Infrastructural Optimism: Reshaping Urban America [1 ed.] 1138481556, 9781138481558

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Half Title
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD / Imagining the Architecture of Possible Futures
INTRODUCTION / The Importance of Optimism
The Case for Optimism
And then, 2020…
Our Optimistic Imperative
Infrastructural Opportunism → Infrastructural Urbanism → Infrastructural Optimism
01. INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM in the Expanded Field
Two Decades of Urbanisms: New, Everyday, Landscape / Ecological → Infrastructural
Infrastructural Urbanism: Two Lineages
Infrastructure as Architecture
Architecture as Infrastructure
Landscape as Infrastructure
Infrastructure in the Expanded Field
02. REINVENTING INFRASTRUCTURE / Why Now?
Three Colliding Crises
Infrastructure Crisis: Collapse + Inequity + Underfunding
Environmental Crisis
Economic Collapse
Three Evolutions
New Forms of Activism
Demonstration Projects
Changes in the Urbanism Discourse
Capitalizing on the Perfect Storm: WPA 2.0 and Next Generation Infrastructure
Next Generation Infrastructure Criteria
Perfect Storm
Practice Case Studies: PITCH_AFRICA, Kalundborg Symbiosis, Sixth Street Viaduct
WPA 2.0 Finalists
03. INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM / Three Strategies
All Growth is Not Good Growth
Broadening the Process, Transforming the Prototype, and Measuring What Really Matters to Evolve the Paradigm
04. INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM / Two Cases
I-11 Supercorridor
I-11 Supercorridor Studio
Mapping and Methods
Green Arrow Solutions / Findings
I-11 Supercorridor: Studio Projects
After the Projects: I-11 Supercorridor Impacts
Mobility For All By All: Northside-Southside MetroLink Expansion
MFABA Studio: Megaregion to Rail
City, County, and Regional Mapping
Northside-Southside Metrolink: Studio Projects
After the Projects: MFABA Impacts
A New Greenway
The Slow Pace of Implementation
05. CONCLUSION: Next Generation +10 / Options for a Contentious Era
WPA 2.0 + 10
Make No Little Plans / Infrastructure As Public Works
06. Notes from Sheltering in Place
Post-COVID Urbanism and Three Scales of Opportunity
National and Megaregional: Zero-Emissions Logistics, Geographic Symbiosis, Equitable Access and Distribution
City & Metro: Rethink Multi-modality, Value the Commons, Make All Infrastructure Next Gen Infrastructure
Neighborhood, Block, and Lot: Protect Density, Celebrate Cohesion, Support Local Micro-economies and Closed-Loop Living
Twelve Criteria for Next Generation Infrastructure
CREDITS
INDEX

Citation preview

INFRASTRUCTURAL

OPTIMISM LINDA C. SAMUELS

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Linda C. Samuels to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Samuels, Linda C., author. Title: Infrastructural Optimism / Linda C. Samuels. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021019129 (print) | LCCN 2021019130 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138481558 (hbk) | ISBN 9781138481589 (pbk) | ISBN 9781351060271 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Infrastructure (Economics)--History. | Urbanization--History. | Architecture--History. Classification: LCC HC79.C3 S349 2022 (print) | LCC HC79.C3 (ebook) | DDC 363--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021019129 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021019130 ISBN: 9781138481558 (hbk) ISBN: 9781138481589 (pbk) ISBN: 9781351060271 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781351060271 Book design by Linda C. Samuels and Sarah Pulvirenti Original I-11 Supercorridor book designed by Bernardo Terán Primary typeface: Bebas Neue Secondary typefaces: Avenir Next, Trade Gothic Typeset by Sarah Pulvirenti Publisher’s Note This book has been prepared from camera-ready copy provided by the author.

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INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM Infrastructural Optimism investigates a new kind of twenty-first-century infrastructure, one that encourages a broader understanding of the interdependence of resources and agencies, recognizes a rightfully accelerated need for equitable access and distribution, and prioritizes rising environmental diligence across the design disciplines. Bringing together urban history, case studies, and speculative design propositions, the book explores and defines infrastructure as the basis for a new form of urbanism, emerging from the intersection of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. In defining this new infrastructure, the book introduces new dynamic and holistic performance metrics focused on “measuring what matters” over growth for the sake of growth and twelve criteria that define next generation infrastructure. By shifting the focus of infrastructure – our largest public realm – to environmental symbiosis and quality of life for all, design becomes a catalytic component in creating a more beautiful, productive, and optimistic future with Infrastructural Urbanism as its driver. Infrastructural Optimism will be invaluable to design, non-profit and agency professionals, and faculty and students in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, working in partnership with engineers, hydrologists, ecologists, urban planners, community members, and others who shape the built environment through the expanded field of infrastructure.

Linda C. Samuels is an Associate Professor of Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis. She is an architect, urban designer, and planner whose work focuses on next generation infrastructure design as a tool for environmental and social justice.

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Sixth Street Viaduct under construction, Los Angeles, 2021. Image: Gary Leonard

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Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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FOREWORD / Imagining the Architecture of Possible Futures Dana Cuff

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INTRODUCTION / The Importance of Optimism The Case for Optimism And then, 2020… Our Optimistic Imperative Infrastructural Opportunism → Infrastructural Urbanism → Infrastructural Optimism

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01. INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM in the Expanded Field Two Decades of Urbanisms: New, Everyday, Landscape / Ecological → Infrastructural Infrastructural Urbanism: Two Lineages Infrastructure as Architecture Architecture as Infrastructure Landscape as Infrastructure Infrastructure in the Expanded Field

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02. REINVENTING INFRASTRUCTURE / Why Now? Three Colliding Crises Infrastructure Crisis: Collapse + Inequity + Underfunding Environmental Crisis Economic Collapse Three Evolutions New Forms of Activism Demonstration Projects Changes in the Urbanism Discourse Capitalizing on the Perfect Storm: WPA 2.0 and Next Generation Infrastructure Next Generation Infrastructure Criteria Perfect Storm Practice Case Studies: PITCH_AFRICA, Kalundborg Symbiosis, Sixth Street Viaduct WPA 2.0 Finalists VI

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03. INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM / Three Strategies All Growth is Not Good Growth Broadening the Process, Transforming the Prototype, and Measuring What Really Matters to Evolve the Paradigm

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04. INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM / Two Cases I-11 Supercorridor I-11 Supercorridor Studio Mapping and Methods Green Arrow Solutions / Findings I-11 Supercorridor: Studio Projects After the Projects: I-11 Supercorridor Impacts Mobility For All By All: Northside-Southside MetroLink Expansion MFABA Studio: Megaregion to Rail City, County, and Regional Mapping Northside-Southside Metrolink: Studio Projects After the Projects: MFABA Impacts A New Greenway The Slow Pace of Implementation

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05. CONCLUSION: Next Generation +10 / Options for a Contentious Era WPA 2.0 + 10 Make No Little Plans / Infrastructure As Public Works

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06. Notes from Sheltering in Place 248 Post-COVID Urbanism and Three Scales of Opportunity 249 National and Megaregional: Zero-Emissions Logistics, Geographic Symbiosis, Equitable Access and Distribution City & Metro: Rethink Multi-modality, Value the Commons, Make All Infrastructure Next Gen Infrastructure Neighborhood, Block, and Lot: Protect Density, Celebrate Cohesion, Support Local Micro-economies and Closed-Loop Living Twelve Criteria for Next Generation Infrastructure CREDITS

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INDEX

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Aerial view of Interstate 10 (future Interstate 11), southern Arizona, March 2014 Image: Deyanira Nevarez Martínez

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Twenty years ago next spring, five students and I pulled out of the back lot of the UNC Charlotte College of Architecture to spend what I called a semester “unabroad.” Amid a rich history of study programs in Florence, Rome, Barcelona, and other western European destinations, our own giant backyard, with its adolescent spatial obsessions, seemed underexplored. I planned the cross-country Mobile Studio for two years before we departed, applying for grants and developing partnerships with faculty at schools along the route in cities with notable road-specific histories (where isn’t that true in the US?). The students who participated – David Fish, Jedidiah Gant, Becky Joye, Couch Payne, and Bill Sinkovic – joined in a year before departure to design and build Mabel, our Mobile Studio Satellite, a solar-powered workspace, roving gallery, billboard, and pinhole camera. We traveled from Charlotte to Los Angeles and back for eight weeks with stops or collaborations in Montgomery, New Orleans, Houston, Marfa, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and roadsides and glorious nowheres in between. The idea was to study the road as a public space, at both the scale of the nation and in car-centric cities along the way. The second Mobile Studio, in 2005, focused specifically on the relationship between the road and civil rights; that two-week trip circled the Southeast, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s home and historical site in Atlanta, to the civil rights march site

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of US 80 from Selma to Montgomery, to daylaborer waiting spaces under the Westpark Tollway in Gulfton, Texas, to the decimated landscape of the failed I-10 evacuation in a post-Katrina Gulf Coast. Throughout the development of the Mobile Studio curriculum and an adjacent curriculum I developed at UNCC called Architecture as Activism, I was occasionally told by more traditionally minded colleagues that “this isn’t architecture.” It was to me. My architecture thesis at Princeton University had focused on the spatial experience of the New Jersey Turnpike, à la Lynch and Appleyard meets Tschumi. The Turnpike is the largest built work in the state of New Jersey, and I knew even then, over twenty-five years ago, that if we were not engaging projects of that scale and import, with that level of investment and impact, we architects were cutting off our nose to spite our face. When I returned to school for a PhD fifteen years after my master’s degree, most architects still saw little value in the study of infrastructure. The shift toward planning made perfect sense and rounded out my interests in spatial justice and big, bold thinking with a new understanding of complex stakeholder and political relationships. Witnessing the rise of the discipline of Infrastructural Urbanism and all it entails in our field is gratifying, and about time.

A large handful of very supportive colleagues, mentors, students, grantors, and friends get credit and appreciation for supporting this thinking and publication to its current fruition. Dean Ken Lambla, who supported the Mobile Studio with absolutely no hesitation, christening Mabel on her creaky maiden voyage and both cheering and critiquing in the best of ways the entire evolution, was a stalwart source of wisdom and guidance then and continues to be still. The UNC Charlotte College of Architecture – now the College of Arts + Architecture – was an ideal place to learn to be a teacher and a colleague, a model of messy democracy and rich studio culture with some of the best scrappy, talented, and adventurous students and most passionate, committed faculty I have known. Arriving in Los Angeles, though, was a sea change. Urban planning challenged me to think more rigorously about my work and more conscientiously about equity. The place itself – a sprawling yet dense majority-minority metropolis, full of endless cultural adventures and constantly discordant infrastructural identities – won me over immediately. Working with Dana Cuff and cityLAB shaped much of my broad thinking into real research with a level of dexterity and professionalism that comes only from engaging talented experts and accomplished critical thinkers. Collaborating on the WPA 2.0 competition from beginning to end was invaluable to the evolution of the ideas in this book and my research and teaching at large. This book has renewed and strengthened connections with the finalists and other participants that I hope will continue and grow. I thank them and Dana for their intellectual generosity toward this project, and I thank my urban planning base, particularly Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Ed Soja, and my PhD cohort, for introducing me to many of the spatial justice concepts and scholars included here.

Two extended visits to the Getty Research Institute provided inspiring and peaceful time to think and write. As part of both the scholars cohort during the Los Angeles Architecture 1940–1988 research theme and the Pacific Standard Time exhibition Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 and as a return visitor in the summer of 2019, I cannot thank the staff and administration at the GRI enough for making the arduous intellectual struggle of getting words on a page as genteel and scenic as possible. Special thanks go to other funders, including those of the original dissertation work, the University of California Los Angeles regents and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. Generous support was provided for the I-11 Supercorridor project by the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at Arizona State University and the Renewable Energy Network at the University of Arizona. My time as director of the Sustainable City Project was a fruitful opportunity to engage immediate neighbors in downtown Tucson and entire megaregions, experimenting with the interdisciplinary and cross-university studio format that ultimately produced the work shown in Chapter 4. In addition to the students, research partners, and teaching team (particularly Arlie Adkins), Ardeth Barnhart, Brooks Jeffrey, J. P. Jones, Diana Liverman, Christopher Trumble, and Kylie Walzak were instrumental in those efforts. Six years ago I joined the faculty of the Sam Fox School in urban design and architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. If Los Angeles was a sea change in my research, moving to St. Louis was an eye-opener to the realities of the struggle for Black lives and the real impacts of systemic racism and neglect. St. Louis has as

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much vacancy as Detroit, as high a homicide rate as the South Side of Chicago, and as rich a history as New Orleans, but it somehow flies under the radar. As you will read in the St. Louis case study, the divide here is real, and it exemplifies much of the unresolved heartbreak across the country. My work has taken on a whole new depth, and I am extremely appreciative of the smart, capable, and talented colleagues, students, organizers, and community members who started tackling the justice questions of St. Louis long before I did and continue to take it on with me, with others, and on their own. The depth of research and design work being done around spatial justice, public health, and race here at Wash U is important and impressive, and we keep it to ourselves too often. Specifically, I would like to thank Dean Carmon Colangelo, Director Heather Woofter, and Bruce Lindsey, dean when I arrived at the Sam Fox School, for their support of my work in general and on this book specifically, through both internal funding and positive morale. Thank you also to the Mellon Foundation Divided City initiative at Washington University, which supported the Mobility For All By All collaboration. Big kudos to my fellow faculty who are also working on book projects, teaching courses through a pandemic, and remaining sane and inspirational. If I learned to teach at UNCC, I’ve learned to speak clearly and powerfully through my writing, teaching, and engagement at Wash U, working with, not for, the people of St. Louis, and growing empathy. Students often enroll in a design studio course with one conception of the process and outcome, and then, sometimes, the studio grows into something more. I have had the great fortune of designing and shepherding many studios that became far more than what I orig-

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inally intended, and I can’t thank enough those students who contributed and – sometimes literally – stayed along for the ride. The first and second Mobile Studio students and collaborating faculty will always have a special place in this lineage. I thank them for their spirit of adventure and trust in my ability to teach them valuable content regardless, and often because of, the scenery. A big thank you to the roster of faculty, students, and collaborators who participated in the I-11 Supercorridor project and publication and the MUD711 teams who have taken on the equity challenges of St. Louis with me. Thank you to teaching partners Patty Heyda, Irene Compadre, Paola Aguirre, Ian Dickenson, Chris Warren, and Andrew Liang, and to MFABA co-PIs Matt Bernstine and Penina Acayo Laker. To the agency, industry, and community partners who have generously shared their time and informed the learning of students and myself, from old friends at ADOT and the City of LA (thank you, Deborah Weintraub in particular) to new friends at Virgin Hyperloop One, I hope you see our hard work reflected here and that this book comes in handy in your own fights for infrastructural optimism. This book is a collaborative effort, and I have relied heavily on the good will and spirits of many, many talented students. Thank you all. In particular, I could not have done this without Bernardo Terán, who designed the original I-11 Supercorridor document and worked many, many late nights with me in a big empty building in downtown Tucson. Thank you also to research and design team member Amanda Gann, who continues to help get the word out on next gen infrastructure, as well as Robbie Aaron and Daniel Aros, who assisted in the first I-11 Supercorridor publication. These last few months I’ve had the technical, creative, and

moral support of two amazing research assistants, Tom Klein and Bomin Kim. The evolution of the diagrams for next generation infrastructure and the intellectual lineage of Infrastructural Urbanism are products of our collective thinking. They have been excellent partners in the project; I appreciate their commitment to getting it right and to remaining game in the face of a pandemic and an extended political nightmare. To those who read drafts of this document – Jacqueline Margetts, Sinéad Finnerty-Pyne, Jayne Kelley – and my team at Routledge, I appreciate your patience and willingness to contribute to the craft and rigor of this book. Sarah Pulvirenti, graphic designer and newest team member, you brought flair and fresh energy just when it was needed most. Thank you all!

my niece and nephews, and particularly my parents, whose unconditional confidence, love, and support continue to make me believe anything is possible. They are most certainly the source of my initial – and ongoing – plethora of personal optimism. From my father I got the perseverance, and from my mother, the creativity and joy. Finally, the book is done.

I am extremely lucky to have such a supportive, global network of confidants and cheerleaders, new and old friends, who send treats or words of encouragement (particularly Melissa and Alex) or generously provide writing space, amazing meals, and a destination when I need a change of scenery (Laura, Jane and Francois, Lucinda and Brent) – thank you! Appreciation to a host of others who have hiked, walked and talked with me through this project, including my fabulous neighbors and my crucial spin and boxing families who keep my stress down and energy up, and always ask how the book is going. A giant, heartfelt thank you to Garwood, not the most optimistic person I know, but not the funniest either. For someone who doesn’t wallow on the bright side, you have never wavered from believing in me or the completion of this project. An extra special thank you to my biological family – my exuberant and thoughtful siblings, LINDA C. SAMUELS

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FOREWORD IMAGINING THE ARCHITECTURE OF POSSIBLE FUTURES Dana Cuff Director, cityLAB, University of California, Los Angeles Professor, Architecture and Urban Design

The pairing of terms in the title of this book – “infrastructure” and “optimism” – is meant to create enough friction to spark a new line of thought. For the last decades, infrastructure in the United States has led to anything but optimism, receiving failing grades from the American Society of Civil Engineers and providing shocking imagery for front page news coverage, from vicious battles over urban bike lanes to collapsing bridges. Infrastructure’s ruptures are public failures that fail in public, telling that story in graphic, material terms. Linda Samuels’s fresh take on infrastructure collects stories for the flip side, where designers creatively reimagine public works as spaces that work for the public. Streets, sidewalks, public utilities, and other everyday functional zones become our most valuable collective, democratic realm. Defined as systems of mobility, recreation, communication, and utilities, infrastructure provides prime sites for inventing a new commons. Infrastructure sits at the intersection of various disciplines but at the heart of none. Planning, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, and engineering all have a hand in the

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material form infrastructure takes, but it isn’t clear which field might set the next generation of infrastructural projects in motion. Whoever leads an infrastructure project locates it in their professional terrain. When the architects of Urban Think Tank propose an aerial gondola for the informal hillside neighborhoods in Caracas, the stations become bona fide buildings with community centers, offices, and gyms. When landscape architect James Corner takes the lead on revitalizing an elevated railway, it becomes a linear park. And when engineers are in charge of urban rivers, they generally become “monofunctional, efficiency-focused” concrete channels for flood control. While others have ventured into the territory, engineers define the history of infrastructure with efficiency the superordinate logic. Samuels argues with passion and evidence that such singularity inherently leaves some of infrastructure’s potential on the table. Streets, a particular focus of her own work over the past two decades, are the foundation for her clear argument about the need for broader thinking as well as collective effort captured under the rubric of Infrastructural Urbanism.

To reconfigure public works like highways into a public realm, the book enacts a rhetorical sleight of hand, converting optimism into opportunism. Opportunism is usually associated with a lack of principle in seeking some gain, and it was just such opportunism that underpinned the federal highway program in the 1950s. Massive investment created an interstate network to serve purposes of civilian movement as well as national security, but as cities across the United States document, the highways also targeted and demolished poor communities of color. Such malevolent, racist opportunism was literally covered up by the free-flowing highways, with their narratives of mobility, “pure” functionality, and economic development. Large interconnected systems like transportation, sewage, water, and power are state-based projects where political power can be prejudicially wielded for purposes of repression or gain. With the decline of the public sector, private actors with clear profit motives see an opportunity to step into the transportation void in particular. Can opportunism be leveraged instead for public good? That does require optimism, that the practices surrounding the creation of infrastructure could be based not on profit and private gain but on hope, an ethics of equitable civic benefit, and a rejection of overly simplistic zero-sum thinking. The latter configures conflict between economic vitality, environmental sustainability, and social justice, which resonates in political debates that pit jobs against spotted owls, or property values versus affordable housing. Those easy but misplaced assumptions have blinded us to this book’s radical proposition: within the built environment, infrastructure provides the best opportunity to demonstrate mutual reinforcement among economy, environment, and equity. By strategically leveraging their necessarily large investments and wide reach, highways and other infrastructure projects can function as Trojan horses for the commons. This is simultaneously more pragmatic than political-economic theory, and less cynical than

“publicness as a sort of by-product of real estate planning and development.”1 Architecture and urban design thinking provide the means to open possible futures in which equitable everyday life becomes part of the material culture. Imagine: the wealthiest white neighborhoods and the poorest Black neighborhoods would be equally accessible, transit-laced, amenity-rich, walkable, safe, municipally maintained, landscaped, and park-laden. Termed futurity or immanent speculation (like opportunism, speculation is another fraught term to be reclaimed), such imaginative capacity is regarded as the primary means to engage with “an inherently unknowable future in order to create the conditions for that future to unfold.”2 Afrofuturism is surely the most vibrant and profound example of speculative fiction, and demonstrates that knowledge of history shapes the critical foundations for imagining desired but closed futures. Film and literature have been the primary sites for immanent speculation, but conceptual urban design could be recruited for the same purpose. To that end, Samuels (in Chapter 4) offers two cases that portray the unlikely prospect of a highway “supercorridor” and an urban rail system becoming collective spheres of spatial justice. Although the proposals are documented according to conventional practices of urban planning, the tools of the trade are repurposed for a radical optimism that goes way beyond the manifest goals of efficient circulation. The conceptual design competition WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture embodies the same basic idea of recruiting infrastructure for public benefit in more than three hundred cases across North America and beyond. It gives me particular pleasure to see WPA 2.0 revisited more than a decade after architect Roger Sherman and I cooked it up in 2009, with help from Samuels, who was a doctoral student at UCLA at the time. We intended to deliberately inject design thinking into President Barack Obama’s $90 billion program for infrastructure and public works projects. Several years earlier, Sherman and I had founded cityLAB, which I

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continue to direct, exactly because of an infrastructural failure: the breach of levees during Hurricane Katrina that destroyed most of New Orleans’s predominantly Black Ninth Ward. Racial discrimination, segregation, and violence were abundantly apparent in the televised devastation, as was the city’s dependence upon its poorly maintained infrastructure. In spite of the fact that human-made infrastructure was the site of disaster that destroyed some eight hundred thousand dwelling units, there was no effective architectural response. Why? Because architecture’s “formal operations . . . remain independent of our understanding of urban change.”3 In other words, the very structure of design projects ties our hands behind our backs when we need to grapple with the most profound urban issues, from “natural” disasters and global warming to homelessness, racial inequity, and health crises like COVID-19. The wildly diverse WPA 2.0 submissions make it abundantly clear in speculative as well as feasible propositions that all forms of infrastructure can deliver on the promise of the commons.4 WPA 2.0 lives on, not in the form of the proposed projects per se, but in the vibrant works and careers of the competition finalists recounted in Samuels’s conclusion, along with the rest of the book you are reading. In fact, such prolonged vitality – more like a conviction than a commission – characterizes infrastructural optimism. Infrastructure is always a long game, and when it is creatively enacted for public good, it will comprise a series of fits and starts, partnerships and opposition, insights and failures, detours and returns. Like the WPA 2.0’s finalists, Linda Samuels is in it for the long run, as am I. Infrastructural Optimism is a significant foundation for everyone toiling over the years to create more equitable and environmentally sound public spaces.

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NOTES 1 Simon Sadler, “You (Still) Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Places, June 2016, https://placesjournal. org/article/you-still-have-to-pay-for-the-public-life. 2 Dana Cuff, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Todd Presner, Maite Zubiaurre, and Jonathan Jae-an Crisman, Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 171. See also Amir Eshel, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 3 Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman, “Introduction,” in Fast-Forward Urbanism: Rethinking Architecture’s Engagement with the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 11. 4 WPA 2.0’s online exhibition of select submissions and finalists is accessible at http://www.wpa2.aud. ucla.edu.

