afterword
We are no longer working in an era of mediation between the natural and the artificial, between country and city, but rather one in which habitable land is con92
ceived as engineered ground. This synthetic space is the vastly interconnected and rapidly changing landscape of our post-industrial environment, a highly developed and layered space in which urban, infrastructure and landscape are increasingly unified as a result of the constant push of development away from the urban interior and into our sub- and ex-urban in-betweens. Yet the conference is evidence that our hopes for infrastructure remain now as they were for Corbusier: as the vehicle for a pleasurable civic environment and individual convenience. With relatively similar cultural desires for leisure as our twentieth century counterparts, the larger contextual questions posed by the conference are clear: how do we shift our perspective on infrastructure and the city, reorienting our urban and suburban services from systems of effective exploitation to systems of efficient mobility and conservation? How can we mend the split seam between our cultural desires, lifestyle expectations, and a lower carbon footprint? No longer a question of simply providing basic public necessities, infrastructure has become a locus for the rethinking of a future urban model and the heart of a growing hope for the unification of resource efficiency and a pleasurable user experience. Acknowledging these trends and questions, the vision emerging from the preceding pages may be characterized as less universal/utopian and more regional/pragmatic, set within a far less polarized world. Within this emerging binary quest for leisure and efficiency, multiple narratives have become a given for contemporary design practice: we are cultural producers that have no choice but to recognize a moral imperative in the face of finite resources, an environment at risk, and continued horizontal urbanization. Moving beyond preconceptions of the past generation, the Green Infrastructure panel engages and analyzes this contemporary design environment in which social and