelphia has nine thousand acres in Fairmount Park. The city has twenty-two thousand acres of unutilized, underutilized, brown field, or soon to be not utilized industrial land, and we can’t possibly use it. How do we use it? Getting back to the idea that transportation and land use are related to each other, I would personally recommend that today’s moderators chase back through the conversation and find things that we’ve said to each other that promote the discussion and debate of that relationship between land use and transportation, which is the infrastructural systems to which the design profession are relevant. How and
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