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introduction the importance of optimism The story of man’s slow ascent from savagery through barbarism and self-mastery to civilization is the embodiment of the spirit of optimism. From the first hour of the new nations each century has seen a better Europe, until the development of the world demanded America. . . . America is the home of charity as well as commerce. In the midst of roaring traffic, side by side with noisy factory and sky-reaching warehouse, one sees the school, the library, the hospital, the park – works of public benevolence which represent wealth wrought into ideas that shall endure forever. . . . In America the optimist finds abundant reason for confidence in the present and hope for the future, and this hope, this confidence, may well extend over all the great nations of the earth. – Helen Keller, Optimism I always come down on the side of hope. – Al Gore

The history of American infrastructure – those visible and invisible systems that support quality of life through the distribution of critical resources – is inseparable from our growth as a nation, our access to information, and our collective rights to the city. Federal administrations wield infrastructural investment as a means of economic expansion, national defense, and social welfare. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system is often credited as knitting together a loose affiliation of forty-eight more independent and autonomous entities into one United States of America. Before that, the Cumberland Road (or the National Road, as it was known in the early 1800s) slowly linked the colonies to the edge of the vast unknown interior (western Illinois), and the transcontinental

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railroad the east with the distant west. The conservation efforts of the late 1800s and early 1900s and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s and 1940s shaped much of the country’s spatial and philosophical ethos of infrastructure, nature, and work. The US Constitution includes only one commitment to infrastructure – the cre ation of post offices and postal roads in Article I, Section 8 – that is partially responsible for those very first routes, and has encouraged, in one way or another, the expansion of mobility and communication ever since. More than just physical links, these larger-than-life projects that turned deserts into fertile farmland and mighty rivers into energy machines solidified a culture of human sovereignty over nature and an embedded

sense of entitlement to seemingly infinite and immediate resources. The construction of large -scale infrastructure, though, is often the shared responsibility of federal, state, and local funding entities and their partners. The three are not always aligned with each other and certainly not always aligned with the needs and desires of residents. For example, the decision to route federal interstates into rather than around urban centers, which displaced millions of mostly Black or immigrant residents in cities across the country, was a mixture of misguided planning, myopic expectations, and local enthusiasm for rising percentages of matching federal dollars. Villains have always abounded – there would be no Los Angeles without the water thievery of Mulholland, nor railroads without the ruthless competition of Vanderbilt – but intentional blurriness between private gain and public good has grown in legitimacy (while decimating the commons) since the rise of neoliberalism. The nature of urban production is highly contested, and infrastructure, as both basic public necessity and conduit for quality of life, plays a special role amid competing attempts to reify a set of principles endorsed by those in power. When I began this research, Barack Obama was president of the United States, and I was reflecting on the outcomes of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the politically controversial funding instigated to right the economic downturn precipitated by the bursting of the housing bubble that ultimately turned into the Great Recession. It took months to negotiate that multibillion-dollar plan, with both sides of the political aisle criticizing its scale (somehow simultaneously too big and too small), implementation, cost, and long-term effectiveness. It seemed a methodical, if mundane, surgery for the bad bruises and broken bones of a suffering economy. The widespread concept of “shovel-ready” infrastructure, one that reemerged in the spring of 2020 in response to the cleverly named CARES

(Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security) Act, was popularized then, and though it implied action and immediacy, the urgency of the timeline meant a big chunk of funding went to maintenance projects and upgrades already on the table rather than big thinking or innovation. ARRA, and its promise of public realm investment, was one of the instigations for the WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture competition, symposium, and exhibition that Dana Cuff, Roger Sherman, Tim Higgins, and I developed and ran out of cityLAB, an urban think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).1 Another was the dire state of our infrastructure at large. In both 2005 and 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our collective systems a D average rating – a vulnerability repeatedly made evident in the crumbling aftermath and critical losses of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and later Harvey, Irma, and Maria, as well as Superstorm Sandy. Another instigator was the looming availability of design talent with the Great Recession and widescale layoffs on the horizon. Evoking the original Depression-era WPA, which employed over three million people, WPA 2.0 called on architects, landscape architects, and urban designers to reconceptualize infrastructure’s potential as a new public realm among these disasters and in light of rising climate concerns. The competition called explicitly for a shift away from the infrastructures of efficiency and standardization promoted by modernism and one-size-fits-all engineering standards and toward design-based solutions that aimed to respond to multiple environmental, social, and spatial problems simultaneously. From a study of the competition entries by the cityLAB team, followed by a series of studio projects and ongoing research, I developed a set of criteria for next generation infrastructure and began defining a larger discourse of Infrastructural Urbanism. This book pulls all that together, building a theoretical basis and intellectual lineage supported by the competition, case studies, and studio work, along with the changing prac-

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tices of a world more and more affected by the challenges of climate change and gross, growing inequities. Infrastructural Optimism investigates a new kind of twenty-first-century infrastructure that encourages a broader understanding of the interdependence of disciplines, resources, and agencies; prioritizes the increasing need for equitable access and distribution; and capitalizes on rising environmental conscientiousness and ecological consciousness across the design disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. It also introduces the concept of dynamic and interrelated performance metrics focused on holistic quality of life rather than myopic dollars gained, intended to assess the “results” (real or projected, economic and otherwise) of implementing next generation infrastructure models. By shifting the focus of infrastructure – our largest public realm – to environmental symbiosis and quality of life for all, its design becomes a catalytic component in creating a more beautiful, productive, and optimistic future. THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM In the summer of 2017, St. Louis, Missouri, was in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures reaching a near- record - breaking 108 hot and humid degrees. An Inconvenient Sequel, Al Gore’s follow-up a decade later to An Inconvenient Truth, opened in theaters, and we were again dramatically reminded of the physical impacts of rising sea levels and more frequent and volatile storms on our built environment, not to mention the consequences for the globe’s most vulnerable inhabitants. The film also documents Gore’s signature efforts to advance the Paris Agreement, a global climate accord negotiated by 196 nations to set more aggressive targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming. That tally dropped one, to 195, when President Donald Trump withdrew US support. The retreat was a blow to the momentum of the movement and an embarrassment to American environmentalists, yet Gore – someone who might deserve to feel a little cynical, after

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the presidential race of 2000 was decided against him by one Supreme Court vote – remained optimistic, espousing the dropping prices of wind and solar energy, the ironic value of natural disasters as proof of a need for action, and the rush by American governors, mayors, and private industry leaders to fill the new federal commitment gap. While we face cataclysmic loss and stunting political grandstanding, Gore continues, in his words, to “come down on the side of hope.”2 He isn’t alone. Our American cities are the products of relentless optimism, from the imperative of westward expansion and the promise of the California gold rush to the rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the irrepressible symbol of a “bigger and better” World Trade Center after 9/11. There is a hint of bootstraps fortitude and Manifest Destiny – of resolute endurance and divine right – in both the early building and post-disaster rebuilding of our cities. Concepts of progress and tenacity, sometimes in spite of cultural and human costs, are integral to the mythology of America, the land of unlimited opportunity and reinvention. 3 As Kevin Rozario makes explicit in his essay “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America,” the narrative of optimism is both a driver of and a necessity for human and urban resilience. But optimism, like its cousin hope, is more than a narrative of resilience. A culture of optimism, as the sociologist Oliver Bennett argues, is imperative to our survival as a society and a species.4 Optimism, or the belief that we can expect – and, of our own volition, create – a better future, is extremely powerful, fundamentally human, and critical in the production of our built environment. Optimism happens at both the individual and collective scales. Individual optimism, or what the anthropologist Lionel Tiger calls “small optimism” (optimism about one’s own life), is initially reproduced through the projections of parents and society onto children, instilling a positive outlook for the future, a belief in perseverance, and a tendency to anticipate personal success.5

Long before parents used bumper stickers to broadcast their child’s “exceptional” achieve ments, nurturing positive childhood illusions was a part of building what Bennett calls “the optimism of everyday life.”6 This internal, everyday optimism is also perpetuated through our social and spiritual institutions: religion with its rhetoric of salvation; work with its boosterish focus on productivity and reward; and modern psychotherapy with its basis in the human potential for transformation. Social psychology research supports the notion that the majority of people, even those living in less than optimum conditions, believe their own lives are satisfactory, and that good things – events they shape through their own agency – will happen to them in the future.7 The production of “big optimism,” or collective optimism, is perhaps more relevant when talking about mega-scaled ventures like cities, economies, or infrastructure, which in nonauthoritarian regimes rely heavily on collective will and shared disposition. As with small optimism, big optimism arises from numerous sources but seems to depend heavily on governmental leadership and confidence in a democratic system.8 The “politics of hope,” wielded so expertly by Barack Obama as a candidate in the 2008 presidential election, for example, expressed a sincere belief in a better future – not just for oneself, but for the whole of society. Obama’s social policies that promoted global cooperation, universal healthcare and education, equal pay, and equal access were grounded in collective optimism. According to Bennett, the role the broader democratic system plays in a society of optimism relies on numerous criteria, including widespread confidence in free speech, belief in free and fair elections, constitutional assurances of the power of elected officials, equal and universal representation, and open access to information and participation. If implemented as intended, these conditions assure political freedom and equality, diversity, and inclusivity while protecting the rights of individuals to hold divergent opinions, no mat-

ter how radical, from those of the mainstream. In other words, confidence in the democratic process itself supports a sense of collective optimism.9 In sharp contrast, a reemerging, rabid “me first” agenda (at both individual and national levels) evidences a distressing resurgence of personal greed and environmental and economic jingoism. It is no surprise the 2020 election caused great malaise and anxiety. Without fully equating the processes of govern mental democracy with the processes behind the development and implementation of public works projects, there is certainly relevance in the comparison. Susan Fainstein’s work on “the just city” cites three necessary criteria for building urban justice: equity, democracy, and diversity.10 Competing approaches to equity in urban planning historically privilege either the value of physical, spatial products (i.e., the equitable distribution of material and nonmaterial benefits and detriments) or the value of an inclusive process (i.e., democratic and participatory decision making). In its most equitable form, a focus on distribution can compensate for long-term lacks; at their most justice-oriented, inclusive processes recognize the need not just for representation but also to rectify institutionalized power imbalances and a history of silenced voices. Optimism around projects, and ultimately collective support, comes from a sense of ownership through real participation in the process, respectful debate and dissent, and trust in leadership to deliver what is promised. One place the project scale and the governmental scale intersect is the public’s expectation that elected officials will hold profit-oriented developers accountable to higher shared values, which might be officially sanctioned in regulation or voterapproved documents (like sustainability plans or community benefits agreements) or unofficially sanctioned through a local ethos (evident in passed or failed propositions and regulations, and the rise and fall of elected officials). But project-based optimism also comes from a sense that public projects – infrastructure in particular as the critical underpinning of our quality

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of life – are not intended for individual gain, but rather to enable collective surviving and thriving. At the root of optimism, Bennett writes, “is the rejection of the Hobbesian view of human beings as self- seeking individuals in perpetual war with one another and a belief in the essentially benign and co-operative nature of humankind.”11 It is no wonder, then, that the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s – with its unwavering faith in competition and the free market as a vehicle for individual and corporate profit – brought about the privatized, militarized, and sterilized city we associate with the death of public space. It might make sense, then, that shared optimism is more prevalent in cities where the priorities of most constituents and those of decision makers align – places like Portland, Oregon, for example, where many policies enacted in the 1980s and 1990s to reduce auto - centric planning and increase density reflect a collective sensibility. Recognizing the importance that optimism plays in projecting and producing our future cities, we might argue that the right to optimism is itself part of the right to the city. Clearly, neither small nor big optimism, nor narratives of resilience, are equally distributed. Rozario mentions the inherent social risks of recovery when optimistic narratives of rebuilding are written by or for a limited segment of the population, or the recovery process simply re-establishes preexisting inequities in power, access, or geography. Reference to the ideas of Henri Lefebvre in this context is both logical and new. But where the Marxist perspective argues for the right to participate in systems of production and profit from a structural labor perspective, and perspectives focused on the public sphere call for the right to difference and debate, the concept of optimism speaks directly to the fundamental right of human agency, and the role that hope and human spirit play in one’s ability to join, much less have to fight for, a space at the democratic table. As evident in the St. Louis case study featured

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later in this book, for example, institutionalized racism in place for generations has not only silenced a host of voices from active participation in the production of the urban oeuvre (through removal, erasure, and disenfranchisement), but has often dampened the ability to believe that having a voice is possible. When the treatment of an entire race labels them as somehow deficient, and those pervasive attitudes result in recurring denial (of jobs, mortgages, promotions, free speech, the simple right to live unaccosted), the condition certainly seems personal, chronic, and unsolvable, and the lack of an optimistic worldview understandable. Two mega-infrastructure projects in the city, both in the early planning phases (the Northside-Southside MetroLink expansion and the Brickline Greenway) are poised to transform the lives of the city’s most perpetually disenfranchised residents – but not if the city fails to address the repression of collective optimism, with all that that means in terms of hope, agency, support, democracy, and fairness, in both product and process. A new kind of infrastructure, one that fulfills the criteria of infrastructural optimism put forward in this book, would deviate radically enough from the existing paradigm to fulfill the Lefebvrian promise of an integrally dependent social and spatial revolution. AND THEN, 2020 . . . Fear. Anxiety. Anger. Desperation. These are the moods of the moment. They have driven people to the streets, bound into a movement, draped in hopelessness. Or is it hope? A protest is an act of desperation and defiance. But why do it if not for the belief, however modest, that the voices in the street will be heard?12 In the spring of 2020, global conditions rapidly changed as thousands and then millions became victims of a type of invasive virus that until just a few months prior we believed existed only in science-fiction films. Slowly and reluctantly, local governments in the United States enacted stay-

at- home orders and business closures to try to staunch the spread of COVID -19 (an effort that was too little and too late for over 500,000 Americans). Unemployment reached proportions just barely shy of the Great Depression, and with that job loss came the compounded risks of losing healthcare and housing. Calls for relief started with references to the ARRA, but quickly reached back to the original WPA and, in some ways, felt more like the fall of Rome. The shocking lack of readiness by the United States – the world’s wealthiest country, with the highest GDP and most per capita military spending – crumbled our seemingly indestructible edifice. One disaster preparedness expert said that his colleagues used to look at him like people might have looked at Noah when he started sawing planks. Not anymore. April 2020 had some similarities to that Biblical fable – an unknown end, a force seemingly beyond human control, a race against the clock, and a good bit of hoarding. Those of us who think about cities and systems began to wonder what might come after the virus is contained and the world restarts. As I stared at the computer during those early days of tracking COVID -19, consumed by skyrocketing numbers of positive cases and the growing red circles merging into a virus megaregion in the Northeast corridor, I was equally captivated by the run on garden seeds and baby chicks, and the sudden appearance of makeshift mask patterns and do-it-yourself 3D-printed ventilator parts. The fictitious images of dolphins taking back the canals of Venice said something about our collective optimism around the retreat of human dominance. Long-standing, stubborn, and irrefutable systems, at both micro and macro scales, were suddenly and rapidly being reimagined; obstinate barriers to lowering emissions, homesteading, and micro-industry – stand-ins for any number of barriers – dissolved. I wondered: Has the near halt of our feverish mobility for reasons of work, school, and recreation created a system reboot, where

what was foundational for twentieth-century life might be finally renegotiated two decades into the twenty-first? Are the choices we’ve been putting off – failing to heed the warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who last year told us to respond now or lose the battle with global warming – no longer choices at all, but a default opportunity to turn the environmental tanker around? Our resilience is not a given; citing the ineffectiveness of our coronavirus response, one expert recently compared the US to an undeveloped country.13 Things are changing, rapidly and radically, whether we are ready or not. Could the silver lining of this global pandemic be the largest moment of infrastructural optimism the modern globe has ever seen? As divided as the nation was in the post-election summer of 2017, the rift reached epic proportions under the erratic leadership, egocentrism, and compulsive duplicity of the federal administration during the spring of 2020. Alongside the tragic milestone of 100,000 dead, unemployment closed in on 20 percent at the end of May 2020 (compared to 24.9 percent at the Depression’s worst point in 1933). Being in a city like St. Louis – one of several in the US with pervasive, chronic poverty, elevated homicide rates, and persistent population loss, where virus mortality disproportionally affected the city’s most marginalized population – optimism was not the descriptor that first came to mind. Yet — to appropriate a relevant meme — nevertheless, we persisted. According to Google Trends data, more people worldwide searched for the word “optimism” in April 2020 than at any other point in the previous sixteen years.14 Articles in the Guardian, the New York Times, Bloomberg CityLab, and U.S. News, among other publications, touted this time as one of momentous change and opportunity.15 Rapid responses, like closing off streets for expanded bike and pedestrian use while driving miles plummeted because of stay-at-home orders and remote work, raised speculation about the end of commuting as we once knew it. Air pollution

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was measurably lower in some notably smoggy cities. Urban historians have characterized public health innovations – sewer systems, readily available clean water, building setbacks to allow for light and air, and agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency – as positive evolutions originating in pandemic-scale crises. In the face of COVID -19, scholars like the urban sociologist Richard Sennett came to the defense of density and transit, eschewing the possibility of a second major wave of suburban flight by predicting a rise in demand for the diverse social relationships, heterogeneity, and human contact that cities provide.16 But perpetual optimism seems easier said than done – particularly during a news cycle when, on top of a global pandemic, voting rights, free speech, and tolerance of a diverse citizenry are under heavy attack. The uncertainty over going to polling places in person in November due to ongoing coronavirus surges, along with the Trump administration’s unfounded accusations that mail-in voting would increase fraud, raised anxiety over the election process, an undeni ably sacrosanct cornerstone of democracy. And in the midst of all of this, police officers killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and white vigilantes murdered Ahmaud Arbery – just three of many victims of long-standing, institutionalized racism that plays out as excessive violence against people of color. These three deaths, however, seemed a tipping point of unnecessary force no longer tolerable from the sidelines. The call to the streets, with varying degrees of social distancing and mask wearing and copious amounts of hand sanitizer, re-energized purpose among a diverse collective advocating for racial justice and created new cause for contesting the commons. As articles appeared advocating public space be subdivided to promote social distancing and giant circles separated strangers sitting in parks, the globe lit up for unity around Black lives and a multiracial sea poured into city streets. The blocks-long painting of BLACK LIVES MATTER

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on 16th Avenue in Washington, DC, was a bright and bold chorus celebrating the power of the people and the use of public infrastructure for collective voice over “law and order” suppression.17 From the boulevards of Paris during the 1968 uprising; to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; to the 110 freeway in Los Angeles, once occupied for immigrant rights; to the newly named Black Lives Matter Plaza in DC: the street – our largest public space – has been infrastructure in the service of visualizing democracy at work. To say the current situation feels uncertain is a vast understatement. Yet even as peaceful protests are tinged by violence, temporarily tarnishing the main point of occupying our public infrastructure – to be seen and heard – Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called for optimism from his city’s residents: We have two choices, Los Angeles, either hopelessness – that this is a moment that can’t be fixed, that America is so broken that we can’t repair our hearts, can’t repair our streets, and can’t bring peace to our lives – or we have hope, the only thing that has ever guided the country, our city, and our world. . . . Tomorrow we have a choice to make, I have a choice to make, and I choose to listen and to move forward. To bring this city together. To build peace on our streets and in our neighborhoods and to admit the country that we live in, that we love and that we want to see [can] do better. . . . Tomorrow when a new sun comes, I hope everybody in Los Angeles will embrace the work that we have to do together. Hopelessness is not our option. We only have hope. And we only have each other.18 Garcetti then committed to reallocating $150 million from the budget of LA’s police department, a highly symbolic yet fairly small sliver of a giant pie piece that currently accounts for over 50 percent of the city’s total spending, to services for Black communities and communities of color.

OUR OPTIMISTIC IMPERATIVE Fortunately, the “politics of hope,” like the larger culture of optimism, works on a much more protracted timeline and from a much wider social, psychological premise than the four-year election cycle. Optimism, both small and big, is not ultimately determined by individual events or limited to specific, seasonal political content but is instead a way of thinking about the world or, as Bennett says, “a particular mode of viewing the future.”19 In that way, small optimisms (personal, internal ones) and big optimisms (collective, external ones), even if unrelated in content, can spring from the same cloth; imagining an uncertain future in a positive light can and must happen at all scales. Beneath Garcetti’s words is the understanding that we have built inequity into our very neighborhoods and streets, into the unequal distribution of toxic pollutants and the limited access to high-speed internet; the transformation of our social relationships relies on the reconstruction of our spatial ones. It is this persistence of optimism that has propelled our development as a species and influenced our progressive urbanization. Certainly, it drove farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl toward better days in California, and millions in rural areas to city centers seeking new opportunities in the early days of industrialization. Such an “optimistic imperative” is at the heart of American exceptionalism – the belief that we are both unique among nations and predestined for greatness – but not historically at the sacrifice of global collaboration and cooperation. For both good and ill, in all of its ethnocentric positioning, optimism got us to the moon – even if it also got us into untold wars. The original WPA was nothing if not an all-out effort in leveraging infrastructure for optimism. Regardless of its ebb and flow, our optimism is bolstered by the fact that few civilizations, regardless of circumstances, have disappeared in their entirety. Even in the face of seemingly certain demise, optimism continues to propel

the success of societies. In Collapse, the geographer and historian Jared Diamond documents the most dramatic instances of resource depletion, hostile neighbors, population stresses, and the breakdown of trading relationships that in some cases did lead to annihilation of tribes or communities, yet these are exceptions, rather than the rule. He even ends the book in “a position of cautious optimism”:20 optimistic because most of our modern problems are caused by our own actions, and we have the power to choose to alter those behaviors and begin counteracting, or at least slowing, the damage already done; cautious because this steamliner heading in the wrong direction is giant and slow to change course, yet has millions of newly wanting passengers just now gaining access. The changes in political will, values, and financial investment necessary at the top are large – huge, in fact. But change has happened before, and the tsunami of truths – inconvenient or otherwise – means that political will on the whole must keep shifting. For architects, landscape architects, and urban designers, this is a particular moment of optimism in the discourse and practice of city making. When the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe fifty years ago ushered in the death of modernism, it also solidified a kind of catastrophic relationship between design and the city that had been building through the decades of urban renewal and exploded in sprawl. The postmodern urbanism of the 1990s, with its depthless simulation, inauthenticity, hyperspace, and militarization, is now also inoperative. But things changed with the rolling over of the millennium, and the relationship between design and the city has taken on new urgency. The trillions of dollars of upcoming investments in infrastructure must support a socioenvironmental agenda if communities, cities, regions, and the whole nation are to truly aim for a better future. Honestly, we can’t afford not to. The future can’t be counted in efficiencies or dollars of unimpeded growth, but rather lies in the nuances of environmental performance, ecological connectivity, and human quality of life. Work that incorporates these ways of thinking is

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happening; the emergence of the inchoate discipline and practice of Infrastructural Urbanism, including the projects and processes included here, is proof. An augmented relationship between the dis ciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design working in partnership with engineers, hydrologists, ecologists, urban planners, residents, and others through the expanded field of infrastructure – not as a neutral conduit of flow but as a foundational territory of collective benefit – can lead to a new kind of urbanism. This book defines Infrastructural Urbanism as that new strategy. Infrastructural Urbanism (1) cap italizes on a simultaneous moment of rampant obsolescence and skyrocketing need across our basic urban systems; (2) recognizes and attempts to repair historically ingrained inequities and produce alternative future social structures; (3) mitigates impacts of past environmental crises and prepares for looming impacts of climate change; and (4) reinvents the foundations of cities – infrastructure – to better capitalize on systemic and symbiotic thinking. This is a new kind of interdisciplinary urbanism, one that enlists the creative spatial skills of a range of design disciplines with creative collaboration across a range of city agencies in conjunction with residents to shape complicated collections of systems into a new performative and adaptive public realm. Infrastructural optimism is the collective narrative that gets us to that better future. INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM → INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM → INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM This book documents and expands the objective of infrastructural optimism, achieved through strategies of infrastructural opportunism, while setting the groundwork for the new design discourse of Infrastructural Urbanism. Projects that best galvanize infrastructural optimism achieve on a range of environmental, social, and economic fronts but also require a context of support, vision, and possibility. Their implemen-

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tation creates a more inclusive, high-performance infrastructural alternative that improves social conditions across economic strata, elevates quality of life for human and nonhuman inhab itants, reduces the environmental load, integrates ecological systems, highlights potential natural and technological intelligence, and is created collaboratively across disciplines, agencies, stakeholders, and residents. It is optimistic in its surety to project a new future through the reimagining of infrastructure, supported from both the top down and the bottom up. For many cities, concurrent projects of such high resolution are rare, requiring, at a minimum, strong project champions, pro gressive thinking, supportive residents, and an appetite for risk-taking. If infrastructural optimism is the luxury of reinvention in the already fertile soil of progressive political leadership, supportive agencies, and cooperative residents, infrastructural opportunism is the vehicle through which more challenged contexts have the chance to equalize that footing. The first two chapters of this book look backward and then forward. As a base for building the discourse of Infrastructural Urbanism, I first explore the proliferation of “urbanisms” in the 1990s that emerged in response to the pessimism and cynicism of postmodernism and the environmental threats of sprawl. Chapter 1 traces the emergence of Infrastructural Urbanism via publications, conferences, built work, competitions, and degree programs – and the people who participated in, wrote, and ran them all – particularly through the prolific first decade of the twenty-first century. The WPA 2.0 competition happened in the midst of this design discourse evolution, in 2008 and 2009, when ongoing environmental and infrastructural crises collided with the growing economic crisis that would become the Great Recession. Simultaneously, designers were recognizing the need to be more socially and environmentally conscientious and more engaged with the pressing problems of the city. The conditions that set the stage for this infrastructural evolution are covered in Chapter 2, followed by an overview of the competition itself and the next generation

infrastructure criteria that emerged. In addition to creating a database of over three hundred aspiring next gen projects, the WPA 2.0 compe tition catalyzed the work of six finalist teams that have continued to pursue the kernels of ideas at the heart of their first submissions. Their work – then and ten years later – is part of the Infrastructural Optimism story. I revisit these entries and firms to explore the ways those inchoate proposals have manifested design directions for infrastructural optimism and reflect on what might come next. Infrastructural opportunism, the strategy of leveraging large infrastructure investment for greater social and environmental gains, was first tested in two interdisciplinary urban design studios where new strategies for implementation and new criteria began to emerge. These two cases – the Interstate 11 Supercorridor in the Southwest megaregion and the Northside-Southside MetroLink light rail line in St. Louis – offered sharply contrasting geo graphic and demographic conditions and served as tests of extreme challenges and potentials. Chapter 3 discusses the tactics necessary to move from last generation to next generation infrastructure, while Chapter 4 covers the specifics of the cases themselves. The book’s conclusion considers the highly contested nature of urban production and the special role that infrastructure, as both basic public necessity and conduit for quality of life, plays in negotiating between the good of the collective, the whims of the market, and the dominant values of sustained political will. On one side, plans that prioritize economic growth and profit regardless of human and environmental impacts still abound. On the other, a powerful new alternative at the federal level, the Green New Deal, recognizes the interconnectedness of environmental, economic, and social objectives and the need to aim high, both to make up for lost time and to repair historical wrongs. The Green New Deal is nothing less than a national level call for infrastructural optimism, and the

work of the WPA 2.0 finalists, summarized in the conclusion, is still rising to that challenge. Beyond situating Infrastructural Urbanism within a wider discourse, defining this movement also means redefining the role of infrastructure in the city from engineering-dominant, functional conduit to design-forward public space. Infrastructural Optimism takes as its premise that major infra structural investments necessary in the coming decades – efforts to increase capacity and address obsolescence, technological transformations, and existing and new crises – embody catalytic opportunities, but that cities themselves exist at varying stages of readiness to capitalize on such opportunities. In some instances, the barriers seem financial, but more often than not, the inertia of historical practices and absence of forward-thinking leadership obstruct the complex relationships necessary for next gen projects to occur. A lack of optimism, sometimes present as debilitating apathy, sometimes as a result of the oppression of rights and opportunities, can be fatal to the perseverance change requires – both from the top down and the bottom up, for both personal and collective optimism. One role of this book is to encourage even the least optimistic of cities to tap into the whispering narrative of their better future. The spring and summer of 2020 brought unprecedented new colliding crises on top of existing challenges: the global coronavirus pandemic, widespread financial hardship, and enlivened social uprising. In an epilogue started during the earliest days of stay-at-home orders, I speculate on three scales of next gen infrastructure – national and megaregional; city and metro; neighborhood, block, and lot – and the potential at this moment for great transformation across them all. What this pandemic might mean for cities, systems, and spatial design is immense. Hints of WPA 3.0 are appearing all around us. The still-pressing question is: what can we – urban designers, architects, landscape architects – learn amid this latest chaos, and how can we be ready to step in bigger, bolder, and more prepared when the current round of dust settles?

