Infrastructure and the Future
cultural relevance are no longer at odds. Charles Waldheim lays out our current age as one of post-advocacy practice in which we are moving beyond the unsuccessful fight of resistant practice over the past forty years into a moment of agency in which “the project of autonomy, the idea of being relevant as a cultural producer, is now ironically central to agency in delivering better environmental and social conditions.” If cultural relevance is now essential to meet the larger goals of sustainability in the sense that the successfully efficient urban environment must be designed for the pleasure of the user, the mandate for the designer is clear: engage the previously disparate poles of institutional involvement and cultural production. Within this mandate, there is little question that a vision for the future of our expanding built environment needs to be both institutionally engaged and multidisciplinary in nature, to be shared among landscape architects, planners, architects, and other stewards of the public realm. As Sarah Goldhagen suggests in the wrap-up discussion, the generation of an overall infrastructural plan for action and a set of clearly defined goals is absolutely essential before actively parsing out roles within the disciplines: “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.” In this sense, it is a strategic rather than aesthetic collective vision that is proposed among the panels of Infrastructure and the Future, requiring a determination of the specific civic values and outcomes that we, as a larger design community, want to promote. At a basic level, if infrastructure is civic and an excellent chance to rethink our current urban habits and patterns, we need to learn to communicate with the government in charge of building and maintaining infrastructure, as well as the people who use the infrastructure and are the measure of its success or failure. This requires engagement at local and regional levels and communication with specific institutions and communities.
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