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NOTES

cityLAB was founded by Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman. For more information, see https://citylab. ucla.edu/. 2 Terry Gross, “Al Gore Warns That Trump Is a ‘Distraction’ from the Issue of Climate Change,” NPR, August 2, 2017, https://www.npr. org/2017/08/02/541124579/al-gore-warns-thattrump-is-a-distraction-from-the-issue-of-climatechange. 3 Kevin Rozario, “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America,” in The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, ed. Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27–54. 4 See Oliver Bennett, “Cultures of Optimism,” Cultural Sociology 5, no. 2 (July 2011): 301-320; and Oliver Bennett, Cultures of Optimism: The Institutional Promotion of Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 5 Bennett references Tiger’s work in both the article “Cultures of Optimism” (page 304) and his book of the same title (page 313). 6 Bennett, “Cultures of Optimism,” 313. 7 Bennett, “Cultures of Optimism,” 305–307. 8 See Chapter 2 in Bennett, Cultures of Optimism. Bennet goes into significant detail regarding the respective histories of and differences between polyarchy and representative democracy. He also differentiates between what we would think of as a “true” democracy versus a kind of shadow “democratic republic” emerging in places like China. Most relevant here are the qualities I detail further in this section: governments that function in ways that are open, fair, and representative. 9 See Bennett, Cultures of Optimism and “Cultures of Optimism.” 10 See Susan Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 11 Bennett, Cultures of Optimism, 43–44. 12 John Branch, “‘In Every City, There’s a George Floyd’: Portraits of Protest,” New York Times, June 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/ protester-profiles-floyd-minneapolis.html. 13 Larry Elliot, “Top Economist: US Coronavirus Response Is Like ‘Third World’ Country,” The Guardian, April 22, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/22/top-economist-us-coronavirusresponse-like-third-world-country-joseph1

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stiglitz-donald-trump. The number of worldwide searches for the term in all categories peaked in April 2020 for the period between 2004 and May 30, 2020. The second- and third-highest numbers occurred in February 2017 and January 2009. This is live data, so these rankings will change as time goes on. See Google Trends, s.v. “optimism,” accessed November 16, 2020, https:// trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q= optimism. 15 A sample of recent articles covering this moment of upheaval caused by the pandemic as an opportunity: Jack Shenker, “Cities After Coronavirus: How Covid-19 Could Radically Alter Urban Life,” The Guardian, March 26, 2020, https://www.theguardian. com/world/2020/mar/26/life-after-coronavirus-pandemic-change-world; Katelyn Newman, “Survey: Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, Urbanites Are Eyeing the Suburbs,” U.S. News, May 6, 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-05-06/a-recentsurvey-suggests-the-pandemic-has-urbanites-eyeingthe-suburbs; James Brasuell, “Debating the Future of Cities, and Urban Density, aAfter the Pandemic,” Planetizen, March 23, 2020, https://www.planetizen.com/blogs/108814-debating-future-cities-and-urban-density-after-pandemic. 16 Shenker. 17 For coverage of the act, see, for example, Mischa Pearlmen, “Washington DC Mayor Has Black Lives Matter Mural Painted on Street near White House,” LADBible, updated June 24, 2020, https://www.ladbible.com/news/news-dc-mayor-has-black-livesmatter-mural-painted-near-white-house-20200605. On June 5, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s chief of staff, John Falcicchio, tweeted, “There was a dispute this week about whose street this is. Mayor Bowser wanted to make it abundantly clear that this is DC’s street and to honor demonstrators who [were] peacefully protesting on Monday evening.” 18 Eric Garcetti, address to the city of Los Angeles, June 2, 2020, KPCC public radio. 19 Bennett, “Cultures of Optimism,” 304. 20 Jared Diamond, Collapse, rev. ed. (New York, Penguin Books: 2011), 499. 14

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01. INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM IN THE EXPANDED FIELD Defining Infrastructural Urbanism relies on bringing together knowledge from the related but intellectually and ancestrally disparate fields of architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and urban planning. The debate around the boundaries and territories of these disciplines – particularly competing claims by architects and urban planners over the sources, scope, and ownership of urban design – is not new, nor settled. Yet the instigators and protagonists have changed over the decades, and the manifestos and charters have varied in focus and tone. In some ways, Michael Sorkin sums up the complexity of defining the discourse in his expansive historical critique declaring “The End(s) of Urban Design”: Questions of the relationship of city and country, of the rights of citizens to space and access, of the limits on their power to transform their environments, of zoning and mix, of the role of the street, of the meaning of density, of the appropriateness of various architecture, of the nature of neighborhoods, of the relations of cities and health, and of the epistemological and practical limits of the very knowability of the city, have formed the matrix of urban theory from its origins, and its constant evolution is not easily repressed.1 Since the official christening of urban design as a formalized discipline at the First Urban Design Conference, held at Harvard University’s

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Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1956, the ownership and boundaries of the field’s scholarship and practice have been hotly contested. The conference, and the resulting degrees offered at the GSD, staked a particular kind of disciplinary claim that, at the time, focused on negotiating primarily between architecture and planning, namely to give the former renewed weight at the city-making table while seeking restitutions from the latter for much of the detrimental urban renewal that legitimized neighborhood erasure and ultimately hastened abandonment of city centers and growth of sprawl at the peripheries. Reignited by the publications marking the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, including the Harvard Design Magazine issue where Sorkin’s essay first appeared, the debate over what urban design is, who practices it and how, continues.2 The physical planning branch of urban planning has sought to take back ground in this arena largely thought of as “the domain of urban-minded architects” by shifting away from a policy-centric practice to a more spatially-oriented approach.3 Architects, too, have again expanded their territory, by taking the complexities of the urban context more seriously and designing across systems and scales more comprehensively. Yet both an architecture-led urban design discipline and a planning-led one have limitations. For one, the city is not simply an extra-large piece of architecture, so a focus on material relationships of form and space –

Harvard Design Magazine no. 24, 2006. This issue marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 urban design conference.

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even complex, beautiful, and meaningful ones – fails to accommodate the kinds of political, social, temporal, economic, and environmental negotiations the design of cities demands. On the flip side, the city is also not simply a set of policy regulations and economic development strategies, or even their combined spatial distributions and procedural processes. Where urban planners do engage the physical components of the city, a lack of design acuity often results in bland, prescriptive standards and rote, stylistic superficiality. Where megaprojects are offered as urban solutions by architects, they often fail to adequately accommodate polyvalent publics or necessarily indeterminate spatial and environmental conditions and desires. Though Sorkin noted that anniversary moment as one of dual dead ends – either nostalgia for traditional urban form (as promoted by proponents of form-based codes and neotraditional aesthetics) or the inevitablism of the finance-driven postmodern city (resulting in theme park urbanism or generic oversanitization) – numerous authors in that anniversary volume and other concurrent texts began defining a new discipline and discourse of urban design and pointing toward more interdisciplinary and varied strategies than this either/or scenario.4 Infrastructural Urbanism is one of those alternatives. The establishment of this range of strategies, I am arguing, marks the shift away from the pessimistic and cynical approaches to urbanism of the 1980s and early 1990s and toward alternatives that are more cooperative, productive, inclusive, and optimistic. These alternatives include a broader range of collaborators, for one – landscape architects, as an obvious start, as well as environmental scientists, urban ecologists, public health experts, agronomists, engineers, and actual city residents (among others) – and re-engage the city as a site for collective action. Though much intellectual and professional energy has been devoted to debating urban design in response to modernism’s failures (totalizing master plans, sterile efficiencies, and auto-induced sprawl), I argue that

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twenty-first-century urbanism must now reject, with voracity, the pessimism at the core of postmodern urbanism and its realization via the unchecked growth mandate of development supported primarily by corporate capitalism. Instead, it must find ways to prioritize the design of the city as a socially and environmentally performative platform that improves quality of life for all while responding proactively to the most challenging conditions of our age. If 1972 and the implosion of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex mark the end of modernism, then 1992, the Los Angeles riots, and the “death of public space” (so thoroughly documented in Sorkin’s edited volume Variations on a Theme Park) mark an equally tragic, if not as dramatic, peak of contemporary urban pessimism.5 The worst failures of urban renewal had become socially and spatially evident, white flight and sprawl exacerbated existing racial and economic divides, and the financial unpredictability of the late 1980s along with the “trickle-down” economic failures and social disinvestment of the Reagan era left cities in crisis. The narratives of decline identified with the rise of postmodernism in the last two decades of the twentieth century created what Oliver Bennett called cultural pessimism – a mood he identified as pervasive across political, intellectual, moral, and environmental thinking.6 The environmental activism of the 1960s and 1970s (for which Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature were instrumental) gave way to the deregulation and banding together of big oil and big business. The traumas of ground, air, and nuclear warfare, genocidal challenges to international civil rights, and increases in crime that created the “perception of a more brutal, violent and indifferent world” contributed to a cloud of moral pessimism, resulting in a rise of securable space.7 Changes in the production of science, which contributed to its perception as distant, meaningless, and inhuman, and particularly of art – unable to fill the void of meaning and stuck instead in a cycle of simulacrum and pop – exemplified intellectual decline.8 Political

John Portman & Associate’s Bonaventure Hotel (Los Angeles, 1977) with its fortified base, reflective façade, and hyperspace interior is Frederic Jameson’s exemplar of postmodern urbanism. Image: Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).

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decline was embedded in the new capitalism of the neoliberal city, a restructuring that had particular impact on the production of the city through the globalization of markets and the genericizing of both publics and public space. Frederic Jameson’s “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” outlines the shift from modernism to postmodernism across painting, sculpture, and ultimately architecture, where the abandonment of authenticity and an obsession with infinite reproduction precipitated depthlessness and superficiality.9 His urban exemplar is the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles (see previous page), a high-rise designed by John Portman in the mid-1970s notable for its fortified autonomy from the city, uninterrupted reflective facade, and disorienting interior of “postmodern hyperspace” – speeding elevators, multidirectional escalators, and vertigo-inducing interior atrium – where the vastness of interior space makes the human visitor seem small and insignificant.10 Richard Sennett describes a related condition in the “dead space” of the postmodern city, space that “looks like money” and is devoid of human contact and support for collective action. Physical touch has “weakened”; “the city has fallen silent,” its design ruled by a “regime of fear.”11 For both Jameson and Sennett, these conditions seem symptomatic of an urban PTSD, a remnant of the traumatic experiences of war – and warlike urbanism – that neutralizes human experience through seclusion, suppression, violence, or silence. Los Angeles reigns central in this conversation. In 1992, the condition on the ground was already volatile; widespread violence erupted following the acquittal of the white police officers who severely beat and tased an unarmed Black driver, Rodney King, after a high-speed chase through the San Fernando Valley. An observer videotaped the more than fifty baton blows and kicks that resulted in numerous broken bones and affected King’s path for life. What some saw as a revisit to the 1965 Watts race riots, the Los Angeles-based geographer and scholar Edward

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Soja named the Justice Riots. Though ostensibly a response to the police acquittal, Soja argued, [The uprising] was much more multicultural in its participants [than the Watts Riots of 1965], more embedded in the New Economy that had emerged in the preceding twenty years, and more global in terms of both its causes and its potential effects. . . . For the massive agglomeration of the immigrant working poor that had grown around the core of downtown Los Angeles, there was a similar feeling that government . . . had not just failed them, but that government would never be able to deliver appropriate solutions to their problems. Rather than leading to hopelessness, however, the resilient working poor and their most persistent supporters increasingly realized that organizing from below, from the grassroots, was now more vitally necessary than ever before. There were similar feelings among the poor throughout urban America, but perhaps nowhere was both the abandonment of hope and confidence in local, state, and federal governments and the awareness of the critical need for grassroots organizing and coalition building as intensely felt as it was in post-1992 Los Angeles.12 The riots lasted six days and spread throughout Los Angeles County. In the end, sixty-three people were killed and over 2,300 injured; more than $1 billion worth of damage was reported, much of it centered in the Korean-owned businesses of the historically African American neighborhoods of South LA. Though the riots ultimately catalyzed decades of activism around workers’ rights, transportation equity, housing, and health, the far reaches of the burning of the city and the vastness and volatility of discontent brought a backlash of fear resulting in even further securitization of space. Variations on a Theme Park, published the same year as the LA uprising, captured the pessimistic zeitgeist of the moment. Sorkin’s “city without a

place attached to it” encompassed the range of modernism’s viral repercussions interbred with the worst of the neoliberal cities’ fallout. Telecommunications technology and globalization were disrupting any sense of meaningful social and spatial propinquity and replacing the eccentricities of place with consumer-focused, generic urbanism. Branded developments homogenized riverfronts – and any other containable attraction when a riverfront was missing. Sorkin cites two other defining features: an obsession with security, by which he means the early stages of covert and overt digital tracking and the increased ability to segregate experiences for an elite class; and the “city as theme park” – sanitized, militarized, and marketable.13 The city as theme park encapsulates much of the pessimism of postmodern urbanism. The physical redevelopment of Times Square and Las Vegas, which started in earnest in the 1990s, tried to revamp two once socially complex places into sterile, “family-friendly” (read: homogeneous, wealthy, and therefore “safe”) destinations. Banal consumption of useless products and entertainment destinations in exurbs and megamalls defined public experience. Joel Garreau’s Edge Cities, published in this same time frame, describes freeway-connected, multicity mega-landscapes of proportional parts housing, office parks, and retail space as the “new frontier”; a seemingly slap-happy journalist, he shrugs and resigns himself to celebrate the indiscriminate ubiquity as the default American condition.14 Soja calls these places “exopolis,” cities that specialize in “non-city-ness.”15

Buildings destroyed by fire during the uprising following the acquittal of the police officers videotaped beating Black motorist Rodney King, Vermont Street, South Los Angeles, April 30, 1992. Image: AP/ Paul Sakuma

In Los Angeles, as in other restructuring global cities, downtown became a kind of battleground. Privatization and corporatization brought about the physical and technological militarization of public space. Cultural messiness, once celebrated, became threatening; the mildly unruly – skateboarders, kids playing loud music, informal vendors – became the dangerous, the illegitimate.16 Expectations of corporate elites clashed with a rising population of people living on the

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streets, many newly expelled from the social services they had relied on before vast government disinvestment. Violent spatial tactics, like spikes on low windowsills, sprinklers to deter sleeping on grass, and the removal of benches and public toilets, were all meant to eradicate the occupation of the city by the non-wealthy, those non-participants in the consumer capitalist system. Underground parking decks, interior food courts, and private elevated walkways between office towers allowed white-collar workers to commute, eat, work, and play without ever seeing or touching the unhoused or the unemployed, who were left in what used to be the most public of spaces – the street, the sidewalk, the public park, the square. The sterilization of the city, and the further segregation of classes and races brought about by the capital conditions of postmodernity and neoliberal policies in particular, gutted urbanism’s political role. The polis had played the role of platform for engaging in debate and decision-making since the Greek and Roman eras, and the loss of that platform meant the impoverishment of civil discourse as integral to the production of daily life. Many urban scholars have written about the significance of the public realm as a primary contributor to a vibrant and democratic society (Arendt, Lofland, Loukaitou-Sideris, Mitchell, Sandercock, Sennett, Soja). Those excluded from the public realm, who operate only in the private realm (where you eat, have sex, raise children, and sleep), as Hannah Arendt pointed out, live a life of deprivation.17 Participation in the public realm, the realm of significance historically, meant being granted a voice and visibility in the actions of the city-state and decisions of consequence. The lives of both those excluded from public life and those unwilling to participate in public life are implicitly less significant. The fate of the homeless is particularly tragic in the neoliberal city, as the unhoused become trapped in their lack of access to both a private realm and a public one – a state that, in essence, outlaws their very right to exist.18

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The rise of postmodern urbanism and the resulting loss of public space are important factors in defining Infrastructural Urbanism for five reasons: First, the peak of pessimism in the 1990s helped actuate the alternative urbanisms that began to emerge as solutions for this moment. As this chapter explores, some reinforced the structural issues embedded in the extra-capitalist model, but hid them in a neo-traditional aesthetic, wistfully harkening to a premodern era. This new kind of theme park city took the brunt of Sorkin’s ire in 2008, when he wrote about urbanisms’ dead ends. Other alternatives, though, resonate with a kind of hopefulness demanded by the challenges of the twenty-first century, evident in a spirit of inclusiveness and urgency and passion for a collective cause. Second, the transition from the use of the term “public works” (a social concept) to “infrastructure” (historically a tactical concept) prompts the question of how significant these systems are to the public life of the city, and particularly how they express or support collectivity, as well as engender and inspire the buy-in that creates ownership and builds community. Kept invisible, these systems rarely unite neighbors or create synergies until times of failure. Indexed in the space of the city, public infrastructure can both unite the constituents it serves and hold them accountable for the resources they draw from the commons. Third, public space, and in particular public infrastructure, is critically important in the fight for justice. Occupy Wall Street exposed the illusion of corporate public space by making POPS – privately owned public spaces, negotiated for extra development rights but still controlled by private interests – a household, and derogatory, term. Historically, street occupations have been an extremely potent means to fight for the right to the city. From the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery on US Route 80 to the immigrants’ rights marches on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles in 2006, activists have regularly

Protesters shutting down Highway 40 in St. Louis on October 3, 2017 after police officer Jason Stockley was found not guilty of murder in the death of Anthony Lamar Smith. Image: Richard Reilly, 2017. Courtesy of Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

leveraged the control of infrastructure as public space to gain visibility and voice, particularly by disrupting commerce. Fourth, protection of the public commons is a form of social and environmental resilience; the unjust imbalance in infrastructural investment, particularly the uneven and sometimes fatal distribution of negative externalities, exacerbates existing social and economic divides. As the impacts of climate change intensify, disenfranchised populations will be disproportionately affected by shifting conditions unless cities cultivate a purposeful, shared responsibility for protecting the public commons. As in post-disaster recovery efforts, a resilient public infrastructure supports a collective narrative of safety, stability, and longevity. Last, the public realm – the space where strangers come together to engage issues of importance, to coexist, to debate inclusively, to create individual and collective identities, to learn, and to

make shared critical decisions – is necessary for achieving optimism. Without the inherent sense of inclusion and agency that real public space provides, we are relegated to the space of deprivation, to individual lives with aspirations limited to consumption and procreation. To paraphrase lawyer and criminal justice reform advocate Bryan Stevenson on justice: The opposite of pessimism is not optimism, the opposite of pessimism is power.19 As Sorkin sums up in the introduction to Variations on A Theme Park, “In the ‘public’ spaces of the theme park or the shopping mall, speech itself is restricted: there are no demonstrations in Disneyland. The effort to reclaim the city is the struggle for democracy itself.”20 Reclaiming the city, in this age of social, environmental, and economic crisis, means investing in the publicness of infrastructure, including the process of its production and its network of constituents.

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Michigan Debates on Urbanism series: Everyday Urbanism, New Urbanism, and Post Urbanism & ReUrbanism, published by Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 2005

TWO DECADES OF URBANISMS: NEW, EVERYDAY, LANDSCAPE / ECOLOGICAL → INFRASTRUCTURAL In the spring of 2004, the University of Michigan held three debates that aimed to capture what Douglas Kelbaugh, then dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and his faculty saw as promising trends in the field of urban design. One debate focused on “Everyday Urbanism,” one on “New Urbanism,” and the last on “Post Urbanism & ReUrbanism,” concerning the redesign of Ground Zero after 9/11. 21 These last two terms would fizzle, perhaps due to their alignment, respectively, with the most mundane and market-ready aspects of urban design of the time – loft conversions, concert halls, sports arenas, classical master plans with traditionally figural space – and with the “post-avant-garde” objects and theories of prominent architects like Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, which consisted mostly of ongoing experiments and manifestos in postmodern urbanism and deconstructivist architectural form. The big misstep was the organizers’ dismissal of Landscape Urbanism as a real third option,

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though this was likely a reflection of the discipline’s absence within the school. That oversight, however, was being rectified in other ways and at other places. The formative Landscape Urbanism conference, organized by Charles Waldheim at the Graham Foundation in 1997, and the traveling exhibition that followed, exposed audiences to a roster of pioneering participants and a new way of thinking about landscape architecture, a field that had essentially been relegated to picturesque plantings and sidelined in the urban conversation. These ideas coalesced in curricular initiatives at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Waldheim founded a Landscape Urbanism program that same year. The Graham Foundation conference and the theories of Landscape Urbanism were built on top of a discourse already in transition, though. An earlier set of symposia, one at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, under James Corner, and the other in 1994 at the Architecture Association (AA), in London, marked a resurgence of landscape architecture’s cultural and critical significance. Recovering Landscape, an edited volume following the two

symposia and published by Corner in 1999, noted landscape architecture’s expanding new relationships with urbanism and planning, but fell short in precisely identifying the performative criticality and instrumentality that Landscape Urbanism would claim as its aims and tenets; these were made explicit in the Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Waldheim and published in 2006, where additional authors – Chris Reed, Pierre Bélanger, and Clare Lyster among them – substantially solidified the scope of the new field and expanded the conversation to include landscape architecture’s relationship with public works and infrastructure.22 Each “Urbanism” has had successes and failures. New Urbanism, known primarily for its prescriptive standards (form-based codes) and neotraditionalist aesthetics, won market share through its charismatic leadership, clarity of objectives, developer-friendliness, and easy readability, but in practice has resulted in stylistically regressive, homogenous new towns – some merely shopping districts with no real mix of uses, and others primarily vacation towns for the affluent. The post-disaster response in New Orleans, for example, led by Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) founder Andres Duany, was criticized for being formulaic, preordained, and locally insensitive. Still, the movement’s progeny have successfully extracted several universally agreeable components of the CNU manifesto, namely walkability and mixed-use zoning, often packaged together as “transitoriented development” (TOD), an approach that supports multifunctionality and increased density around transit nodes. Author and urbanism entrepreneur Jeff Speck has created an industry around bringing “health, wealth and sustainability” through walkability to all sizes and types of cities, both capitalizing on and fueling the new desirability of urban cores.23 Eliminating New Urbanism’s contrived and typological rigidity and incorporating data that supports the potential for increased profits, have made the density necessary for walkability more

digestible to those who might have previously resisted, but have not necessarily made these newly resurging cities less homogeneous, more public, or more authentic. Like Richard Florida’s call for a “creative class” as a one-size-fits-all ingredient for a “successful city,” both appeal to (and appeal for, in the case of Florida) a particularly abled, particularly privileged demographic. Each has also fueled gentrification, particularly in cities where millennials and baby boomers who want to reclaim urban neighborhoods are displacing long-term residents; once diverse downtowns are rebuilding historical streetcars and replacing local critical retail and housing with luxury chain stores and high-end TOD – what some have called “white infill.” 24 Rather than reducing the wealth gap and fixing the dying public realm, New Urbanism seems to be fueling them. Everyday Urbanism, a descendant of the Michel de Certeau / Learning from Las Vegas camp of studying the common and real, brought new attention to the overlapping realms of public and private life in the city, arguing that micropolitics and counter-publics are avid and critical – and oft-ignored – components of a democratic city. Publicness and the right to it – as in the lineage of Henri Lefebvre, Jurgen Habermas, and Arendt – are central to Everyday Urbanism’s argument countering the restrictive corporate economic model of the neoliberal city. Its progeny, which include bottom-up movements like Tactical Urbanism, Latino Urbanism, and Insurgent Urbanism, have had incremental impacts by bringing attention to spatial adaptations that better support alternative (informal, impermanent, recurrent) social and economic structures. The legalization of street vending and accessory dwelling units (ADUs), for example, both legitimize alternative revenue and living structures (respectively) and alternatively apportion the social territorialization of urban space. Many Tactical Urbanism actions, like park(ing) day, parklets, better blocks, and other pop-up mechanisms, aim to reclaim the road as a public space overly sacrificed to car storage and use.

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OMA, Parc de la Villette competition proposal diagrams, 1982. Above, left to right: Initial Hypothesis; The Strips; Point Grids, or Confetti; Access and Circulation; The Final Layer. Right: Composite Framework. Images: Photos by Hans Werlemann courtesy of OMA, © OMA

These kinds of bottom-up strategies have met their top-down counterparts in a moment of “Top/Up Urbanism,” where the grassroots tactics wielded in the previous scenarios are adopted by agency officials to quickly test ideas and avoid neighborhood resistance and their own agency red tape.25 Janette Sadik-Khan’s transformation of Times Square’s east side to a pedestrian-only zone through painted polka dots and moveable furniture kicked off this revolution on a large scale (see page 63). Ultimately made permanent in a project designed by Snøhetta, the Times Square pop-up, and dozens of others like it across the City of New York, convinced skeptical business owners of the value of increased pedestrian activity and proved the traffic congestion naysayers wrong. Unlike the highly structured New Urbanism, with its Congress and treatises, Everyday Urbanism typically reflects and amplifies lived experience without aims of control or dissemination. Applications like Sadik-Khan’s and legal ADUs have rebuffed criticism that Everyday Urbanism has little space for impact and little room for design. Though strong in creating platforms for social equity through the support of heterogeneity, Everyday Urbanism has little to say about crises of environmentalism. Of the three, Landscape Urbanism – intentionally conceived as an affront to the idea that built objects and natural open space are dichoto-

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mous and delimited – is the only one to directly confront the challenges of the changing climate, making it potentially the most radical and ultimately the most relevant shift in thinking about ecological systems and the importance of infrastructure in twenty-first-century urbanism. Unlike landscape architecture of previous generations, Landscape Urbanism projects reject the pictorial and fixed for the process-oriented and performative. The 1982 competition for Parc de la Villette, particularly the entry by OMA (above and right), which proposed intentional programmatic indeterminacy and organizational logics over formal specificity, is often seen as an inchoate moment in the field and the precursor for future competitions, such as those for Downsview Park in 1999 (see page 26) and the reimagining of Fresh Kills landfill in 2001, both of which resulted in projects that have become defining touchstones of Landscape Urbanism. These projects discard absolute timelines and rigid concepts of programming as functional prescription and instead create open, flexible frameworks for as-yet-unknown future activities, those that are, as Waldheim describes, “planned and unplanned, imagined and unimagined, over time.”26 In these projects, landscape replaces architecture as the urban organizer. Unlike the rigidity of a form-focused master plan dominated by discrete architectural

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James Corner / Stan Allen, Field Operations, Downsview Park competition proposal, 1999

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objects, Landscape Urbanism prioritizes the interconnectivity of the horizontal field condition, seen as ripe with (instead of fraught with) the indeterminacy and instability that a variable landscape can successfully support. Though criticized for its limited applicability beyond parks and other open, low-density environments, Landscape Urbanism and its derivations are proving effective in responding to challenges posed by postindustrial landscapes and reimagining obsolete or underutilized public infrastructure. The High Line in New York, by the collaborative team of James Corner Field Operations and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (see pages 28, 29, and 66), and the reclaiming of the Cheonggyecheon river in Seoul, South Korea, are both affirmative examples of the catalytic impact these projects have far beyond their material extents (for good and ill). The Cheonggyecheon restoration, in particular, an initiative of Seoul’s mayor and led by the city’s government, allowed for a moment of infrastructural opportunism that supplied a new platform for public life while simultaneously prompting microclimatic transformation and modernizing and integrating water, sewer, and transit systems. Ecological Urbanism, a kind of amplification of Landscape Urbanism, shares many of the same tenets, with a greater focus on the preeminence and indivisibility of ecological systems in the broadest sense (including not just human and nonhuman plants and animals, but also social and architectural systems) and design’s ability to better engage questions of environmental resilience. Following a 2009 conference at the GSD, Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the school at the time (and former chairman of the AA), edited a 656-page volume that compiles the projects, manifestos, and positions of dozens of collaborators, vastly expanding the disciplinary scope of this emerging arm of urbanism. Beyond calling for a more robust recognition of the spatial and social vastness of rural and urban and human and non-human ecologies as well as a transdisciplinary worldview, Mosta-

favi’s Ecological Urbanism – like Everyday Urbanism, and like much of urban planning – at least acknowledges the centrality of the political and the public as challenges for urbanism today. Ecological Urbanism projects, he says, “provide the stage for the messiness, the unpredictability, and the instability of the urban, and in turn, for more just as well as more pleasurable futures.”27 The Ecological Urbanism conference and book published the year after have significant overlap in concepts and proponents with Landscape Urbanism, but also share an effort with the original 1956 conference on urban design to corral the epicenter of urbanism back to Harvard. In 2010, Mostafavi started an “Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology” concentration as part of the Master in Design Studies post-professional degree at the GSD (much to the consternation of the New Urbanists and their prime protagonist, Duany, again sparking that ongoing public, volatile debate over the “ownership” of urban design).28 With Waldheim as its lead and Chris Reed as Professor in Practice, the distinction between Landscape and Ecological Urbanisms seems purposefully, and perhaps productively, inexact. Additional distinctions between Landscape and Ecological Urbanism, though, can be attributed to two others in the field: Kate Orff, founder of SCAPE and codirector of Columbia University’s Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, and Nina-Marie Lister, founder of PLANDFORM and the Ecological Design Lab at Ryerson University, who, with Chris Reed, put forward her own version of Ecological Urbanism in the edited volume Projective Ecologies, published in 2014. Arguably, compared with Landscape Urbanism, Ecological Urbanism more aggressively takes on the challenges of environmental sustainability and resilience and more overtly embraces the biological science and applicability of ecology as a holistic model. For one, Ecological Urbanism argues that the city itself is also an ecology, one that

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Above and right: James Corner Field Operations, High Line competition concept boards, 2004

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is, in fact, an interdependent part of the same ecology as nature (as are humans). Building on C. S. Holling’s work from the 1970s, Lister introduces a concept she names adaptive ecological design.29 Holling’s theory, grounded originally in laborious scientific research around the adaptability of species, was the first to suggest the possibility that species longevity benefits from multiple stable states, rather than a single equilibrium. Holling differentiated between stability, defined as a system seeking a given and consistent state of equilibrium, and resilience, which is the ability of a system to persist in spite of, or perhaps in conjunction with, a range of disturbances and no dominant single state of return.30 Ecological Urbanism similarly embraces expected uncertainty and necessary diversity. Per Lister, “Adaptive design thus constitutes decision making that is inclusive of multiple perspectives, adaptive to regular but unpredictable environmental change, and both resilient and responsive to these changes. . . . Adaptive design emerges from a deliberative, integrative, cyclic, and continuous – rather than deterministic and discrete – approach to planning, design, and management.”31 Orff adds community-based participation and activism to her practice-based definition of urban ecology, as well as a sense of urgency in the face of climate change.32 Her 2016 book, Toward an Urban Ecology, positions the work of her firm, SCAPE, as more of a merger between landscape architecture and advocacy planning, staking serious claims for the importance of collective and coordinated action that binds communities together and to the landscapes they occupy. Another intellectual lineage incorporated into the Landscape Urbanism discourse, however, is less expected: the urban thinking that, in the mid- and late 1990s, began to theorize changing urban conditions in the face of globalization and relentless exurbanization, in particular, ideas from Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL (1995), Lars Lerup’s Stim and Dross (1994), and Alex Wall’s “Programming the Urban Surface” (1994/9) (which appear in various Landscape Urbanism

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anthologies, reading lists or histories). Wall, for example, looks beyond the green spaces, parks, and waterfronts that more typically exemplify Landscape Urbanism projects (and where critics often locate their programmatic limitations), and puts forward Barcelona’s second beltway, a trolley line between St. Denis and Bobigny, and the Yokohama Port Terminal by Foreign Office Architects as models for new types of strategies that collect and distribute movement and program through folding, thickening, and other surface manipulations. In these projects, architectural form and mobility infrastructure are critical to the collective space of the urban metropolis, and “networks and relationships” emerge as integral to the urban surface. 33 Though the shift from an object-centered to a field-centered urbanism is part of what defines Landscape Urbanism at large, projects like those cited by Wall also incorporate material infrastructure as pliable and ripe territory that intentionally blurs the disciplinary line between landscape and architecture. What seemed at the time a latent tributary of Landscape Urbanism was rising concurrently with a related movement in architecture. INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM: TWO LINEAGES Infrastructural Urbanism also emerges in the late 1990s, but until now has been either concealed as a latent arm of early Landscape Urbanism or as an underexplored version of architecture at the scale of the city. Though both the architecture and the landscape architecture lineages inform the definitions that follow, Infrastructural Urbanism also draws heavily from other arenas, including systems dynamics, engineering, planning, public health, metabolism, spatial geography, economics, and sociology. More than any of the other urbanisms mentioned above, Infrastructural Urbanism benefits from this current moment of heightened interdisciplinarity, increasing urbanization, and pent-up demand for serious responses to the political stagnation and looming disaster of billions of dollars of life-critical systems on the verge

SCAPE, Oyster-tecture from the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Rising Currents, 2009. Concepts from Oyster-tecture have informed much of SCAPE’s work, including the Living Breakwaters project for the post-Sandy Rebuild By Design competition, currently advancing toward implementation.

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of collapse. In addition, Infrastructural Urbanism demands a radical shift in thinking from centuries-old patterns of infrastructure understood as a narrowly and precisely programmed economic tool ruled by efficiency, as well as a simultaneous shift within both landscape architecture and architecture toward recognizing and owning both the potential of these dual lineages and the blurriness between them. Infrastructural Urbanism, like Landscape and Ecological Urbanism, offers resistance to the environmental crises resulting from sprawl and climate change without the regressive return to a pre-automobile era. By nature of the publicness of its sites, types of project participants, and relationships to critical resources (clean water, air, energy, food, and so on), Infrastructural Urbanism aims to foreground the battle against inequity and more actively resist the overbearing focus on economic development and the narrow ambitions of corporate dominance to which other urbanisms have fallen prey. All three – Landscape, Ecological, and Infrastructural Urbanism – consider the city a set of complicated yet integrated systems with complementary relationships between natural (or “natural,” more accurately) and human-made ecologies. They prioritize performative over pure aesthetic ambitions and intentionally work in trans- and interdisciplinary ways, incorporating methods, tactics, and strategies from across disciplinary-specific epistemologies. Yet unlike Landscape and Ecological Urbanisms, Infrastructural Urbanism also aims to tackle the spatial justice questions of access and distribution that are so important in the discourse of urban planning and so critically reliant on equitable infrastructural systems. To better equalize both access and distribution, Infrastructural Urbanism incorporates a broader interdisciplinary territory and a broader physical territory of infrastructure, beyond those systems typically associated with the landscape or ecological frameworks. It also aims to “measure what matters,” or renegotiate the limited, primar-

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ily growth-oriented and profit- or wealth-based terms typically associated with “successful” cities. Notably, Infrastructural Urbanism strategies may foreground systems of transportation/ mobility at multiple speeds and scales, as they often (1) harbor large amounts of excess capacity, particularly in slow- and no-growth (and typically less wealthy) cities; (2) are critical in questions of physical access, saturating some populations with options while underserving others; (3) have historically (through practices of urban renewal) erased populations and divided cities; (4) have, since modernism, dominated the design of cities because of a default emphasis on the efficiency and priority of auto-centricity; (5) contribute disproportionately – and can therefore disproportionately help solve – critical environmental hazards, like air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions; and, (6) after decades of stagnation, are on the verge of transformation, with radical changes happening in components (like autonomous vehicles), delivery (like ride hailing), funding (with private, entrepreneurial investors, like SpaceX) and service (shared micromobility or ultra-high-speed ground travel). In addition to mobility and transportation, Infrastructural Urbanism takes into account systems of energy, information and technology, education, politics, and government, plus the more environmentally obvious systems of stormwater, wastewater, waste, flora and fauna, and food and agriculture. Critically, Infrastructural Urbanism looks across systems, recognizing interreliances and interconnectivity, and seeks symbiotic relationships among obvious and not so obvious partner systems. Infrastructure – in the full sense of civicness, contestation, and collectivity – is thus reinvented as a new public realm. INFRASTRUCTURE AS ARCHITECTURE The emergence of Infrastructural Urbanism is partially a result of a particular set of colliding forces with their own urgencies and histories, but its origin, like those of the other urbanisms, is grounded in the design discourse of

previous eras. Certainly modernism and before it, Futurism, glorified through architecture the possibilities of an emerging infrastructural revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Antonio Sant’Elia’s Futurist city, La Città Nuova, monumentalized central train stations, airship hangars, and electric power plants as the hierarchical components of a new urban language. Modernism fetishized the promises of technology, the power of speed, and the preeminence of efficiency. Le Corbusier’s plan for the city was a response to the hazards of industrialization and the haphazard way the early twentieth century city was failing to rapidly modernize. The rules of his City of Tomorrow, most simply, aimed to bring order to an exploding urban crisis through the reorganization and segregation of systems – streamlining the conduits of delivery (infrastructure), concentrating live and work (dense towers), and freeing up the ground plane for access to recreation, light, and fresh air (open space). According to Le Corbusier, the complexities of this new urban project went beyond the skill of the “common” architect and were a better match, he argued, for the more disciplined engineer, a position which undoubtedly contributed to the reframing of cities as sites of efficiency and the disenfranchisement of architects in their design and realization.34 Team 10, a faction of modernism that refuted the myopia of such pure solutions as Le Corbusier’s, still maintained the fascination with mobility and circulation in particular. The Team 10 Primer, edited by Alison Smithson and published in 1968, marked the first appearance of the term “infra-structure” in the discipline, focusing on the “urban motorway” as a means to provide order and comprehensibility, both physically and socially, for the complex new modern city (see page 34). Team 10 tempered the modernist position by touting the importance of flow and movement as integral to rather than separate from the architectural fabric, as Le Corbusier had suggested. Instead of advancing an efficiency-first agenda of universally applied spatial principles, they aimed to embed the abstractions of

Antonio Sant’Elia, air and train station with funicular cableways on three road levels, from the series La Città Nuova, 1914.

technology into a more systematic framework reflective of localized form and supportive of existing networks of community relationships.35 The high-speed road was the key element of organization and dispersal, but also of establishing a modern identity: “The first step is to realize a system of urban motorways. Not just because we need more roads but because only they can make our cities an extension of ourselves as we now wish to be.”36 Previous urban strategies – figural objects in fixed, well-defined ground – were no longer adequate to understand the networked relationships of modern urban components. Aldo Van Eyck called for a new way to “impart order at the same time to a multiplicity of things” in an effort “to create harmony in motion.”37 Team 10 summed up their approach to the relationship of architecture, urbanism,

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Alison and Peter Smithson, Berlin Hauptstadt, 1957. Top: Peter Smithson, Diagram of hierarchy of vehicular routes. Bottom: Alison Smithson, diagram of pedestrian net structuring central area organized within Urban Motorways. Image credits: Smithson Family Collection

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and infrastructure by declaring, “The time has come . . . to approach architecture urbanistically and urbanism architecturally.”38 But these efforts at holistic vision, particularly the scale of master planning that Le Corbusier instigated with his broad strokes of erasure, translated poorly for the millions of existing residents residing in those slow-to-modernize neighborhoods. The height of urban renewal in the United States, which converted the socialist dream into a capitalist leviathan, created stillevident scars on the city, both physiological and psychological. Figures like Robert Moses took the brunt of the criticism, even though he began his career in the 1930s and 1940s by providing hundreds of schools, playgrounds, parks, and other amenities to low- and middle-income New Yorkers. By the 1950s, the massive freeway projects he (and many others around the country) facilitated, largely planned to capitalize on generous contributions by the federal government while pursuing the project of modernization, were more the norm than the exception. Watching the demolition of his neighborhood that made possible the construction of the CrossBronx Expressway, Marshall Berman reflected on the simultaneous grief and awe of the moment: To oppose his bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centers, was – or so it seemed – to oppose history, progress, modernity itself. And few people, especially in New York, were prepared to do that. . . . Moses struck a chord that for more than a century has been vital to the sensibility of New Yorkers: our identification with progress, with renewal and reform, with perpetual transformation of our world and ourselves. . . . Moses was destroying our world, yet he seemed to be working in the name of values that we ourselves embraced.39 Modernization’s specious tool of the universalizing master plan was – and still is – a stubborn and blunt ax. As wielded for “urban renewal”,

its impacts of homogenization, neutralization, and erasure are seen in retrospect as one of planning’s biggest failures and the source of widespread spatial and cultural loss. The late 1960s and early 1970s brought a period of broad social discontent for these pervasive reasons. In this era of restlessness and rebellion, architects found a new fascination with non-form; the mobility landscape and its ramifications emerged as worthy sites for design attention. Reyner Banham’s essays, mock-doc driving tour Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, and seminal book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies deviated widely from standard design research. The wandering tour prefigured later understandings of the city as a set of integrated, human-constructed, urban ecological systems. Anthony Vidler called Four Ecologies “a freeway model of history,” noting how the rhythmic, non-periodized structure of the book formulated an appropriately topographical rather than chronological or landmark-focused understanding of the city.40 Four Ecologies contributed to the thinking that common infrastructural systems and the city of Los Angeles itself were worthy of both scholarly and design attention. In the same time period, Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s studio-based analysis of the Las Vegas strip, introduced an immersive and uncensored evaluation of the structure and significance of the seeming detritus of the strip city. Their thorough analysis of the sign- and symbol-centric communication system of strip architecture sought an alternative kind of order evident in the alleged aesthetic chaos of car-centric development. The publication bestowed a degree of academic credibility to the cultural iconography and spatial conditions of a road-based visual culture – whether designed or not, but implying a certain missed opportunity for architectural intervention. Around the same time, anti-establishment design collectives emerged on the American West Coast (Ant Farm), in the UK (Archigram), and in Italy

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(Archizoom and Superstudio), defined loosely by their shared infrastructural dystopianism. Ant Farm, originally based in San Francisco, uniquely captured the intersection of media and car culture and staged performative events for broad public exposure that both playfully and forebodingly poked fun at both. Their book Automerica, which traces the country’s mobility love affair from Norman Bel Geddes’s 1939 Futurama exhibition to the gas crisis of the 1970s, is both sanguine and cautionary, inspired at least in part by the contemporaneous environmental opus, the Whole Earth Catalog. Never traditional practitioners, Ant Farm operated in the expanded field of architecture, conceptual art, landscape, and consumption, producing a kind of “oppositional architecture” that was both humorous and scathing.41 Even though much of their subject matter dealt with private obsessions – driving, television, sex – their aims were to produce commentary through the creation of an architectural/infrastructural public sphere. Their inflatables were occupiable symbols that stood in juxtaposition to what they saw as the rigid, unevolving, institutional context of government, architecture school, and design practice at large. Cadillac Ranch, ten half-buried cars still present on the side of Interstate 40 (previously Route 66) in Amarillo, Texas, pokes at both the dramatic, formal evolution of the 1950s tailfin and the planned obsolescence embedded in consumerist culture. Over a quarter million people visit it yearly, many freely tagging the exposed Cadillacs, transforming the roadside into a public space of critique and participation. Ant Farm’s international counterparts shared their obsession with infrastructure, if not their American attachment to wanderlust, critique of media, and fetishism of the automobile. Constant Nieuwenhuys (New Babylon), Yona Friedman (Spatial City), and Archigram (Plug-In City, among other proposals) in particular took Team 10’s rather tame theories of a new urban order through infrastructure and radicalized them. The megastructure proposals of Archigram in particular invested little in the archeology of the historical city or its existing social networks and instead

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suggested ground-up utopian alternatives intended to challenge both the old physical and social structures.42 In Walking City and Plug-In City (right), Archigram eviscerated the weight of fixed infrastructure and instead responded to the more mobile, fluid, and technologically connected society they saw emerging. Their work predicted and predated the smart city movement and the Internet of Things by decades.43 Their urban anthropomorphism inserted playful optimism as instigation to the sparsity of modernism. Projects like Archizoom’s No-Stop City and Superstudio’s Continuous Monument capitalized on the spatial neutrality of the infinite grid – a mega-infrastructure – to serve as both commentary for the modern state of globalization and platform for the infinite variations of consumption in the postindustrial, post-Fordist condition. In these proposals, the new city is far from fixed and static – not only is it more flexible and adaptable than the old one, it is also infinitely expandable and in a perpetually sustained state of disassembly and assembly.44 These attributes make projects like these precursors to a twenty-first century generation of infrastructure. Though playful in spirit and aesthetics, these infrastructural dystopianists architecturalized the discontent swirling around the environmental and social disruptions of their era: the anti-war movement, urban renewal and displacement, the vacuousness of mindless consumption and waste, the banality of monotonous sprawl, and increasingly noxious and visible environmental damage – all faced by both institutions and the design profession with a shocking passivity. Their resistance failed to fully prevail (though their resurgence in popularity in the last decade is notable), and the cloud of postmodern urbanism soon rained heavily on this experimental parade. ARCHITECTURE AS INFRASTRUCTURE The term “infrastructural urbanism” first appeared in the discipline of architecture through the work of Stan Allen in the late 1990s, when architecture, quite differently from cities, was in the midst of

Peter Cook, Plug-In City; section, Max Pressure Area, 1964. Image: Archigram Archives 2021. © Archigram 1964

Ron Herron, “Cities: Moving New York,” 1964. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London. Image © Ron Herron Archive. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021

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Stan Allen, Field conditions. From Points + Lines, 1999. Allen’s theories on field conditions, including variations on these diagrams published as early as 1996, introduced a horizontally focused, non-object-centric understanding of figure/ground relationships concurrent with and akin to emerging ideas of Landscape Urbanism. Allen and Corner’s collaboration on the Downsview Park competition (see page 26) while co-leading Field Operations, exemplified the confluence of these similar ideas from both the landscape and architecture disciplines (see lineage diagram, pages 44–45).

its own postmodern crisis of symbolism and meaning. His 1999 book Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City, where the essay “Infrastructural Urbanism” was published, is a theory-heavy monograph of sorts, composed of six architecture competition entries, every pair with their own critical essay, and both an introduction (by K. Michael Hays) and an afterword (by R. E. Somol) arguing for the seminal nature of the ideas-supported-by-projects that fall between.45 The substance of these writings, with “Infrastructural Urbanism” marking the peak of the arc, is the critique of a seemingly impotent profession with a call for architecture to return to relevance by finding meaning in physical, material design and production. Responding to both the shallow, stylistic references of postmodern architecture and the obtuse, literary, and philosophical references of deconstructivism (still monopolizing the field at the time after a decade of experimentation), Allen called for architects not just to return to isolated, autonomous objects, but to shift focus toward performance over aesthetics – buildings that do the physical work of shelter and human accommodation, that are instrumental in “improv[ing] the human condition” not just expressing it, that communicate through space, form, and structure, rather than abstract symbol or semiotics – creating an alignment with those “material practitioners” – ecologists, engineers – who are “less concerned with what things look like and more concerned with what they can do.” For Allen, this idea of infrastructural urbanism, after a drought of material efficacy, offered “a new model for practice and a renewed sense of architecture’s potential to structure the future of the city. . . a way of working at the large scale that escapes suspect notions of master planning and the heroic ego of the individual architect.”46 He condemned architecture’s self-imposed irrelevance through its emphasis on signs and surface and simultaneously saw the chance for renewed material meaning opportunistically aligned with the country’s massive underinvestment in infrastructure in the last twenty-five years

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of the twentieth century: As much as they have been excluded from the development of the city, architects themselves have retreated from questions of function, implementation, technique, finance, and material practice. And while architects are relatively powerless to provoke the changes necessary to generate renewed investment in infrastructure, they can begin to redirect their own imaginative and technical efforts toward the questions of infrastructure. A toolbox of new and existing procedures can be expanded by reference to architecture’s traditional alliance with territorial organization and functionality.47 Borrowing liberally from the language of landscape ecology, and reminiscent more of the indeterminacy of OMA’s Parc de la Villette proposal than of the lingering deconstructivist or historicist postmodern objects of the era, the organizing features of Allen’s projects were the loose patches and connective corridors of the horizontal site surface; the flexibility of the field where “program, event, and activity can play themselves out”; and the recurring expansive, organizing indeterminacy of a three-dimensional, “infrastructural” grid.48 It is not the scale of the proposals that make them infrastructural – one would have a hard time arguing that the projects in Points + Lines are in fact urban design projects at all – but the idea of an organizational framework that supports a range of complex and perhaps alternatively organized configurations that make them less discrete architecture. The shift from object to field and from aesthetic to performative priority marks the importance of this contribution.

Stan Allen, reconstruction of the Souks of Beirut competition. Montage: roof plan in context, 1994. From Points + Lines, 1999.

To Allen, architecture’s foray into infrastructure was not an endorsement of modernism’s pure functionalist vision or top-down master planning – quite the opposite – but capitalized on a property unique to architecture: its ability to physically materialize a “scaffold” in support of

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Stan Allen, reconstruction of the Souks of Beirut competition. Above: Existing structures, New surfaces, Proposed buildings, and Roof. Right: site plan, 1994. From Points + Lines.

unanticipated and unscripted programmatic complexity. Most important, in defining the discourse of Infrastructural Urbanism, Allen put forward seven propositions: infrastructure constructs the site and “creates conditions for future events”; “infrastructures are flexible and anticipatory,” evolving as conditions evolve; infrastructure is collective, incorporating multiple voices and authors, both strategic and tactical; infrastructure is both pragmatic and local, prioritizing performance over formal constraint; infrastructures “organize and manage complex systems of flow” and allow for gaps in the system for unanticipated contingencies; they “work like artificial ecologies” and adapt to conditions over time; and, lastly, “infrastructures allow detailed design of typical elements or repetitive structures, facilitating an architectural approach to urbanism.” “In infrastructural urbanism, form matters,” Allen writes, “but more for what it can do than for what it looks like.”49 Allen’s move away from object-centric architecture was an expansion of his earlier theories on field conditions (first published in 1996, revisited in 2010, and inspiration for an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012) and an explicit effort to find agency for architects in the shaping of the city without the top-down dominance of the master plan. Field conditions are a parallel yet more archi-

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tecturally particular kin to the organizational, horizontal infrastructural plane of Landscape Urbanism. Allen’s field is tactical, not neutral; unifying, but not homogenizing. Infrastructural Urbanism’s horizontal field is also urbanistically loaded, allowing for seamless readings in multiple scales simultaneously and for a fluidity between figure and ground that defies a traditional object/field relationship. Though both Landscape and Infrastructural Urbanism allow for a kind of flexible programmatic and spatial emergence, Infrastructural Urbanism demands a precisely realized framework, relying on the hard infrastructures of material form and utility. The projects featured in Points + Lines, though, are bound still by architecture’s site, scale, and disciplinary limitations. The materialization of architecture’s instrumentality, as shown in Allen’s competition entries, expands the field of operations within architecture but does not yet expand the physical territory nor the philosophical, political, or environmental agenda beyond those internal to the practice. Over the next decade, though, this would change. In 1999, Allen and James Corner joined together in Field Operations, the experimental, interdisciplinary firm that would take first prize in several key design competitions, most notably Fresh Kills Reserve on Staten Island in 2003, and a finalists’ slot for Downsview Park in Toronto in 2000 – both

argued, “to work within an expanded field that includes architecture, urban design, landscape, infrastructure, ecology, and program, and we need to factor in economics and policy.”50 Though the concept of interdisciplinarity is shared with Landscape Urbanism, Allen called for something that actively sought territory beyond the open space, parks, and waterfronts typical of traditional landscape architecture – an “expanded institutional definition . . . one that would open up to the design of systems and infrastructure: a shift from landscape urbanism to landscape infrastructure.”51

touchstone projects for the inchoate field of Landscape Urbanism. Though short-lived as an official collaboration (Corner would transition his firm to James Corner Field Operations and Allen would become dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture and commit back fully to Stan Allen Architect in 2003), those prolific years provided a significant platform for testing many of the aligned tenets of Landscape Urbanism and Infrastructural Urbanism. In this practice and the projects of this era and just beyond, a new form of Infrastructural Urbanism begins to take shape. LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE In 2010, a new article by Allen, “Landscape Infrastructures,” revisited the concepts of Infrastructural Urbanism, this time focusing on new, more complex and urbanistic public projects and an expanded mandate. “We need,” Allen

Though grounded by training in the landscape architecture discipline, Pierre Bélanger developed theories, beginning with his 2006 essay in the Landscape Urbanism Reader, “Synthetic Surfaces,” that make him an Infrastructural Urbanist from a landscape lineage in the same way Allen is an Infrastructural Urbanist from an architectural one. “Synthetic Surfaces” looks at the US Interstate system, and asphalt in particular, as a resurfacing of the economic global network. In his 2009 article “Landscape as Infrastructure,” Bélanger identifies the postindustrial landscapes, particularly those of “failures & accidents” (the Love Canal, Leslie Street Spit) or chronic, slow-motion disasters (the depopulation and deindustrialization of the Rust Belt), as sites where landscape might intervene as infrastructure.52 Bio-industries, which witnessed explosive growth in the 1990s, and waste economies, which help close the cradle-tocradle material loop by converting waste to raw material or increasing waste diversion through recycling, are both infrastructural and economic opportunities, and, in these theories, opportunities for design. Like Allen’s original call for disciplinary agency, these are not abstractions, but applied ways landscape architecture becomes operational and essential, and hence infrastructural.53 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, infrastructure-centric topics began appearing liberally as journal themes, studio foci, the

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subject of architecture school think tanks, and on numerous taxonometric explorations of the state of the discipline, regardless of intellectual, stylistic, or political positioning. This was a radical departure from the decade prior, when the topic was not considered a valid area of research or intervention in the design fields.54 In Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders’s edited volume Urban Design, one of Krieger’s “ten spheres of urbanistic action” is “The Infrastructure of the City.” At the most basic level, he calls for an end to engineering optimization in service of auto-centricity and a chance for urban designers to reconsider mobility infrastructure as part of an integrated, multifunctional social system. Joan Busquets identifies ten types of urbanistic projects with infrastructural reinvention prominent in at least three – “Multiplied Grounds,” “Reconfigured Surfaces,” and “Piecemeal Aggregations” – but also prime territory for “Recycled Territories,” “Core Retrofitting,” and “Tactical Maneuvers.”55 Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman’s edited volume Fast-Forward Urbanism also projects new alternatives to the dead ends of postmodern pessimism and over prescriptive neotraditionalism with infrastructure front and center. Their “eight principles” work across agents and scales, connecting economies, politics, cultures, and epistemologies. Infrastructure is integral as both a site and a process, both prominent (point five, “Infrastructure as Catalytic,” and six, “Recasting the Performative”) and covert (in new arrangements of logistics, material resource distribution, and ways to anticipate contingency).56 Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd’s edited volume Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks collects many of these same voices with updated or expanded stances, including WPA 2.0 organizer, Cuff, and finalists Lateral Office and UrbanLab. Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velikov introduce their Conduit Urbanism projects with this prophetic proclamation: It is by now doubtless that the question of infrastructure will dominate the concerns of

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architects, landscape architects, urbanists, and planners for the foreseeable future, both as a site of research and analysis and as a field of potential intervention. The participation of design intelligence within this area is urgent: not only is the current stock of transitional infrastructure in a state of physical decay, it is in many cases inadequate to meet the needs of contemporary urbanization and of social and ecological urgencies. The concept of infrastructure is currently undergoing a re-evaluation and shifting from its being understood as an organizational and logistical construct in support of urbanization, to recognizing it as a constructed ecology in complex interdependency with biophysical systems, economies and politics. For significant amounts of the contemporary population, infrastructure has also become the prevalent form of urbanism itself, serving as a primary locus of public life and social space.57 After decades of inching into the boundaries of the discipline, infrastructure finally falls within the scope of designers’ re-entry into agency on the city. For those who might still resist and align with more traditional paths of figure/ ground–based urban design, the question of “fit” may still seem uncomfortable. Intentional interdisciplinarity makes categorization both difficult and perhaps antithetical. Though dual in origin, Infrastructural Urbanism is decidedly not just architecture (at an urban scale), and not landscape (urbanism), but operates across an expanded field of urbanisms; without narrowing those relationships by trying unnecessarily to fit round pegs in square holes, understanding them can clarify a path and open wider options in an expanded field.

RVTR, Conduit Urbanism Project for the Great Lakes megaregion: Strategic nodal configuration at highway exchange locations (top); Reconfigured infrastructural systems (bottom), 2013. © RVTR / Kathy Velikov and Geoffrey Thün

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Infrastructural Urbanism Lineage Diagram; Linda C. Samuels and Tom Klein © Linda C. Samuels 2021

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Sculpture in the Expanded Field diagram derived from Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 1979

INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE EXPANDED FIELD Paradigmatic disciplinary shifts are inevitably difficult to characterize. Though it may be minimally productive to identify where one urbanism precisely diverges from another, the exercise of exploring their relationships can be a fruitful strategy to expose previously unidentified and unnamed potential. In 1979, art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss wrote the essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” in an effort to explain the eroding boundaries of the art form, which had evolved from easily recognizable statues and monuments to works that escaped historical norms of form, place, and meaning. Though these new types of sculpture had both architectural and landscape qualities, they were neither contained nor explained by either field. Siteless, homeless, baseless, and placeless, modernist sculpture entered its “negative condition”; it was “what is in the room that is not really the room” or “continuous with grass and trees, . . . [but] not in fact part of the landscape.”58 This condition of not-landscape and not-architecture, though, represented only half the equation. Krauss used a Klein group diagram as a way to both encapsulate this hard-to-pin-down descriptor, as well as

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to open up the possibilities that arise from these shifts beyond a single binary. In other words, if sculpture is not-landscape and not-architecture, then what “conditions of possibility” exist in the other combinations of the diagram’s vertices, opening up a field of numerous complex and related subpractices? Using the work of artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, and Mary Miss as examples, Krauss identified and named the additional combinations – marked sites (both landscape and not-landscape), site-construction (both landscape and architecture), and axiomatic structures (both architecture and not-architecture) – and embedded a generation of artists in an expanded field of architecture and landscape.59 In theory, this same strategy can be applied to explore the relationship between infrastructure, architecture, landscape, and urbanism. In Coupling, an issue of the journal Pamphlet, the members of think tank and design firm InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office pick up on Krauss’s thinking in an effort to locate such subpractices within architecture’s new relationship with infrastruc-

Infrastructure in the Expanded Field, InfraNet Lab, 2009

ture. Replacing “sculpture” with “infrastructure” and “architecture” with “urbanism,” their diagram allows for expanded relationships between these distinct but related fields. Using their own projects as instigators, they identify three new categories that occupy the remaining vertices: civic conduit (both landscape and urbanism), programmed container (both urbanism and non-urbanism), and productive surface (both landscape and not-landscape). Perhaps less subpractices than architectural components (or what they call “formats and operations for architecture”), these are then “coupled” in the projects to create mutant variations of Infrastructural Urbanism.60 For InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office, the Klein diagram is a projective model for opening up the work of their own practice. A second variation of InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office’s Klein diagram introduces another layer, which continues to stretch the conversation of what the expanded discourse might contain. An outside square encloses the diamond, adding four additional vertices labeled ecologies, velocities, energies, and economies, with the center now marked as “flows.” The additional square gives the overall effect of contextualizing

Infrastructure in the Expanded Field, InfraNet Lab, 2010

the diagram in a larger epistemology, one not specific to architecture, but to a systems logic of flows and interconnectivity. Ecologies, economies, energies, velocities – flows – potentially introduce compelling questions of distribution to the stable state of the internal Klein diagram. InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office’s version of the Klein diagram is a thought-provoking but, in some ways, flawed adaptation of Krauss’s analysis to position new urbanistic practices around infrastructure. Removing architecture from the body of the diagram seems to make architecture’s relationship to landscape architecture and urbanism less comprehendible, not more, as they claim.61 In absentia, architecture is assumed to be the disciplinary umbrella of the entire diagram (as, say, “art” would have been for Krauss’s diagram), capturing all of the practices (landscape, urbanism, and their negations) and subpractices identified as falling within. The assumption that everything that is not-landscape, not-urbanism, landscape, and urbanism combined is architecture is problematic, though not at all atypical. This partially results from the breadth (and sweeping vagueness) with which “architecture” is often defined as field

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Urbanisms in the Expanded Field, Linda C. Samuels, 2020

and the imbalance of architecture’s predominance – or sense of predominance projected from within – in the spatial design disciplines generally, and in renewed efforts to claim a portion of city design in particular.62 This looseness, particularly in an effort to pin down disciplinary relationships, makes categorization all the slipperier. At the risk of returning to the initial threat of architecture’s irrelevance, particularly at the scale of the city, architecture’s instrumentality in the conversation relies on clarity around its critical contributions and keeping it internal to the fray. The lineage of Infrastructural Urbanism, as initially stated in this chapter, though inclusive of many disciplines, emerges from the dual worlds of landscape architecture and architecture, but is defined by neither. I argue that the binary should start there, with not-landscape and notarchitecture in the two negative positions (as in Krauss’s diagram) and infrastructure taking the place of sculpture at the base. This is a moment of transformation in the field of urbanism (as the 1970s were in art), where previous boundaries and rules of city-making are obsolete, unreflective of the conditions and needs of the day, and

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new subpractices operate between (or across) the traditional edges of these fields, with infrastructure as the point of focus here. Krauss’s article positioned sculpture’s evolution through its appropriation of extradisciplinary components and practices. As sculpture became less autonomous, object-oriented, and “pure,” so too does infrastructure expand beyond its well-defined boundaries, mostly of functional engineering. The vertices of this new Klein diagram are populated with primary characteristics of Infrastructural Urbanism, related to their originating authors and contributing fields of Landscape, Ecological, and even Everyday Urbanism: respectively, performative and operational; resilient and adaptive; and tactical and flexible. Like InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office’s second version, the center incorporates one key way the binaries are all tied together, a common relationship to the flow and flexibility of systems rather than the static pattern of objects; though potentially equivalent, all flows are not the same, so they are shown here as ecologies, fields, economies, and symbiosis. A further iteration of this diagram aims to incorporate the missing elements that distin-

guish Infrastructural Urbanism from its peers. If infrastructure is critical to the production of urbanization, then its processes and products can contribute to either a more spatially just or spatially unjust condition. The added epistemological framework of this diagram incorporates knowledge from urban planning, particularly aspects of spatial justice, claiming a new significance for equity at all stages of infrastructural design, planning, and implementation, including the preservation and incorporation of existing communities, the processes by which those communities engage in changes in their own neighborhoods, and the degree to which final projects serve a larger sense of equity and publicness in the places where they are built.

reduce environmental impacts. It is important to note that economies are equivalent to but not greater than the other flows contained in the diagram’s interior, and that – as in the more recent field of ecological economics – the primary use of resources is not to serve growth and profit. Lastly, the epistemological frame of spatial justice that includes engagement, democracy, and publicness supports the idea that Infrastructural Urbanism achieved is infrastructural optimism, a product and service of the collective, with self-determination and a right to contestation embedded in the structure of the discipline.

Though no diagram is all-encompassing, particularly one based on a potentially oversimplistic binary, this expanded field, like the original, aims to open up the broader disciplinary scope to allow for a wide range of subpractices and constituencies across multiple disciplines and inclusive of multiple contributors. I would also argue that equitable flows and systems support both just access and distribution, and efficient flows, particularly symbiotic relationships,

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NOTES

1

Michael Sorkin, “The End(s) of Urban Design,” in Urban Design, ed. Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 166. This edited volume is a compilation and expansion of several of the articles published originally in the Harvard Design Magazine, no. 25 (Fall/Winter 2006), which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 urban design conference.

2 3

Krieger and Saunders.

Alex Krieger, “Introduction: An Urban Frame of Mind,” in Krieger and Saunders, ix. 4 5

Sorkin, “The End(s) of Urban Design.”

Charles Jencks declared that modernism ended when demolition began on Pruitt-Igoe, in 1972, in The Language of Postmodern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977); in the edited volume Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), Michael Sorkin collects the many deaths of public space. 6

Oliver Bennett, Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 7 8 9

Bennett, 97. Bennett, 97.

Frederic Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 10 Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” 11 Richard Sennett, “The Powers of the Eye,” in Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm, ed. Russell Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 60, 63, 68. 12 Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 143. 13

Michael Sorkin, “Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park,” in Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park, xiii. 14 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 15

Edward W. Soja, “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County,” in Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park, 95. 16

Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003).

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17

Hannah Arendt, “The Public and the Private Realm,” in The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958). A third realm, the social realm, emerges later as a space where the once intimate activities of the home begin to occur in public space. 18

See, for example, Don Mitchell, Right to the City, and Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). Lefebvre argues that the right to the city includes fundamental rights to survival, civic rights like participation, and social rights like joy and pleasure. Without housing, one is condemned to practice all life activities in the public realm, essentially illegalizing private activities such as using the bathroom or having sex. Mitchell’s in-depth case study of People’s Park in Berkeley shows how the introduction of certain programs and rules can have subversive effects on reducing the rights of some groups by privileging access for others. 19

Stevenson’s original statement is “The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.” Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (New York: Spiegl & Grau, 2014), 18. See also the TED talk “We Need To Talk About an Injustice,” March 2012, https://www.ted.com/ talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_ injustice. 20 21

Sorkin, “Introduction,” xv.

In 2005, the University of Michigan published three small books documenting the presentations and discussion from each debate under the broader title Michigan Debates on Urbanism: Rahul Mehrotra, ed., Everyday Urbanism: Margaret Crawford vs. Michael Speaks, Michigan Debates on Urbanism, vol. 1; Robert Fishman, ed., New Urbanism: Peter Calthorpe vs. Lars Lerup, Michigan Debates on Urbanism, vol. 2; and Roy Strickland, ed., Post Urbanism & ReUrbanism: Peter Eisenman vs. Barbara Littenberg and Steven Peterson, Michigan Debates on Urbanism, vol. 3. 22

Charles Waldheim, ed., The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

23 Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). 24

Richey Piiparinen, “The Persistence of Failed History: ‘White Infill’ as the New ‘White Flight’?,” New

Geography, July 9, 2013, http://www.newgeography. com/content/003812-the-persistence-failed-historywhite-infill-new-white-flight. 25 See Linda C. Samuels, “Top/Up Urbanism,” in Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, Amplified Urbanism (Los Angeles, CA: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, 2017). 26

Charles Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism,” in Waldheim, 41. 27

Mohsen Mostafavi, “Why Ecological Urbanism? Why Now?,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 32 (Spring/ Summer 2010), 12. 28

See, for example, Andres Duany, “Andres Duany vs Harvard GSD,” Metropolis, November 3, 2010, https://www.metropolismag.com/cities/landscape/ duany-vs-harvard-gsd/; and Leon Neyfakh, “Green Building,” Boston Globe, http://archive.boston.com/ bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/30/green_building/?page=full. 29

Nina-Marie Lister, “Insurgent Ecologies: (Re) Claiming Ground in Landscape and Urbanism,” in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2010), 536–547. See also Nina-Marie Lister, “A Systems Approach to Biodiversity Conservation Planning,” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, no. 49 (February 1998): 123. 30 C. S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4, no. 1 (November 1973): 1–23.

that architects had become (page 176). See Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 48, 57. 35

36 Alison and Peter Smithson, “AD., October, 1958. A./P. S.” in Smithson, 70. 37 38 39

“Nagele Schools. Van Eyck,” in Smithson, 73. Smithson, 73.

Marshall Berman, “Robert Moses: The Expressway World,” in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 294–295. 40

Anthony Vidler, “Introduction,” in Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; repr., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), xxv. 41

Michael Sorkin, “Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Cars, Dolphins, and Architecture,” in Constance Lewallen et al., Ant Farm, 1968–1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 42

Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (Ann Arbor, MI: Harper & Row, 1976). 43

Darran Anderson, “The Prophetic Side of Archigram,” Bloomberg CityLab, November 15, 2017, https://www. citylab.com/design/2017/11/the-prophetic-side-of-archigram/545759. 44

Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 45

See Kate Orff, Toward an Urban Ecology (New York: Monacelli Press, 2016).

An earlier, slightly more compact version of the essay “Infrastructural Urbanism” was published in the Cambridge architecture journal Scroope, vol. ix (1997). It was first widely available in Points + Lines in 1999.

34

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31 32

Lister, 540.

33

Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” in Recovering Landscape, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 234–249.

Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (1929; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1987). “A city made for speed is made for success,” (page 179) and the street, “a new type of organism, a sort of stretched-out workshop, a home for many complicated and delicate organs, such as gas, water, and electric mains,” was a “masterpiece of civil engineering and no longer a job for navvies” (page 167) – his term for the “twisted sort of creature” in love with irregular sites and original ideas

46

Stan Allen, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 52–53. 48

Allen, Points + Lines, 51–52.

The concepts of IU related to ecology at this early stage were actually developed in isolation from Landscape Urbanism and related more to his earlier ideas of field conditions. It wasn’t until Allen met James Corner via an invitation to serve on reviews at the University of Pennsylvania that the connection was made and his theories evolved in more direct alignment with those of Landscape Urbanism. Stan Allen in discussion with the author, October 30, 2020; see also Points + Lines, 52.

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49 50

Allen, Points + Lines, 54–57.

Stan Allen, “Landscape Infrastructure,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: JOVIS, 2010), 38. 51 52

Allen, “Landscape Infrastructure,” 38.

Pierre Bélanger, “Landscape as Infrastructure,” Landscape Journal 28, no. 1 (2009): 79–95. 53 54

Bélanger refers specifically to Allen on page 89.

This observation is based in my personal experience. In 2001, a curricular initiative I developed at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, The Mobile Studio, won numerous grants and teaching awards and was runner-up to be featured in an issue of Pamphlet (26), which focused on an alternative, infrastructurally focused research project, but I was often told these kinds of subjects were “not architecture.” When I first applied to the University of California, Los Angeles for my PhD, Dana Cuff was the only faculty in the architecture program who recognized the value of this topic as a design proposition. Urban planners, however, have been heavily invested in infrastructure since the beginning – for good and ill – so there was substantial support in planning for the pursuit of this kind of research. I have a PhD in planning instead of architecture partly because of architects’ historically myopic definitions of what “counts” in the field. I noted a rise in the number of programs and themed research studios around infrastructure in architecture schools beginning around 2008.

55 Joan Busquets, “Defining the Urbanistic Project: Ten Contemporary Approaches,” in Krieger and Saunders. 56

Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman, eds., Fast-Forward Urbanism: Rethinking Architecture’s Engagement with the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). 57

Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velikov, “Conduit Urbanism: Retooling Regional Ecologies of Energy and Mobility,” in Stoll and Lloyd. 58 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 34, 36. The essay is reprinted in “On Landscape Urbanism,” ed. Dean Almy and Michael Benedikt, CENTER 14 (Austin, TX: Center for American Architecture and Design, 2007);

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the text quoted appears on page 37 of the reprint.

59 60

Krauss, in “On Landscape Urbanism,” 38, 41.

InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office, “Formatting Contingency,” in Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, Pamphlet 30 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011).

61 Lateral Office (Mason White and Lola Sheppard), “New New Deal: Infrastructures on Life Support,” in Stoll and Lloyd, 58. 62

See numerous academic programs, including my own at Washington University in St. Louis, where the school or college of architecture encompasses landscape architecture and urban design degrees.

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02. reinventing INFRASTRUCTURe: why now? In the first decade of the 2000s, three coinciding crises prompted attention from architects, urban designers, and landscape architects toward infrastructure as untapped sites for the reinvention of the public realm: a series of tragic and highly visible infrastructure failures that exposed the fragility and obsolescence of our aging systems; an economic recession that simultaneously left tens of thousands of built environment design professionals unemployed and spurred a new (if woefully underfunded and underscaled) set of government investments; and mounting data further substantiating the expansive, interdependent, and rapidly approaching impacts of climate change in need of a response. In addition, a shift in the urbanism discourse away from the pessimism and cynicism of the neoliberal 1980s and 1990s set the stage for more optimistic, collaborative, and productive alternatives. New ways of thinking spatially about environmental and social challenges through the lens of design opened doors into re-engaging the challenges of urbanization. Landscape, Ecological, and Infrastructural Urbanism emerged as real strategies for urban revitalization that were more public and environmentally conscientious than the privatized, capital-focused approaches of the decades prior. The combination of these crises and circumstances marked the first decade of the new millennium as a turning point, a moment of infrastructural opportunity needing a creative

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response. Resulting design competitions capitalized on that moment, particularly cityLAB’s WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture, proving creative infrastructure reinvention projects possible, even if building these kinds of projects still proved challenging. Much has happened to move ideas that challenge status quo infrastructure solutions forward since then, but the perfect storm of the early 2000s set a dramatic stage for a long-overdue reinvention of infrastructure as the site of a new public realm envisioned by architects, landscape architects, and urban designers. THREE COLLIDING CRISES 1) Infrastructure Crisis: Collapse + Inequity + Underfunding The first decade of the new millennium was truly a disaster decade and brought the infrastructure crisis crashing into public consciousness. Large and seemingly unimaginable infrastructural catastrophes, such as the 2005 levee and floodwall failures following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Gulf Coast, the power outages that affected over fifty million residents of the northeastern and midwestern United States and Ontario, Canada, in August of 2003, and the collapse of the Minneapolis Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River during rushhour traffic in 2007, were visible and haunting proof of what Pat Choate and Susan Walter began telling Congress in the early 1980s: America’s infrastructure is in ruins, and the continued

dearth of investment in basic infrastructural systems threatens both the country’s economic health and its ability to maintain the quality of life residents have grown to expect.1 In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) rated the performance and capacity of our sixteen major infrastructural systems an average of D, a low point (though not by much) in the twenty years of their measuring up to that time. That year the biggest offenders were drinking water, inland waterways, levees, roads, and wastewater (all scoring D-); solid waste was the high scorer at C+. The rating was widely cited as proof of a pervasive and ignored slow crisis coming to a head. The vast majority of America’s infrastructure was – and still is – poorly maintained, obsolete, or failing. In 2009 we started to notice – and to realize that engineering solutions weren’t solving the complex crisis, only temporarily delaying its force and shifting its impacts. The ASCE’s 2017 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure rated the performance and capacity of our sixteen major infrastructural systems an average of D+, the same grade as in 2013 and up just slightly from 2009’s D rating.2 This grade indicates just how much of the country’s infrastructural systems are in unsatisfactory and potentially dangerous condition, approaching the end of their usable lives yet continuing to function under a high risk of failure that only worsens with time and increasing load. Of the sixteen categories analyzed, the lowest scorers in that report were transit (D-), along with aviation, dams, drinking water, inland waterways, levees, and roads (all Ds); only one system – rail – rated above a C+. The “cost to improve” America’s infrastructure more than doubled in those eight years, from $2.2 trillion in 2009 to $4.59 trillion in 2017, not to mention the cost to America in everything from lost wages and higher manufacturing expenses to car repair from sub-standard road surfaces and the health impacts of polluted water and air. The ASCE estimates that additional cost at $3,400 per year,

per family – or another $3.9 trillion by 2025.3 Like the uneven distribution of assets generally, the costs of failing infrastructure fall hardest to those least able to recover. The aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, went beyond proof of deferred maintenance and obsolescence to expose an additional, underlying social crisis. Conditions of decay and neglect, combined with the all-too-common condition of a city’s poorest residents occupying its most at-risk land, exposed a history of social and economic disparity many around the world thought impossible for the globe’s most advanced industrialized and democratic society. Residual effects, over fifteen years later, are still evident as once-vibrant neighborhoods remain gutted of residents and services. Resource bias and pervasive political corruption haven’t helped the situation.4 The Army Corps of Engineers is back in the Lower Ninth Ward, one of New Orleans’s most affected neighborhoods, with a canal project that benefits big industry but closes off evacuation routes for locals during years of construction. More than a decade after Hurricane Katrina, residents of Puerto Rico, clearly low in political priority, were without potable water and reliable power for eighteen months after Hurricanes Maria and Irma devastated the island; in 2020, that infrastructure is still subpar. Would results come more quickly to an area with wealthier, whiter residents? The answer, for nearly all of America’s existence, has been probably yes. Infrastructure inequity is widespread in contemporary cities, the result of entrenched dynamics that trace back far into history. Even cities like Los Angeles, with interspersed socioeconomic groups and a majority-minority racial and ethnic mix, illustrate the degree to which infrastructure biases can be hidden or covertly ingrained in the system. The Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles, founded in the mid-1990s, was born out of the fight to save funding for and expand access to bus service, which more commonly serves lowerincome residents and communities of color,

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in light of competing investment in light rail, which is tailored to more middle-class – though far fewer – riders. Mike Davis’s 1999 exposé on fire response in Los Angeles, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” investigated the inequitable level of investment dedicated to protecting, preserving, and rebuilding for the most affluent, often at the expense of the most at-risk. “Whether the issue is garbage collection, recreation, school crossing guards, street cleaning, library facilities or housing inspection, [the poor neighborhood of] Westlake is the city’s orphan,” Davis wrote two decades ago. 5 According to councilman Mike Hernandez, whose district suffered preventable loss of life and property due to negligence from landlords and city inspection agents while Malibu was heavily insured, well-protected, and repeatedly rebuilt, “[Westlake is] still light years away from per capita equality in city facilities or services.”6 This essay was resurrected in the fall of 2018 – equality still apparently light years away – when California experienced the worst wildfires in its history. Several small towns in Northern California were wiped out completely. When nearly a quarter of a million people were evacuated from Malibu, some homeowners hired private firefighters for added protection, dividing access to infrastructure even among the wealthiest and their neighbors. The infrastructural divide between the haves and have-nots – a slow and chronic crisis of generational spatial injustices – is pervasive and growing. Low-income neighborhoods often bear more of the costs of negative impacts and get fewer of the benefits of positive ones (otherwise known as “externalities”) due to generations of ingrained political favoritism, power dynamics, and manipulated real estate access and value. New data shows that neighborhoods that were “redlined” – deemed “hazardous” or high risk for bank loans due to the presence of Black, poor, or immigrant residents – before the practice was outlawed in 1968 have higher risk of illness from extreme heat and, in 2020, are witnessing higher rates of COVID-19 deaths

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than surrounding neighborhoods.7 Poisoned water, polluted air, and toxic soil in these neighborhoods are often the result of overexposure to the negative externalities of living adjacent to more highways, waste incinerators, heavy industry, and landfills than their wealthier counterparts. These exposures, in addition to a host of other factors, are partially responsible for shockingly wide disparities in life expectancy. In north St. Louis, which is predominantly African American and where 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, life expectancy can be up to seventeen years lower than in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods less than five miles west. These kinds of infrastructural inequities – limited or reduced access, insufficient or inconvenient choices, long periods of disruption or limbo, shallow or nonexistent community engagement, and high instances of negative externalities – may not have the media draw of catastrophes, but they are the slow-motion, chronic disasters that persist in the infrastructure landscape with disproportionate impact on communities of color. Another is the battle over funding. “We’ve had 18 short-term measures in the last five years. The cumulative effect of short-term measures is that the country is grinding to a halt,” said former US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in July 2014.8 Massive as they were, the disasters of the last twenty years – both slow and instantaneous – have not been enough to instigate truly formative action at the level of new federal investment. As Choate and Walter summarized in their 1983 publication America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure, the decline is a result of chronic underinvestment since the middle of the twentieth century, often exacerbated by what can only be called political negligence. At the time of their study, the national investment in public works had fallen 21 percent in the years between 1965 and 1977, while the population rose over 11 percent in that same time period.9 Per capita public works investment dropped from $198 to $140 annually, from a 4.1 percent share of GDP to a paltry 2.3 percent.10 In 2006, while we spent 3.8 percent on our vast

military arsenal, the percentage dedicated to our crumbling, supposedly life-sustaining infrastructure was barely over 1 percent of GDP; average expenditures between 2010 and 2015 ranked the US twelfth in the world in percentage of GDP dedicated to infrastructure, just below Mexico and with roughly one quarter of China’s proportional expenditure.11 As Choate and Walter noted, even while the initial 42,500 miles of interstate highways were just being completed in the late seventies and early eighties, 2,000 miles each year already needed reconstructing.12 Funded primarily by the federal gas tax (which is both stuck at the 1992 rate and dropping in total revenue as fuel efficiency improves), commitment regularly falls short in covering national road expenses. In nearly forty years, little has changed. The shortterm measures former Secretary Foxx refers to in the quote above are the all-too-common federal budget Band-Aids aimed at keeping the Highway Trust Fund from imminent insolvency. Though this stopgap measure in 2014 saved nearly 100,000 construction projects spread across every state in the US, last-minute solutions make for inefficient and piecemeal planning – and untenable political irresponsibility. Choate and Walter blamed fragmentation in Congress among competing committees and a failure by the executive branch of the federal government to compel higher levels of investment for the state of the country’s infrastructure. They laid out the monumental risk to quality of life and productivity that these gaps engendered and urged Congress to prioritize strategic and efficient plans to reverse the trend of deterioration. America in Ruins expounds specific recommendations, including a call for an inventory of infrastructural needs and budgetary impacts; a capital budget that responds to those needs, from pre-construction through to maintenance and operating costs; reforms in administrative procedures that bring improved transparency and efficiency and reduce delays and corruption; and guidelines for allocating

responsibilities at each level of government – all in the service, ultimately, of economic renewal and growth.13 Fulfilling one of Choate and Walter’s mandates, the first version of an ASCE-like report on infrastructure was published in February 1988 by the National Council on Public Works Improvement (NCPWI), a result of Senate Bill 1330: the Public Works Improvement Act of 1984.14 Called Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works, the NCPWI’s report found convincing evidence that the quality of America’s infrastructure is barely adequate to fulfill current requirements, and insufficient to meet the demands of future economic growth and development. And unless we dramatically enhance the capacity and performance of the nation’s public works, our generation will forfeit its place in the American tradition of commitment to the future. Without such an effort, our legacy will be modest at best. At worst, we will default on our obligation to the future, and succeeding generations will have to compensate for our failures.15 The first average of the initial eight criteria measured in 1988 was a C-. We may now be keeping track of what is out there, but in over thirty years of assessment, we haven’t yet compensated for these failures. Approaching the 2020 census, the US population is over 330 million and the federal-level investment in infrastructure has dropped to an unprecedented .5 percent of GDP.16 Such an emergency state – one we now know has been quietly sustained for well over four decades – creates a simultaneously panicked and resigned attitude around infrastructural spending as almost a necessary evil of the modernized condition. Though both Democrats and Republicans regularly wield the ASCE’s statistics as ammunition for infrastructure spending, and it is often cited as one of the few issues that should find easy bipartisan support, progress has been miniscule, regardless of who is in charge.

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2) Environmental Crisis In addition to the ongoing physical, economic, and social crises revolving around infrastructure outlined above, a new environmental crisis came to the fore in the early 2000s, with greater emphasis on climate change and greater focus on personal and professional responsibility. The last decade of the twentieth century became a particularly significant one for the environmental crisis globally after the publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987. Officially the Report on the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, the Brundtland Report established the concept of sustainable development and its accompanying definition: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”17 This definition is often equated with the larger concept of sustainability and has become the de facto description of what it means for cities to grow with social and environmental conscientiousness in mind. The Brundtland Report, produced collaboratively under a United Nations task force of twenty-one countries, made a powerful contribution by instigating global cognizance around climate crisis and calling attention to resource limitations as well as spatial and generational interdependency. In addition to that seminal definition of sustainable development, the Brundtland Report also established several critical positions shifting the conversation around cities and sustainability, namely: that resources are not infinite, but limited; that progress is globally interdependent, requiring multilateral cooperation to raise living standards in underdeveloped nations while challenging excesses in developed ones; and that environmental and social concerns are interrelated and inseparable from questions of economic growth. Though what is now considered the threelegged stool or the triple bottom line of sustainability – economic growth, environmental

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protection, and social equity – is evident in the document, the predominance of economic growth is embedded in the emphasis on development as the globe’s default, and preferred, direction. Efforts to impose limitations on that growth conflicted with the neoliberal policies of conservative powers rising in the 1980s and 1990s in the US and United Kingdom that, above all else, were based on assumptions that free market processes resulted in the “highest and best” allocation for resources (meaning the most profitable) and that economic growth, often through “business-friendly” policies like tax incentives or lax regulations on pollution, should be the primary aim of government. This conflict of ambitions, which intensified the pessimism of the era, left eviscerated cities and design professionals struggling to intervene. After the turn of the millennium, though, this environmental crisis spurred a new era of widespread response. Unlike the 1970s environmental movement in the US, which was a direct response to the trigger of gasoline shortages, polluting corporations, and the opportunities presented by specific technologies like solar panels, this new generation of environmentalism is more integrated into the practices of daily life, local on the one hand – characterized by practices such as urban agriculture and community gardening, water harvesting, material reuse and recycling, bike commuting, and demand for walkability – and global on the other, with rising pressure to consider the environmental costs of supply chains, e-waste, and the plights of climate refugees and sea-level rise. The dominant modes of architecture and architecture-as-urbanism during postmodernism and after could no longer solve these kinds of problems; objects were not the answer, complex and cooperating systems and cities are. Such passive and integrated efforts at sustainability were triggered not only by the popularization of climate change consciousness through the distribution of Al Gore’s easily digestible 2006 Academy Award–win-

ning film, An Inconvenient Truth, and its subsequent climate change–education roadshow, but also through a younger population’s growing awareness and activism. Policies outlawing plastic bags and zero-waste recycling efforts on college campuses were part of this design generation’s norm, as was Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), launched in 2000 as a points-based evaluation system for buildings. Despite its shortcomings (for one, it can prioritize good metrics over good design), LEED has popularized and quantified sustainability as an added value to design, and, through LEED certification, tied design professionals to some marketable measure of sustainability knowledge and execution. LEED (and, later, LEED for Neighborhood Development, or LEED ND), were part of a wider trend of metrics systems – BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method), STAR (Sustainability Tools for Assessing and Rating) Communities, and EcoDistricts, among others – that take into account a range of criteria beyond the performance of autonomous objects and energy efficiency. Assessment frameworks like STAR (2009) helped institutionalize competitive rankings among cities in addition to goal-setting within cities, pitting some less-endowed twoor three-star cities against wealthier and more progressive competitors. The substantiation of sustainability as a quantifiable value, including economic studies that showed related market improvements and cost-savings in healthcare, helped green-leaning mayors like Michael Bloomberg of New York (2002–2013) and Richard M. Daley of Chicago (1989–2011) support rapid expansion of bike programming and green roofs, respectively, to take just two examples. More importantly, these kinds of initiatives increased the attractiveness of cities to mobile millennials and others interested in a greener lifestyle, making them more possible as they became more profitable. Since Brundtland, the Intergovernmental Panel

Modeling interdependent infrastructural sectors. Derived from the Department of Energy report Climate Change and Infrastructure, Urban Systems, and Vulnerabilities, 2014.

on Climate Change (IPCC) has produced a series of data-driven reports under the United Nations Environmental Program and World Meteorological Organization intended to collect the most up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge around the impacts of climate change. The first IPCC report was published in 1990; the fourth, in 2007, specifically linked climate change impacts with policies focused on sustainable development, adaptation, and mitigation. In 2007, the IPCC and Gore won a joint Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, creating a combined professional and populist moment for the environmental movement. This, too, was a moment for optimism. In 2014, the United States Department of Energy released a report called Climate Change and Infrastructure, Urban Systems, and Vulnerabilities, which took an expansive look at the crises in dangerous collision.18 New in that report was the emphasis on cross-sectoral infrastructure codependencies (diagram, above),

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revealing the exponentially larger impact any single system breakage actually has on the expanded web of life support – what Critical Infrastructure Protection approaches call the “system of systems problem.”19 A power outage is not just a power outage, but can also disrupt water, health, transportation, agriculture, and emergency services. Software originally developed by the Department of Homeland Security to better prepare for terrorist attacks is now being applied to analysis of these kinds of cascading failures in an effort to increase systems resilience. And good thing, because the 2018 IPCC report is the most dire yet, suggesting that previously anticipated impacts of greenhouse gases were far underestimated, and that agreed-upon carbon emission limits intended to keep rising temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius will be exceeded within the next decade and a half. Regardless of the antagonism of climate change deniers and anti-environmentalists at large (including highlevel federal politicians), mayors, progressive governors, private industry, nonprofits, and corporations have stepped in to fill the gap. People like the one-woman army of young Greta Thunberg – the Swedish climate activist who began a school strike in 2018, at the age of 15, to protest the lack of climate change action by global governments – have since given impassioned speeches at venues including the UN Climate Action Summit, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the World Economic Forum, inspiring a new generation to be even louder and more committed to reversing the course of environmental destruction. 3) Economic Collapse The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was part of a larger effort by the Obama administration to create a short-term public works program along with a long-lasting, dedicated Infrastructure Bank as a response to 2008’s Great Recession and the economic pressures of rising unemployment. Those shaping

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the ARRA also claimed to take into account the persistent need to compensate for the decades of extreme neglect of infrastructure and capitalize on a moment of bipartisan political will. It took this additional crisis in the disaster decade – an economic recession triggered by dubious investments in the housing market, among other financial missteps by institutions “too big to fail” – to unearth the recommendations of Choate and Walter and again demand attention from the federal government to reinvest in the country’s public works. Intended also as a general economic stimulus and job creation package, much of the ARRA funding, per political demands, went directly to manufacturing and construction jobs, and even more – almost $300 billion – to tax cuts. Where the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s and 1940s employed thousands of artists and designers in addition to laborers, educators, and engineers in a wide range of cultural and social projects, the ARRA was hamstrung by its comparatively small budget and the stubborn politics of the day. Of the ARRA’s $787 billion total spent, the $150 billion designated for infrastructure seemed barely big enough to make a dent in existing operations and maintenance gaps, much less help imagine a projective future. In an effort to inject funding quickly into the system, these dollars were targeted toward “shovel-ready” projects – those tasks, like filling potholes, paving, and fixing bridges, that met the most egregious and immediate needs and were already in line for funding. Yet a spark of ambition, a hint of infrastructural optimism, was evident in the Obama administration’s efforts. In addition to the ARRA funding stream, President Obama created the White House Office of Urban Affairs, the first executive department dedicated specifically to cities. A new collaborative initiative among Housing and Urban Development (HUD, led for the first time by an architect), the Department of Transportation (DOT), and the Environmental Protection Agency, called the Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities (IPSC), represented an unprecedented cross-agency cooperation,

and a dedication to examining the interconnectivity of development patterns, climate, and mobility. The IPSC created the “U.S. Livability Initiative,” with a mission to support infrastructure and other investments that addressed both climate change and social inequity, specifically targeting neighborhoods and communities.20 As the ARRA funds were distributed, some of the sustainability goals endured. That $150 billion was spread widely between transportation, water, sewage, public lands, government buildings, information technology, and energy. Then Vice President Joe Biden, who was administering the program, put out a report in September of 2010 that listed “100 Recovery Projects That Are Changing America.” He highlighted a surge in electric car-battery plants (providing 20 percent rather than 2 percent capacity of the needed supply, with ARRA’s help), wind farms, energy conservation efforts, clean energy technology, and support for “the world’s largest solar plant.”21 In addition to core infrastructure projects like roads and bridges, ARRA spending included pollution mitigation, broadband expansion, and renovation and restoration work – even in small amounts – distributed throughout the country. What it did not include much of was the art and architectural investment of the original WPA, particularly investment in the public sphere. Perhaps ironically, now President Biden has a chance for a second go at getting infrastructure spending big and bold – and public – enough to really matter. His emerging $2 trillion plan still tackles the necessities, but also aims to address climate change impacts head on and infill gaping, inequitable gaps starting with housing, child care, education, and highspeed internet access. The economic crisis that spurred the ARRA turned into the Great Recession, which ultimately defined the global financial landscape of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Massive development projects were halted midstream, changing the shape of cities and patterns of work within a matter of months. One aspect of the recession

was the widespread loss of jobs in design and construction, topping out at 12 percent job loss for architecture and engineering – around 178,000 jobs – and over 28 percent for construction workers.22 Stalls and layoffs meant dormant talent, waiting for projects to be resuscitated, had time and energy to pursue side projects or opt for alternative ventures. Designers, particularly those keen to redirect resources to more socially and environmentally productive cities, saw an opportunistic moment to reinsert an architectural vision into the urban mix. As in other historical moments when latent design energy focused on pressing generational dilemmas, this combination of crises and time created fertile soil for speculative thinking. THREE EVOLUTIONS 4) New Forms of Activism What made these kinds of projects seem possible after 2000 – and what had made them all but impossible before – were changing priorities in both the profession of architecture and the urbanism discourse, particularly the reckoning with architecture’s potential role in social and environmental urban activism. The end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first brought a modernized version of environmental awareness, mentioned earlier, and a new focus by design professionals on problems of social inequity. Though passionately led academic-based community design centers (CDCs) and hands-on design-build models, including Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee and D. K. Ruth’s incomparable Rural Studio, had played a role in low-income communities nationwide for decades, Architecture for Humanity (AFH), founded in 1999 by Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr, upped the social scope of the global mission of design altruism and, in turn, the scale of its impact. AFH turned the effort from a volunteer house-building or local pro-bono model into high quality, high visibility design opportunities

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aimed at intervening in social and humanitarian crises at the systemic scale. Their first competition focused on housing in Kosovo for returning refugees; their second was for a mobile HIV/ AIDS clinic in sub-Saharan Africa. This 2002 competition garnered interest from 530 teams across fifty countries. In 2006, Sinclair won the TED Prize, a $100,000 award that he used to launch the first ever global open source platform for humanitarian design work. At the same time, descendants from the Rural Studio and other programs of that ilk were carrying on the Mockbee ethos. Design Like You Give a Damn, a collection of AFH-supported projects published in 2006, and Bryan Bell’s edited volumes Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service through Architecture, published in 2004, and Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, published with Katie Wakeford in 2008, brought broader awareness to the quest for design excellence across more inclusive social and economic lines. Before Occupy Wall Street demanded economic rights for the other 99 percent, activist architects demanded professional designers work harder to reach the underserved 98 percent.23 Unlike the single object or neighborhoodfocused work that often typified previous design altruism, the new-millennium model channeled design innovation toward large-scale inclusive and collaborative problem solving, particularly towards dilemmas grounded in infrastructural disparities, like clean water access, sanitation, and human health. For example, PITCH : AFRICA, founded in 2007 (see pages 74-77), is a transportable, permeable soccer field also used to harvest and store rainwater for distribution. Tucked beneath the bleachers are classrooms and community spaces which double as health clinics. These clinics provide testing and treatment for HIV-infected women, women who might otherwise not seek treatment because of stigma or inconvenience, yet can covertly receive medical attention while collecting water and attending matches. A second example, MIT’s Senseable City Lab, founded in 2004 by Professor Carlo Ratti, mines

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real-time information and digital technologies to read urban patterns and project data-driven design solutions exploring issues like e-waste, emergency response, water quality, traffic congestion, trash, and human health. Unlike their predecessors, this new generation of design activism is more global in reach; recognizes the integrated nature of social, economic, and spatial injustices; uses data more strategically than ever before to make design decisions; and attacks infrastructural issues in particular with ingenuity and entrepreneurialism. 5) Demonstration Projects In skeptical arenas like public agencies, the ability to entertain new models often relies on proof of concept. Though Boston’s Big Dig, the first and largest attempt to erase the scars of urban highways, was in many ways disastrous (it was years late and millions over budget, and just as the project was nearing completion, material failures led to a death from falling debris), it proved the possibility of mega-scale, against-all-political-and-economic-odds reinvention. If the Big Dig can happen, what else can? New York City under Mayor Bloomberg was an expansive test ground. Nearly four hundred miles of new bike lanes and dozens of pop-up parks demonstrated – through increased economic activity, enhanced safety, and expanded usership of the public realm – that even the most aggressively protected vehicular space can be successfully renegotiated. Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013, Janette Sadik-Kahn, proved through a series of temporary project strategies that one way to change the system is to change the process. The transformation of Times Square (see right), a space notoriously dangerous for pedestrians and fiercely protected by drivers and business owners resistant to new ideas, ended up a particularly huge success. A plan that started in 2008 with temporary street closures and traffic light readjustments, the “battle of Times Square” really kicked off on the eve of Memorial Day 2009, when the city created a pedestrian-only public zone with orange traffic barrels and 376 $10.74 beach chairs; painted

Above: Times Square reconstruction, New York City, Architecture and landscape design, Snøhetta, 2017 Images: Before image (left) by NYC DOT: after image (right) © Michael Grimm Below: Tactical Urbanism pop-up planned and implemented by New York Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn prior to the Snøhetta redesign, 2009. Images: Linda C. Samuels, 2010

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polka dots identified newly car-free space over that summer. This reclaiming of Broadway for pedestrian activity was first tested for a few hundred thousand dollars over a few months’ time – a fraction of the usual cost and schedule of such massive changes. Safety for drivers and pedestrians, flow of traffic, and real estate values all improved, the first two substantiated by data gathered from taxi drivers themselves. This pilot project ultimately led to a permanent 2½-acre plaza designed by Snøhetta. “Top/up” models (where bottom-up guerrilla tactics are adopted by top-down formal agencies) for fast, strategic urban intervention have now spread around the world. These experiences in New York carried over to Sadik-Kahn’s leadership at the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), which has been instrumental in providing models for public street use that incorporate a breadth of modalities and green utilities (presented in user-friendly diagrams and language) and have become an alternative paradigm to the historically rigid regulations of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the engineers taught to abide strictly by them. No project has more fully capitalized on the untapped resource of obsolete infrastructure than New York’s High Line (see pages 28–29 and 66). In 2008, when researching resources to share with future competition entrants, the WPA 2.0 organizers recognized that the High Line, lower Manhattan’s now famously renovated abandoned elevated train line, was one of few projects of its type – infrastructural, multifunctional, interdisciplinary, strategic, sustainable, public, and beautifully designed – moving toward actual implementation. Though still a set of conceptual drawings at the time, the collaboration between the architecture and landscape disciplines and the designers’ representational techniques, which spanned species and time frames to conjure an “agri-tecture” of flexibility and slowness, exhibited a unique kind of synthesis between spatial and ecological systems that both preserved the original train trellis and entirely transformed it. The first segment of the project opened to the public in

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Above: NL Architects, WOS 8: rendering with sign, bird habitat, and basketball court (left) and climbing wall / sign (right), 2006. Images: Rendering by NL Architects; photo by Daria Scagliola / Stijn Brakkee Left: NL Architects, A8ernA: rendering, images, and site plan showing multifunctionality, including retail, transit, recreation, public art, and public space connecting the two sides of the city previously split by the highway, 2006. Images: Site plan (bottom) and rendering (top) by NL Architects; middle photo by Luuk Kramer; bottom photo by Jeroen Musch

2009. Wildly popular, this transformation ultimately had a drastic effect on the surrounding neighborhood – for good and ill. Other demonstration projects completed in these same years cross-pollinated agriculture, energy, recreation, and habitat systems. WORKac won the prestigious MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program in 2008 with their proposal PF1 (Public Farm 1), which hybridized farming, public space, electrical generation, water harvesting, and an urban market with hyperlocalized, micro-civic space. Far from New York, some of the best examples were projects by Dutch firm NL Architects, like WOS 8 (above), a heat transfer station in Utrecht that uses the wastewater of heat generation to supply hot water to 11,000 residents in the surrounding neighborhood. The project is playfully public, designed as “the Village Square wrapped around a Box”: basketball court, climbing wall, bird habitat, material expression, and architectural sign in addition to energy producer. 24 At the

time, only a few built projects met the criteria of active infrastructure and innovative architecture combined in ways that reinvented the public realm. WPA 2.0 called for that bolder vision and used these demonstration projects as aspirational proof of possibility. 6) Changes in the Urbanism Discourse There was a radical shift of mood in the United States around the turn of the millennium. Ronald Reagan’s presidency, from 1981 to 1989, had cemented the rise of neoliberal economic policies latent in previous administrations in an effort to spur economic growth through smaller government and so-called “trickle-down economics” – the belief that increasing wealth at the top eventually makes its way down from CEOs to workers (though time and again this has been proven ineffective). Reduced taxes and widespread deregulation of financial markets and various utilities (garbage collection, air travel, and trucking, among others) were intended to open up

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James Corner Field Operations, High Line competition concept board, 2004

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competition and increase growth. But reduction of taxes and commitment to policies of unrestricted free market capitalism essentially gutted public services and the public realm, resulting in massive underfunding of affordable housing and rent subsidies, mental health services, Medicaid, food stamps, and other public support. The combination of lower taxes at the top and fewer services at the bottom, along with an abusively low minimum wage, exacerbated the already-growing wealth divide. The reduction of social services also contributed to a rise in homelessness, which was itself at odds with an increasingly privatized public realm. With nowhere else to live, sidewalks, parks, and plazas become the last best option.

By the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, a set of alternative urbanisms were emerging as responses to the collective traumas of twentieth-century development and increasing awareness of their social and environmental ramifications (see Chapter 1 for the more expansive lineage). New considerations of the city as a complex and adaptable ecology, responsive to informal as well as formal economies and structured (or intentionally unstructured) for fluid programming and a multifarious public, brought new theories of urbanism to bear on its thinking and production. In the first decade after 2000, the loose field of urban design entered into a heightened moment of annexation and self-evaluation.

The urban condition of this time was divergent. On the one hand, suburbs were growing into exurbs and polycentric megalopoli. Joel Garreau’s Edge City: Life on the New Frontier described a sprawling, generic condition of office parks, condominiums, and highways with little discernibility between Atlanta and its satellites and Phoenix or Dallas and theirs. On the other hand, the city itself was becoming more privatized, thematized, sterilized, and militarized. Midnight sprinkler activation, divided benches, and pigeon spikes began to appear to keep people from sleeping in public space. One Rouse waterfront development looked just like all the others, down to the same chain restaurants and clothing stores. Privately owned public spaces (POPS, which became widely known during the Occupy Wall Street movement) were a real estate deal that greatly favored the advantages of private development while many of the pseudo-public spaces they provided in return were often locked, patrolled, or limited access. Together, these conditions defined the postmodern city, a place that felt universally homogeneous, with few unique characteristics and even less human diversity. What it had in abundance was the scent of growth and wealth, and a kind of cynicism where profit was all that mattered.

A slew of exhibitions, events, and publications marked the ebullience of the moment. A rash of seminal texts emerged in this narrow time period announcing a range of “Urbanisms” – New Urbanism (2000), Everyday Urbanism (1999), and Landscape Urbanism (1999, 2006); all took different design directions but claimed to respond to the stubborn persistence of rampant sprawl and the remnants of totalizing, positivistic, and monumental strategies of modernism.25 Landscape and Everyday Urbanism, either directly or indirectly, also took on the commercial, thematized, sanitized, and militarized strategies that defined the “death of public space”, which New Urbanism, in other ways, exacerbated.26 New Urbanism, though, particularly attacked dehumanizing scalelessness and fought, in theory, against the kind of isolation and sensory deprivation identified as symptomatic of the dead public realm. The combined rise of the right to the city movement, a commitment to environmentally performative urbanism, and a new industry around placemaking and walkability created a set of urban antidotes in the 2000s to the pessimism of the 1980s and 1990s. This shift in the discourse and practice of designing cities and their systems, explored much more fully in the first chapter of this book, contributed to a new moment of optimism.

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CAPITALIZING ON THE PERFECT STORM: WPA 2.0 AND NEXT GENERATION INFRASTRUCTURE In 2009, the directors of UCLA’s urban think tank, cityLAB, saw these colliding conditions as an opportunity to provide a platform for designers to reimagine their relationships with cities and infrastructure. 27 cityLAB director Dana Cuff and codirector Roger Sherman identified this moment as a “perfect storm” – bringing together the three crises of infrastructure, economics, and environment, plus a rekindling of government investment combined with a surplus of creative talent and an opportunity to reclaim the “public” in public works. The competition sought innovative design-based solutions that “explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor, but as a robust design opportunity to strengthen communities and revitalize cities” with an emphasis on “design ideas that exploit the opportunity for such solutions to be leveraged, through nested scales of thinking, into strategies that catalyze a larger and more visible public benefit.”28 The competition brief asked, What could a WPA for the twenty-first century look like if architects, landscape architects, and urban designers took the lead? Twenty-three countries and over half of US states were represented in the entering teams. The 327 professional and student submissions to the competition, by 850 total team members, are a rich archive of data and ideas that captured a moment when a substantial group of designers turned their attention to questions of urban performance and environmental sustainability. The proposals showed the potential of a design-based revolution where infrastructure at every scale could become an instrumental part of the public realm. The accompanying web exhibition cross-referenced the proposals into searchable categories: water management, stormwater, energy, recreation and public space, mobility and accessibility, wastewater/ graywater, education/childcare, potable water, solid waste, government, and food production

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and distribution. 29 Assessments of the work noted overall trends and patterns.30 Combinations of water in all its forms – reclamation, storage, and reuse – with renewable energy generation and urban agriculture featured most prominently in the professional entries; student teams added an emphasis on reimagining roadways and transit. Projects generally fell into four types of strategies: reinvention, recycling, revitalizing, and restructuring. 31 Reinvention proposals called for innovative conceptualization of previously nonexistent forms of infrastructure, prompted by either new technologies or the conversion of practices or components not previously considered infrastructural. These entries considered services such as the Internet of Things, cloud storage, and widespread Wi-Fi and device charging as a growing part of the public realm. Recycling proposals found new purposes for abandoned or obsolete structures or facilities, for example water towers transformed into urban nodes or parks into farms. Revitalization projects incorporated dramatic adaptive reuse, evolving single-purpose infrastructure into multipurpose, potentially even symbiotic versions of their former selves. Proposals that reimagine the US-Mexico border wall as a solar producer or water harvester represented this type of radical revitalization. Lastly, restructuring projects often disaggregated megaprojects into multipart solutions, as with thousands of public toilets converting greywater into aquafuel or enlisting unused suburban pools as rainwater harvesting devices and reservoirs. Each of the six finalist teams explored a large concept then tested it through one or more site-specific applications. 32 Their proposals modeled both the ability to create widely applicable prototypes and notable expansions of performative capacity. Most projects identified invisible opportunities within current conditions, finding ways either to tap into the flow of an existing system for higher gains or to turn a waste by-product into a usable resource. In

every case, monofunctional infrastructures were converted to multifunctional ones, often serving both civic and environmental services in addition to their more pragmatic delivery functions. Some projects, like Local Code: Real Estates (Nicholas de Monchaux and collaborators), directly confronted the rigidity of most infrastructure by building in a mechanism for neighborhood input, allowing public space to be adapted over time as needs and conditions change. Border Wall as Infrastructure (Rael San Fratello), a proposal for programmatically thickening the US-Mexico border wall, leveraged an exorbitant federal investment (over $1,300 per linear foot) by turning a high-cost, militaristic symbol into a playful and productive social commentary, imagining thirty better ways the wall could give back. Coupling Infrastructures: Water Economies/ Ecologies (Lateral Office / InfraNet Lab) recognized the funding challenge of such widespread reinvention and extracted potential new markets integrated with human and nonhuman ecologies from their revitalization of the Salton Sea. Expansion of the public realm was a critical aspect in all of the finalist projects; Carbon T.A.P. // Tunnel Algae Park (PORT) reimagined the program of public space far beyond green space and recreation to a thick infrastructure of alternative transit, wildlife habitat, and – the project driver – algae farming and biofuel production from waste CO2 captured from cars in tunnels beneath the water. Each project reverberates in the city or region beyond its immediate site with potential for widespread economic, environmental, or social impacts that would contribute to its larger value. None of the projects is easily categorized as architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, or planning. Instead, they are better understood as hybrids that borrow liberally from a variety of methodologies, epistemologies, and practices; to be implemented, each would require collaboration among numerous agencies and across budget, power, and jurisdictional silos. These next generation solutions are integrated with their context rather than segregated and autonomous; multi-, not mono-

functional; and more flexible than fixed. Rather than responding to narrow pragmatic engineering needs with efficiency as the highest priority, next generation solutions must answer more complex challenges, often with less funding. From analysis of the proposals came a set of criteria that show how next generation infrastructure must differ from last generation versions. These criteria can be operationalized at multiple scales in a vast range of conditions. Their value should not be assessed in standard metrics alone, like budgetary dollars spent, but in the larger, exponential results, both quantitative and qualitative, compounded by the way next generation projects work symbiotically across systems and types of systems and create preventative as well as additive benefits. The original seven criteria were derived from the study of the WPA 2.0 competition entries; four more were added as a result of extended research and testing in studio projects (see pages 70–71). Though certainly related to multifunctionality, infrastructural symbiosis – where systems form mutually beneficial relationships to reduce waste – requires greater cross-agency collaboration but can yield exponentially more prodigious results. This physical interconnection of multiple systems (also called bundling) can range from simple to complex, the most straightforward being co-location, where spatially compatible programs, like solar panels in the highway right-of-way, sit adjacent to one another on shared property. Adaptive bundling is where a single piece of infrastructure changes over time as conditions or needs demand. But the most productive – and the eighth criterion – is bundling that is symbiotic, also called cogenerative, where the waste of one system is directly used as the fuel for another.33 WPA 2.0 competition winner, Carbon T.A.P., exemplifies symbiotic infrastructure, as does NL Architects’ WOS 8. Many new green infrastructure projects integrate natural and synthetic systems symbiotically, taking pressure off of both by more closely mimicking nature’s original processes.

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NEXT GENERATION INFRASTRUCTURE IS: 1. MULTIFUNCTIONAL It capitalizes on overlapping spatial and economic investment to accomplish many things at once; it is a hybrid of multiple activities or uses and recognizes the inefficiencies in monofunctional, isolated systems.

2. PUBLIC It is the new public realm, where public life happens, not just where public tax dollars are spent. Next generation infrastructure supports inclusivity, engagement, and difference.

3. VISIBLE In next gen infrastructure, resource consumption and infrastructural processes are made visible to promote accountability and acknowledge responsibility for personal consumption and collective needs.

4. SOCIALLY PRODUCTIVE Next gen infrastructure increases rather than decreases equity by providing amenities, opportunities, and environmental enhancements across economic and social strata while more equitably distributing negative externalities. Socially productive processes also distribute power to existing residents for grassroots decision-making.

5. LOCALLY SPECIFIC, FLEXIBLE, AND ADAPTABLE Next gen infrastructure recognizes the need to change over time and place, to adapt to people and technology, and to do so with community- and site-specificity in mind. It is particularly sensitive to rising threats of climate change and the need to increase community resiliency.

6. SENSITIVE TO THE ECO-ECONOMY Next gen infrastructure is environmentally as well as economically conscientious. It prioritizes strategies of reuse, recycling, revitalization, or reinvention to expand the life of latent investment and preserve historical value.

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7. DRIVEN BY DESIGN It recognizes infrastructure as space shaped for human occupation with consideration of scale, materiality, phenomenology, program, tectonics, and aesthetics; Projects may serve as design tests, experiments, prototypes, or demonstrations for longer-term or various site-specific adaptation.

8. SYMBIOTIC It capitalizes on relationships between infrastructural components to make the most of inputs and outputs by finding positive interdependencies that turn one system’s by-products into another system’s fuel, therefore reducing resource use and waste. Symbiosis incorporates both synthetic and natural systems, recognizing the cooperative benefits and redistributing pressure on existing systems.

9. TECHNOLOGICALLY SMART It uses the best and newest technology to improve system functionality, performance, safety, and access by using data to increase intelligence and operability, particularly in service of the other next gen criteria.

10. DEVELOPED COLLABORATIVELY ACROSS DISCIPLINES AND AGENCIES Next gen infrastructure works across silos to locate new opportunities for more creative solutions. It incorporates interdisciplinary thinking that capitalizes on multiple skillsets, methods, and paradigms to create solutions that find what’s possible rather than what’s probable.

11. OPERATIONAL AT BOTH MICRO AND MACRO SCALES SIMULTANEOUSLY Its systems are unrestricted by history and expectation in terms of scale; they exist at a multitude of scales simultaneously, accommodating an array of contingencies, increasing resilience and adaptability, and providing opportunities for symbiosis at numerous levels.

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Hillary Brown calls this “infrastructural ecology,” and it is exemplified in Kalundborg Symbiosis (see pages 78–81), an eco-industrial park where multiple industries co-locate to share wastes and fuels with an aim of net-zero water, energy, and economic systems. Symbiotic relationships often require collaboration across agencies and disciplines, breaking down historically stubborn silos. In the coming age of autonomous hyperloops and the Internet of Everything, smart systems, criterion number eight, seem a base requirement for next gen infrastructure. Technology now monitors a range of infrastructural scales and types, from the structural deficiencies of bridges over time to the user patterns and geographic fences set on shared electric scooters. When Anthony Foxx, Secretary of Transportation in the Obama administration, announced the $50 million Smart City Challenge in 2015, it signified that even “one of the crustiest, stodgiest sectors in America” – the federal Department of Transportation – recognized the need to get up to speed on technology.34 This has only grown as micromobility corporations, government agencies, and data companies like Google band together to map out trips, link ticketing, and consolidate payment options (and, of course, sell stuff). Predictive infrastructure (the on-time arrival of an autonomous pod at the end of a train trip) or digital tracking and programming (the home thermostat that turns up automatically when the car is thirty minutes away, the phone that glows red when a contagious person is nearby) pinpoint needs and threats, in the service – and at the risk, too – of both individual and collective comfort. Infrastructure that is flexible, adaptable, and local is rarely monolithic. The need to work at micro and macro scales simultaneously, and across short and long spans of time, is critical to maintain fluidity and absorb complexity. Pierre Bélanger talks about the telescopic and the stratified, a kind of zooming in and out, sliding across scales, that increase a system’s ability to handle

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greater levels of complexity.35 Micro and macro do not refer only to small and large interventions in the city. Micro operations can be pilots or prototypes, that are then widely dispersed to have large territorial impacts. Macro interventions can cover composite sites but have contained influence. Working across scales simultaneously expands the degree to which systems can operate cooperatively and fluidly; redundancy increases the capacity for resilience and responsiveness in radically changing conditions. PERFECT STORM As further evidence of this perfect storm moment, cityLAB and our 327 competitor teams weren’t the only architects looking at next generation infrastructure in 2008 and 2009. The Future Initiatives program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the Architect’s Newspaper sponsored their own competition, “A New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for Los Angeles,” encouraged in part by the multibillion-dollar Measure R half-cent sales tax for transit approved by Los Angeles voters in 2008. The SCI-Arc competition and jury deliberation, like the WPA 2.0 workshops and symposium that accompanied the competition, succeeded in bringing together agency officials, transportation engineers, community developers, mobility researchers, urban planners, urban designers, and architects to discuss a future for transit that might look and operate very differently from earlier systems. The Architect’s Newspaper California editor, Sam Lobell, observed, The fruitful exchange of knowledge made clear that limiting expertise and political power to small bubbles of influence is the biggest roadblock to effectively transforming our transit systems. Our world doesn’t work that way anymore. If all parties keep their creative ideas to themselves, then innovation will be stifled, and without coordination, implementation will be a disaster.36 Conversation among the jurors instigated by

the seventy-five entries played out some of the consternation regarding architects working urbanistically, disciplinary boundaries among architects, landscape architects, planners, and urban designers all the more contested when considering fresh infrastructural territory. Jurors with experience implementing urban proposals, like Cecilia Estolano, then CEO of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (now CRA/LA), critiqued the economic naivete of proposals that might not fully comprehend the city as a complex system of production, distribution, and accumulation. Gail Goldberg, Director of Planning for the City of Los Angeles at the time, championed the power of neighborhood pilot projects, a top/up urbanism strategy that has since grown in success and visibility, particularly after Janette Sadik-Kahn’s tests in Times Square and other sites hostile to change.37 But Thom Mayne slammed the community scale, arguing that, particularly in LA, it is the large, unwieldy, and expanding “organism” of growing numbers of people and vast expanses of space, that must be solved, a social and political problem not typically “in the consciousness of an American architect.”38 In fact, though, urbanism has entered the consciousness of architects more and more, and competitions like these, along with Mayne’s Culture Now and Suprastudio programs, are part of renegotiating disciplinary relationships from inside schools of architecture.

including Maurice Cox, then at the National Endowment for the Arts; Casey Jones, lead for the General Services Administration Design Excellence Program; David Burney, from the New York City Department of Design and Construction; and Julia Anastasio, from the American Public Works Association – advocated for the importance of connecting design professionals with government-level implementation. The bottom line was activism. To be part of the polis, they argued, designers must engage in the political. The projects themselves were well-received at the time, and the architects, landscape architects, and urban designers involved continue the trajectories jump-started by the WPA 2.0 competition. Their initial proposals and the way they exemplify the next generation criteria are included here. Their reflections a decade after the competition, as covered in the conclusion, propel ongoing speculation around the future of urban design and infrastructure more recently aligned with aspirational public policies and mega-scale private investments that point towards a future of possibility.

More national in scope and scale than the SCI-Arc competition, WPA 2.0 aimed for real impact on future versions of the ARRA. Organizers took the conversation directly to policymakers and legislators in Washington, DC. A symposium cityLAB organized at the National Building Museum included winners, finalists, and jury members, but also keynote addresses by Ron Sims of HUD, and Adolfo Carrión, the director of Obama’s landmark Office of Urban Affairs. After presentations by all finalists and comments by the jury, a panel of high-level agency decision makers, often key stakeholders in making projects happen –

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“ There is more rain in Africa than in the North, in London, in Seattle, in New Orleans, but it falls in weeks, and then disappears. Catch the rain so it falls forever.” PITCH_AFRICA LOG 1, December 2008, ATOPIA_RESEARCH

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Pitch_Africa AtopiA_Research

If you make the school the source of water you tackle a number of issues directly, one of which is girls’ education, which is that girls can go to school and take the water home from the school. That was the idea – the school and the reservoir became synonymous. – David Turnbull, ATOPIA_RESEARCH ATOPIA_RESEARCH, founded by Jane Harrison and David Turnbull, describes itself as a nonprofit design organization that develops architectural responses, informed by decades of research, for locations and populations experiencing systemic and often chronic social and environmental crises. As early adopters of applied infrastructural optimism – or what Turnbull simply calls doing a “decent job, in a humble and straight-forward manner, to achieve a goal that has collective benefits”41 – their work models site-specific, bottom-up, symbiotic systems that prioritize the supply of basic life necessities, like food and water, with social benefits such as education, information, and public health. The initial concept of PITCH_AFRICA was to combine the passion and play of soccer with the pressing need for a year-round supply of clean water and a desire to help tackle the problem of increasing and often undiagnosed HIV infections and AIDS. Instigated in part by Mel Young, founder of the Homeless World Cup street soccer tournament and the newspaper Streetwise, Turnbull made a quick design sketch while watching teams play in Copenhagen (where his firm was participating in the 2007 Metropolis Biennale) showing a permeable field and bleachers with shipping containers serving as cisterns beneath, and water being distributed for drinking and agricultural irrigation; social spaces and multipurpose rooms, including those that could be used as health clinics, filled in the gaps around the cisterns. The

combination allowed for recreation above and inconspicuous testing and treatment below. In 2008, ATOPIA_RESEARCH received a $450,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation to build a pilot project in Long Beach, California. The summary for the pilot: ONE soccer PITCH = ONE MILLION liters of WATER ONE SCHOOL ONE CLINIC ONE MARKET ONE FARM ONE MEETING PLACE Deploying the project in Africa, though, meant working with communities and not repeating the mistakes of well-meaning NGOs or other philanthropists who often under-estimate local politics, misconstrue needs, or inappropriately design for local conditions. Through a slow and careful process, Turnbull and his team visited sites, built relationships, and trusted local knowledge. They learned that building even a small soccer stadium at first could attract too many people and destroy the cultural logic of the region, disrupting the dynamics of a pastoralist lifestyle and an economic structure where tribal members often follow changing resources on a seasonal cycle. Instead, they took the existing, accepted model of a school building in Kenya – four eight-by-eight-meter rooms, costing US$50,000 – and worked within those parameters to create a comprehensive

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Prototype funded by the Annenberg Foundation in Los Angeles for US Street Soccer. Images: Courtesy of David Turnbull, ATOPIA_RESEARCH

water conservation, storage, and distribution project with protected gardens, indoor/outdoor classrooms, composting toilets, and even an increased amount of space per student. Now, rather than walking long distances to a river or stream or trying to collect water from broken and sometimes contaminated wells, girls can go to the Waterbank School and continue their education in a safe, protected environment, while also fulfilling the life-saving task of collecting clean drinking water for their families. In a culture where girls frequently are removed from school after their first menstrual cycle to be married, sold or work for men in the community, an opportunity for safe education provides the seeds of gender equity, and the chance to change lives and cultures. In response to the overwhelming popularity of the first school, a secondary school was added not long after, funded by a gift from soccer player Samuel Eto’o. Unlike the first school,

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which has a circular plan, the second school is architecturally asymmetrical, with the excavation from one half creating the mound for the other which supports stands for the soccer field. The reservoir beneath the stands has a 1½ million liter storage capacity (compared to 150,000 liters in the first school), filled by designing every surface to capture and redirect water into the tank.42 Underneath are also eight classrooms that form the secondary school, plus latrines, showers, separate boys’ and girls’ dorms, and a dining pavilion. In 2013, the first Waterbank School won the US Green Building Code and World Green Building Council’s Greenest School on Earth award. It was quite a contrast to the other winner – a LEED platinum school in Hong Kong constructed with the newest technological bells and whistles. When the second school won the Design of the Year from the Design Museum in London, its contrasting award winner was Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton Foundation headquarters. Wondering

“PITCH binds together the social ecologies of sport, medicine, education and agriculture, stimulating new enterprise and encouraging self-determination” ATOPIA_RESEARCH

what the mission should be of such foundations, Turnbull calculated the number of schools that could be built had the funding from Gehry’s building been dedicated to Waterbank schools instead. That number was over fifty – enough to “completely change education for an entire generation across the entire continent of Africa.” The first Waterbank school was built for an unbelievable $8 per square foot; the second, including the stadium, averaged just $10–15 per square foot. To save funds, Turnbull conducted all of the construction oversight from a distance, through phone and Facebook Messenger, with local representatives taking and posting photos that he would then sketch on top of and return. Clearly, these buildings are even more than schools and water supply. Two additional political and jurisdictional factors came together to make these projects work: first, the importance of year-round clean water is enough of a priority to push some tribal politics aside and

spawn often elusive cooperation; second, in a society where land ownership is unclear and often contested, a school is the only institution with sufficient authority to claim land rights and generate buy-in from a wide range of community members, tribal elders, and advisors. Tribal amity is further encouraged once children from across various groups mix together in the school environment, creating cross-tribal cooperation possible in all but the most politically-charged times. The guiding ethos of the project is a dedication to local material use, zero waste, a symbiosis of ecological and social needs, enhanced public amenities, and provisions for a better future particularly for women and girls – truly a next gen, infrastructural optimism project. ATOPIA_RESEARCH’s work proves that it doesn’t necessarily cost more to be more sustainable, symbiotic, and optimistic, but the benefits – often unmeasured – are exponential.

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Kalundborg Symbiosis is in the town of Kalundborg, Denmark, 100 km west of Copenhagen with a population of roughly 16,000 residents as of 2020. © Kalundborg Symbiosis, permission required for reproduction

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Kalundborg Symbiosis industrial partnership

“Bear in mind that systems make things possible, but it is people that make things happen.”48 Kalundborg Symbiosis is well-known in manufacturing circles as the first example of large-scale industrial symbiosis, where cooperating industries increase environmental efficiencies – and, almost by default, profits – by using the waste of one process as a resource for another. After starting small in the 1970s, when flare gas from the oil refinery was used in the drying process of sheetrock, interest in collaboration grew with the release of the Brundtland Report in 1987 and rising commitment among these physically adjacent industries to conscientiously develop a more green business profile.43 Officially established as a collaboration between the municipality of Kalundborg and four original industrial partners (a coalfired power plant, oil refinery, gypsum board manufacturer and biotech facility – industries not necessarily known for prioritizing sustainability) in October 1989, this eco-industrial park has continued to grow and evolve, finding more nuanced and localized ways to create expanded benefits. Its symbiotic engagement with municipal water and energy services expands the project to an infrastructural level. In 2018, Kalundborg Symbiosis won the prestigious WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award for its leadership as a globally influential prototype. Fifty years after its founding, there are now eleven partners on site and an aim to add an additional ten symbiosis projects by 2025. The material relationships across Kalundborg Symbiosis are notable and well-documented. Research papers using Kalundborg as a case study are numerous and calculate savings of millions of cubic meters of water, tons of bio-

mass waste, and over sixty thousand tons of CO2 emissions annually in the manufacturing process.44 Various sources of waste are shared with local farms to support food production, including a growth in fish farming, which benefits from the heat released in energy production. In addition to corporate gains, the interrelationship between industry and the municipality means home heating and wastewater infrastructure for the town work symbiotically between private industry and public utility. Average annual cost savings are in the tens of millions of dollars, totals which don’t readily take into account the immeasurable benefits, such as reduced pollution or novel innovation. A new engineering school, for example, has been wooed to the town by the municipality, filling a dearth in research specialists and a lack of research capacity in the local bioindustrial cluster. This new academic branch was made possible through collaborations with Kalundborg Symbiosis partners who will also work with incoming students on select projects.45 Clearly, Kalundborg Symbiosis is an exceptional case study in industrial symbiosis, but its success relies on many criteria beyond input and output codependence and literal connecting pipelines. The origin story is very much about human relationships and cooperation, which emerged both out of a robust local social network and a shared environmental ethos. From the first set of partners, there was the belief that together they could do more than any single industry could do alone, that they could help each other tackle complex challenges in new innovative ways; openness, trust, and commitment to the greater good permeate the

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Ten public and private companies share and reuse resources in cooperation at Kalundborg Symbiosis to reduce waste, create local growth, and support the green transition. © Kalundborg Symbiosis, permission required for reproduction

narrative. An equalization of power across all partners, regardless of market size, and a resolve to show up and buy in with true attentiveness made the original effort possible. The partners believed, and still believe fifty years later regardless of numerous additions and hand offs to the next generation of managers, that this effort to work across typically competitive industries and in collaboration with municipal leadership creates a unique opportunity and a special place. Now it is private industry creating greater pressure on local governments to be more proactive in terms of their climate response.46 The idea of a “short mental distance” between partners reinforced by a place with a “Symbiosis way of thinking” elevates the importance of human collaboration in service of infrastructural inter-connectivity.47 Over the decades, the partners and relationships have both grown and evolved; as expertise and cooperation expand, systems have been tweaked to be more local and more green. Synthetic gypsum, for example, can be created on-site with by-products from energy production eliminating the need to extract and import natural gypsum from distant quarries. When renewable prices are low, wind and solar power

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replace coal for all of the partners’ energy needs, including those supplied to the city; when prices are high, wood chips gathered from sustainably managed forests supplement the supply of steam, increasing both reliability and flexibility of the whole energy system. During the COVID-19 pandemic, an under-utilized bio-ethanol plant on site was adapted in a matter of weeks to fill a shortage of hand sanitizer for local use. The agility of local, smaller manufacturers, working collectively with shared expertise to fill changing needs also boosts local resilience. Kalundborg Symbiosis is, in many ways, a prototype with global impact. After expanded media coverage and exposure at academic conferences in the early 1990s brought a degree of industry fame, the Symbiosis Center Denmark was created to respond to inquiries from others interested in mirroring their success. The Center now helps other companies identify their resource needs and opportunities and better understand the symbiosis concept and find potential matches. A symbiosis database tracks resource streams that might be tapped to optimize collaboration and energy efficiency across industries. One project Kalundborg

architecture or designed components of public green infrastructure exist. Limiting the symbiosis to industrial and utility lines only, without the advantages of design innovation, keeps the project from providing additional positive social, environmental, aesthetic, sensory, and educational opportunities. Utilizing architecture, urban, and landscape design skills have the potential to make the systems more visible, more interactive, more socially productive, and even more prized by the town.

As of 2020, twenty symbiotic systems connect energy, water, and materials produced on-site at Kalundborg. © Kalundborg Symbiosis, permission required for reproduction

inspired is the Swedish Symbiocentrum. Unlike Kalundborg, though, Symbiocentrum explicitly includes a socially productive component in the mix, primarily a job skills development and adult education program that adapt teaching and learning content to the needs of the many companies in the symbiosis, practically guaranteeing high-level employment. Though Kalundborg Symbiosis excels at nearly all of the other next generation infrastructure criteria, social productivity, public realm, and design at large are lacking. Though infrastructural services in the form of heat and water exchange are provided to the residents of the city, there is no spatial, occupiable public space or public engagement component to the project. Interaction with non-workers is limited to virtual inquiries and scheduled tours. The campus is unabashedly an industrial zone on the city’s harbor, a designation defended by the municipality and the partners regardless of current trends to increase natural, accessible public space for residents at the water’s edge in other coastal cities. Though it certainly uses expansive biological and ecological processes in the many system exchanges, no natural features and particularly no landscape

The construction of the new Biomanufacturing Project House, the engineering school, which is run by University College Absalon, might be an opportunity to rectify this handful of gaps. The DKK 120 million project supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and other partners (about US $18.5 million), is to be designed by one of the most well-known architecture firms in the region. Apparently the firm is taking an interest in symbiosis as part of the design process and exploring ways, upon encouragement from the client, that resource connectivity can happen in the new school. New attention to design for the whole Kalundborg Symbiosis campus could better accommodate visitors and local residents, and actively show off the award-winning processes of the moderately visible but unexplained and uncelebrated Kalundborg Symbiosis. With the new school, the larger district could easily be envisioned as an infrastructural urbanism opportunity. Kalundborg is also building a short freeway segment to complete a long-incomplete connection to the neighboring town. As expected, this community that prioritizes sustainability is conflicted over this car-centric construction. Fortuitously, my interview with the managing director of Kalundborg Symbiosis provided an opportunity to share the lessons and design work from the I-11 Supercorridor project, meaning the influence of design might come to Kalundborg Symbiosis after all, starting in the new freeway rather than in the industrial waterfront of the world’s most famous site of symbiosis.

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Dusk view rendering of the new Sixth Street Viaduct design proposal, A Ribbon of Light, looking northwest toward the Los Angeles River, viaduct park, and downtown skyline Image: HNTB

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Sixth street viaduct Michael Maltzan Architecture + HTNB + Hargreaves Jones Associates

The original Sixth Street Viaduct was one of fourteen Beaux Arts-inspired bridges built between 1910 and 1939 that took car and pedestrian traffic across the Los Angeles River. The Sixth Street bridge was the longest, at 3,500 feet, eventually extending over eighteen railroad tracks and the 101 freeway and deep into the neighborhoods east and west of the river. After just twenty years, a reaction between the aggregate and the cement mixture began to compromise the bridge’s integrity and, though it was designated a Historic-Cultural monument by the city in 2008, a seismic evaluation revealed that the damage to the bridge was too great to salvage the structure. After the original was demolished in 2016, the City’s Bureau of Engineering (BoE) put out an international request for qualifications in search of architecture, engineering, and landscape architecture teams to design a replacement. Three shortlisted teams produced conceptual design proposals and, with input from the public and a nine-person Design Aesthetics Advisory Committee, the interdisciplinary partnership of HTNB engineering and Michael Maltzan Architecture won the second phase with their “Ribbon of Light” design. Both selection via a design competition and such high aesthetic expectations made this bridge project uncommon even before a final selection was made. Beyond the difficulty of competing with the iconic status of the original bridge (featured in numerous famous films, including the riverbed drag race in Grease, Gone in 60 Seconds, and Terminator 2), the new version is tasked with connecting the very different east side neighborhood of Boyle Heights with the growing and gentrifying Arts District on the west side. It also has to accommodate a changing landscape of multimodal mobility, increased economic

and environmental pressures from surrounding neighborhoods and downtown, and growing interest in the river and its opportunities for recreation and water access. Programmatically, the new bridge incorporates wide sidewalks, ten-foot bike lanes, ramps and stairs intermittently linking the bridge surface with the ground beneath, and twelve acres of open space, recreational facilities, public art and arts plazas. When complete in 2022, this $580 million bridge project will incorporate many of the next generation infrastructure criteria espoused in this book.49 In addition to the numerous internal civil, geotechnical, and structural engineers, the Bureau of Engineering is tasked with coordinating the expansive team of agencies and disciplinary design firms involved in this project, including five railroad agencies (that own and manage the eighteen railroad tracks and adjacent storage yards), the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, LA Metro, Army Corps of Engineers, California Department of Fish & Wildlife, California Department of Toxic Substance Control, the Federal Highway Administration and, of course, the California Transportation Department. Gary Lee Moore, City Engineer, and Deborah Weintraub, Chief Deputy City Engineer and chief Architect, worked from both an interdisciplinary perspective and an appreciation for design. Their disciplinary agility – and insistence – helped navigate the happy and balanced marriage of Michael Maltzan’s architectural vision and HNTB’s Mike Jones’s complex engineering. It also broadened the project’s potential by incorporating a range of local stakeholders, including neighborhood representatives from east and west, early on. That inclusion led to park amenities distributed

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on both sides of the river, particularly for existing residents – not future, anticipated wealthier ones – including a proposed skatepark on the east side, restrooms, a youth soccer field, and quiet walking space for elderly community members. The smaller west side park will have room for working out, dog walking, a future mobility hub, and public art. In sunny Southern California, the shade from the bridge is itself an amenity and additional program – a café, a performance stage and seating – will be tucked underneath and surrounded by large areas for picnicking, grilling, and other informal activity. Every age and ability level are accommodated.

bridge deck and transferred to the ground level, where stormwater is filtered to minimize pollutants eventually discharged to the ocean. Technologically, the structure is designed for a one-thousand-year seismic event, with isolation bearings allowing for thirty inches of movement in any direction – the first bridge built in the US with this much seismic accommodation. LED lights, able to change color through remote operation, provide luminance while protecting views and natural habitats from light pollution. One fewer pier in the center of the bridge provides flexibility for increased flow capacity in the river basin.

Socially, the bridge and park serve as connectors for the two neighborhoods, as the original Sixth Street Viaduct did when it was constructed over ninety years ago. The transition between east and west – entering and exiting the city – is culturally significant. In addition to provisioning for bike, car, and regular pedestrian modalities, car lanes can also be closed in phases, allowing half or all of the bridge to be occupied by pedestrians for public events (including, specifically, protests). Connecting the bridge and park space are ramps and stairs that are intentionally designed to operate as giant pieces of exercise equipment. A running loop from Boyle Heights to the Arts District, up, over, and down the bridge and back, further encourages interaction between the two neighborhoods, creating an integrated social connection that did not exist with the previous version of the bridge. The bridge and park also provide access to a major bike project along the river in the planning stage by Metro.

When the original Sixth Street Viaduct was built, it was common for bridges to provide places to pause and view and ample space for slow-speed pedestrian connectivity. Aesthetics of our public works was as important as their functionality. In contrast, most arterial bridges built after the Second World War exemplify the dominance of a modernist and myopic engineering mindset (just as the full channelization of the LA River did). But the plans for the future of the LA River and the new Sixth Street Viaduct both represent an ecological turn, where interconnectivity among human and nonhuman participants and different types of people, activities, and speeds of movement are integrated into this new type of public works. The new Sixth Street Viaduct conjures $100 million worth of infrastructural land in the heart of one of the US’s most expensive cities for social and environmental benefits to parkpoor neighborhoods nearby. Far more than just a bridge, the Sixth Street Viaduct may very well serve as a model for next gen investment in the twenty-first century.

A subtle sustainability agenda permeates the design. As part of an effort to reduce auto-dominance, minimal parking is designated specifically for the site. Weintraub insisted the project be designed to be flexible enough to accommodate a future Metro light rail stop should the system extend access to the PARC (Park, Arts, River and Connectivity Improvements). All the rainwater is captured from the

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Planning for creative community use of infrastructural space, a new performance venue, Leonard Hill Arts Plaza, will be built under and protected by the viaduct in the Arts District. This location is also the gateway for access to an anticipated bike path along the river. Image: Hargreaves Jones

The PARC (Park, Arts, River and Connectivity Improvements) plan incorporates a wide variety of community activities, focusing on urban greening, passive and active recreation, and advanced stormwater management systems within the non-contiguous spaces under the viaduct. Image: Hargreaves Jones

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WPA 2.0 FINALISTS

WPA 2.0 is an open design competition for Working Public Architecture, organized and sponsored by cityLAB. Beyond the mere replacement of obsolete or overtaxed infrastructure, WPA 2.0 seeks design ideas that exploit the opportunity for such solutions to be leveraged, through nested scales of thinking, into strategies that catalyze a larger and more visible public benefit. In this respect, it is looking for proposals that put architecture back to work through designs that: • • • • •

are embedded with added value (multifunctionality, imageability, public presence), represent potential prototypes, adaptable for use in numerous locations, are locally self-regulated and controlled (i.e. which “unlock” the grid), strategically attract investment and/or generate community stability, and generate new sustainability practices. From the “WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture,” competition brief, cityLAB, July 2009.

(Left) Lateral Office / Infranet Lab, Coupling Infrastructures: Water Economies / Ecologies. Diagram from WPA 2.0 competition proposal, 2009.

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CARBON T.A.P. / TUNNEL ALGAE PARK PORT (COMPETITION WINNER)

Carbon T.A.P. seeks to colonize the by-products of contemporary urban infrastructures by transforming them into ecological, economic, and social opportunities capable of catalyzing the transformation of adjacent urban landscapes through the bundling of green infrastructure, multimodal emission-free transportation, and public realm amenity. The team’s proposal for a pivoting, pier-like armature between Red Hook, Brooklyn, Governor’s Island, and the Battery in Lower Manhattan captures CO2 from the existing vehicular tunnel below to supply a large-scale algal farm that doubles as a dynamic urban park replete with structured wetlands, aquatic and avian habitat, recreation amenities like swimming pools and fishing piers, as well as high-speed bike lanes and public promenades. This new green infrastructure prototype could be deployed at dozens of similar locations transforming concentrated levels of CO2 into new bio-economies and much-needed public realm amenities for the city. Team: Andrew Moddrell, Christopher Marcinkoski, Richie Gelles, Jonathan Mac Gillis, Braden Schneider; Video by Richie Gelles

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COUPLING INFRASTRUCTURES: WATER ECONOMIES / ECOLOGIES LATERAL OFFICE / INFRANET LAB

This proposal focuses on America’s impending water crisis, particularly in cities in the Southwest where population growth is high and water availability is limited. By rethinking water use, distribution, and storage, this project addresses the demands of an increasingly fragile ecology, and the complex economies of agriculture and tourism that rely on that ecology. Using the Salton Sea as a model site, the proposal operates at a large regional scale while also employing micro-scale, incremental soft infrastructure that allows for the coupling of production systems, threatened ecosystems, and new water and salt economies. Island pods provide for salt harvesting, bring back recreation, and support revitalized animal habitats. Here infrastructure behaves as an ecosystem, growing, shrinking, and adapting as needed to this extreme environment.

Team: Mason White, Lola Sheppard, Daniel Rabin, Fei-ling Tseng

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BORDERWALL AS INFRASTRUCTURE RAEL SAN FRATELLO ARCHITECTS

The US Secure Fence Act of 2006 finances seven hundred miles of fortification dividing the US from Mexico at the average cost of $4 million dollars per mile; six-hundred miles of barriers have been constructed since 2006, which have been breached over 3,000 times, incurring $4.4 million in repairs. At an estimated cost of up to $1,325.75 per linear foot, there is far more potential for this construction project to be socially, environmentally, and economically productive. Recognizing the high cost, limited effectiveness, and unintended natural consequences of the new, multilayered US-Mexico border wall, this proposal names thirty alternatives – covering the whole of the Mexican alphabet, from Aqueduct wall to Zen wall – that might better combat the energy crisis, risk of death from dehydration, disruption of animal habitat, loss of vegetation, negative labor relations, missing creative vision, and lack of cross-cultural appreciation in the government-sponsored version. Coupling the wall with viable, productive infrastructure provides a pathway to cooperation at the national and very local levels. Team: Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello, Emily Licht, Plamena Milusheva, Brian Grieb, Nicholas Karklins, Colleen Paz, Molly Reichert

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FREE WATER DISTRICT URBAN LAB

Combining the Rust Belt’s loss of population with its abundance of fresh water, this proposal outlines a strategy for re-densification of underutilized postindustrial landscapes. Free Water is used as a catalyst to attract water-intensive industries to relocate from areas such as the Sun Belt – where water is scarce – to the water-endowed Great Lakes region. Today, water-intensive businesses representing millions of jobs are scrambling to secure long-term water resources as global supplies become more and more contested. In exchange for free water, industries will recycle “waste” water from their operations through a series of constructed wetlands in order to slowly remediate adjacent postindustrial landscapes. Wetlands will be designed as ecological treatment systems that make use of natural bioremediation processes to remove contaminants from wastewater sources. Once treated, water will be carried through blue/green infrastructure (bio-streets and wetlands) to recharge the lake. Ultimately, a network of Free Water Districts connected by the Great Lakes will grow. Team: Sarah Dunn, Martin Felsen, Katherine Eberly, Lee Greenberg, Jeff Macias

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HYRDOGENIC CITY 2020 AERSHOP

Metropolitan regions that draw water from considerable distances are particularly vulnerable to impacts of climate change on their water supply. Hydrogenic City 2020 aims to provoke a new relationship between city residents and their waterworks by making the process of water treatment more visible and decentralizing waterworks infrastructure into local, recreational public nodes. As an integrated solution, this project envisions a network of ecologically sensitive and aesthetically compelling water reclamation centers, where each center provides a sustainable water source to the city. The mechanistic infrastructure of waterworks is transformed into an interactive and sensory series of public nodes. As mist platforms, solar-encased water tanks, urban beaches, aquatic parking lots, reflecting pools, and channels, water-based landscapes become organizational moments for community-building.

Team: Darina Zlateva, Takuma Ono, Helen Han, Ryan Leidner, Matt Storus

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LOCAL CODE: REAL ESTATES NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX & COLLABORATORS

Local Code uses geospatial analysis to identify thousands of publicly owned abandoned sites in major US cities, imagining this distributed, vacant landscape as a new urban system. Using parametric design, a landscape proposal for each site is tailored to local conditions, optimizing thermal and hydrological performance to enhance the whole city’s ecology, while also relieving burdens on existing infrastructure. Local Code’s quantifiable effects on energy usage and stormwater remediation eradicate the need for more expensive, yet invisible, sewer and electrical upgrades. In addition, the project uses citizen participation to conceive a new, more public infrastructure, as well – a robust network of urban greenways with tangible benefits to the health and safety of every citizen. Team: Nicholas de Monchaux with Kimiko Ryokai, Natalia Echeverri, Sara Jensen, David Lung, Ben Golder, Shivang Patwa, Matt Smith, Laurie Spitler, Thomas Pollman

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AQUACULTURE CANAL_NEW ORLEANS Fadi Masoud / co-winner

This proposal takes the dangerous and abandoned portion of New Orleans’s Industrial Canal, which is slated to be filled and closed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and turns it into a series of levee ponds – ponds that both operate as a mechanism to protect from flooding caused by storm surges and create a productive infrastructure of aquaculture. Acknowledging the site’s original state as marshland, constant saturation will kick-start the processes and systems that are true to the nature and ecology of the region. The canals’ series of levee ponds will function much like an ice tray divided into cells of various depths and levels of inundation. A layer of clay will line the canal base, and water will be directed from the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, cleaned through Cell 1 (the South Wetland Treatment Ponds), which is also a park system, and then released into over 400 acres of crawfish-rice and catfish ponds. Water is then released back out into Lake Pontchartrain at the northern edge. The seasonal variation in precipitation means that a natural cycle of flooding and harvesting of the canal will take place, allowing the site to function as water storage during the wet season of the summer and early fall, while the series of levees perform as secondary flood protection. Evident in many examples across New Orleans, the strength and the soul of New Orleans is in its people and their determination and resilience. This intervention would engage these local characteristics, offer a new financial narrative to what was once a bustling economic spine, and bring improvements to the quality of life of the neighborhoods that surround it. The project provides the seeds for an interactive and social activity that is embedded in Louisiana culture and establishes a landscape

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infrastructure system that engages the site’s natural processes, achieves vital ecological functions, and holds water while performing crucial flood protection.

r_ignite Peter Millar, Jamie Potter, Andy Wilde and Stuart Wheeler / co-winnerS

Post-industrial portal towns around the world have suffered a decline in industrial demand. High unemployment rates of skilled manual laborers, redundant transport systems, derelict industrial facilities, and brownfield sites have become classic symptoms of the decline. Global ship wrecking is performed by thirdworld countries in unregulated conditions causing irreparable damage to their eco-systems. Seven hundred large commercial vessels require decommissioning and recycling every year in a $1.5 billion industry. Oil rigs have similar problems at the end of their lives. Around one thousand offshore structures have already been removed from the Gulf of Mexico, and the number of platforms dating from the 1970s and 1980s eligible for decommissioning is growing. Rigs are either sunk on-site causing biohazards or broken down at massive economic and environmental expense. This project proposes that portal towns are revitalized as regulated recycling nodes for ships and rigs, making use of their redundant industrial infrastructure. This process would involve occupying the docks with floating rigs and ships that create a public spectacle and attract global media attention. The rigs and ships are intertwined with social programs acting as additional catalysts for public involvement, incorporating ecological landscapes, energy production, skills building, education, and leisure. These programs would aim to empower the working-class population and redefine the identity of major shipping ports.

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NOTES

See, for example, Pat Choate and Susan Walter, America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure (Durham, NC: Duke Press Paperbacks, 1983). 2 American Society of Civil Engineers, 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, 2009, https:// www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/01/Report-Card-for-Americas-Infrastructure-Full-Book.pdf; and 2017 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org. The fifteen categories evaluated in 2009 were aviation, bridges, dams, drinking water, energy, hazardous waste, inland waterways, levees, public parks and recreation, rail, roads, schools, solid waste, transit, and wastewater. The ASCE added ports to the list in 2017. 3 American Society of Civil Engineers, Failure to Act: Closing the Infrastructure Investment Gap for America’s Economic Future, 2016, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/ASCEFailure-to-Act-2016-FINAL.pdf. 4 For example, Ray Nagin, a former mayor of New Orleans, was convicted of fraud, bribery, and tax evasion for kickbacks that took place both before Hurricane Katrina and during rebuilding. The United States Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Louisiana, “C. Ray Nagin, Former New Orleans Mayor, Convicted on Federal Bribery, Honest Services Wire Fraud, Money Laundering, Conspiracy, and Tax Charges,” press release, February 12, 2014, https://www.justice.gov/ usao-edla/pr/c-ray-nagin-former-new-orleans-mayorconvicted-federal-bribery-honest-services-wire. 5 Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 137. 6 Quoted in Davis, 137. 7 Cristina Kim, “New Study Finds Formerly Redlined Neighborhoods Are More At Risk For COVID-19,” NPR, September 14, 2020, https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/09/14/redlined-neighborhoods-coronavirus-study; and Marlene Cimons, “How Redlining Makes Communities of Color More at Risk of Deadly Heatwaves,” PBS, January 23, 2020, https://www.pbs. org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2020/01/redlined-neighborhoods/. 8 Quoted in Ron Nixon, “House Committee Takes Step Toward Renewing Highway Trust Fund,” New York Times, July 8, 2014, https://www.nytimes. com/2014/07/09/us/house-committee-takes-step-toward-renewing-highway-trust-fund.html. 9 Choate and Walter, 8. Choate’s 2006 book, Saving Capitalism, cites slightly different numbers: “Almost 1

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2% of GDP to public works in the 1960s . . . dropped steadily over the intervening five decades to 1.1% by 2006, a decline of 43%. In the same period, the US population expanded by more than 120 million, a growth of 66%.” Pat Choate, Saving Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 142. 10 Choate and Walter, 1983. 11 See “Military Expenditure (% of GDP) - United States,” The World Bank, accessed June 4, 2019, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND. GD.ZS?end=2017&locations=US&start=2006; and “Annual Average Infrastructure Expenditures as Percent of GDP Worldwide from 2010 to 2015, by Country,” Statista, accessed June 4, 2019, https:// www.statista.com/statistics/566787/average-yearly-expenditure-on-economic-infrastructure-as-percent-of-gdp-worldwide-by-country/. 12 Choate and Walter, America in Ruins, 1. 13 Choate and Walter, America in Ruins, xi–xii, 87–89. 14 Public Works Improvement Act of 1984, S. 1330, 98th Congress (1984). 15 National Council on Public Works Improvement, Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works, February 1988, https://www. infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/1988-Fragile-Foundations-ExSum. pdf, 1. 16 Jared Bernstein, “I (Mostly) Like Hillary Clinton’s Infrastructure Plan,” Washington Post, December 2, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/02/i-mostly-like-hillary-clintonsinfrastructure-plan/. 17 United Nations, Report on the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, annex to document A/42/427 (August 4, 1987), 24, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/139811?ln=en. 18 Thomas J. Wilbanks and Steven J. Fernandez, eds., Climate Change and Infrastructure, Urban Systems, and Vulnerabilities: Technical Report for the US Department of Energy in Support of the National Climate Assessment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014). 19 Wilbanks and Fernandez, 25. 20 For more on this, see Linda C. Samuels, “Working Public Architecture,” Places Journal, January 2010, https://doi.org/10.22269/100110. As of 2019, the website for this initiative no longer exists; presumably, the collaboration and resulting initiative were purged as part of the Trump administration’s gutting

of sustainability efforts by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Transportation. 21 Office of the Vice President, The White House, 100 Recovery Act Projects That Are Changing America, September 2010, https://obamawhitehouse.archives. gov/sites/default/files/100-Recovery-Act-Projects-Changing-America-Report.pdf. 22 Greg O’Brien, “Architecture and Construction Are Beginning to Dig Out from the Recession,” Archinect, January 23, 2014, https://www.architectmagazine.com/practice/architecture-and-construction-are-beginning-to-dig-outfrom-the-recession_o. 23 Bryan Bell and Kate Wakeford, eds., Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (New York: Metropolis Books, 2008). This article, however, refutes Bell’s claim that 98 percent of houses don’t include architectural services of some kind: Suzanne LaBarre, “Truth in Numbers,” Metropolis, October 1, 2008, https://www.metropolismag.com/uncategorized/ truth-in-numbers/ 24 NL Architects “WOS 8,” accessed December 23, 2020, http://www.nlarchitects.nl/slideshow/133/. 25 See, for example: John Leighton Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, eds., Everyday Urbanism (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999); Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000); and Charles Waldheim, ed., The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). 26 On the death of public space, see Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 27 cityLAB was founded by Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman in 2006. The team behind the WPA 2.0 competition was Dana Cuff, Roger Sherman, Tim Higgins, and me. I was Senior Research Associate at cityLAB at the time. An archive of WPA 2.0 material is available online: http://wpa2.aud.ucla.edu/info/. 28 Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman, WPA 2.0 competition description, accessed November 24, 2020, http://wpa2.aud.ucla.edu/info/index.php?/about/ about/written by Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman. 29 The website that documents selected projects (http://wpa2.aud.ucla.edu/info/) allows visitors to sort by type of infrastructure or type of strategy.

See Dana Cuff, “WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture,” Harvard Design Magazine 34 (Fall/Winter 2011); and Samuels, “Working Public Architecture.” 31 These strategies were first published in a pamphlet prepared for the competition and available on the cityLAB website: https://static1. squarespace.com/static/58e4e9705016e194dd5cdc43/t/58fb38886b8f5b0fe39dc335/1492859024758/2010_WPA_2.0.pdf. 32 In addition to the six professional finalist projects, listed on pages 78–79, the seven student finalist projects included Re-Ignite (Peter Millar, Jamie Potter, Andy Wilde, and Stuart Wheeler); Aquaculture Canal_New Orleans (Fadi Masoud); Polytechnic High School and Transportation Center (Douglas Segulja); Fluctuating Freeway Ecologies (The Crop); urban ConAgraculture (Dale Luebbert); Cash for Clunkers = Bike Sharing for Chicago (Matt Moore); and Topographic Infrastructure: Hollywood Freeway Central Park (Meng Yang). 33 In her book Next Generation Infrastructure: Principles for Post-Industrial Public Works (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014), Hillary Brown introduces and expands on these three types, though she uses different terminology than appears here. 34 Alex Davies, “The $50 Million Competition to Remake the American City,” WIRED, December 7, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/12/the-50-million-competition-to-remake-the-american-city/. 35 Pierre Bélanger, Landscape as Infrastructure (New York: Routledge, 2017), 66. 36 SCI-Arc Future Initiatives Program and the Architect’s Newspaper, A New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA: Southern California Institute of Architecture, 2009), 12. 37 Linda C. Samuels, “Top/Up Urbanism,” in Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, Amplified Urbanism (Los Angeles: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, 2017). 38 Thom Mayne, “A New Infrastructure: Jury Comments,” in A New Infrastructure, 11, 8. 39 David McManus, “PITCH_Africa : Building” E-architect August 2, 2010. https://www.e-architect.com/ africa/pitch-africa 40 “Waterbank Fact Sheet,” PITCH_Africa, Princeton, NJ. Provided by ATOPIA founder David Turnbull. 41 Details of the project and quotations in this case are from an interview by the author with David Turnbull, cofounder of ATOPIA-REARCH, on October 15, 2020. 30

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Turnbull often returns to true Vitruvian methods of water harvesting and storage, incorporating simple Roman courtyard forms with effluvial courts and segmenting, sloping, and staggering the tanks to catch sediment and direct flow. Though his Arup engineers were skeptical, the systems as designed based on these principles do work. 43 Kalundborg Symbiosis. 44 Teresa Domenecha and Michael Davies, “Structure and Morphology of Industrial Symbiosis Networks: The Case of Kalundborg,” Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 10 (2011): 79–89. 45 Interview by author with Lisbeth Randers, director, and Mette Skovbjerg, project manager, Symbiosis Centre in Kalundborg, July 16, 2020. 46 Interview with Randers and Skovbjerg. 47 Marian Chertow, “Kalundborg at 40: Adaptation and Evolution,” Kalundborg Symbiosis, 27; and Henrick Damm, “The Green Industrial Municipality,” Kalundborg Symbiosis, 19. 48 Jorgen Christensen (Kalundborg Symbiosis former site manager, Novo Nordisk), “A Principle Was Born,” in Kalundborg Symbiosis, fortieth anniversary report, 15, accessed July 16, 2020, https://greenexchange. earth/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Kalundborg-Symbiosis-40th-anniversary-publication.pdf. 49 Details of the replacement Sixth Street Viaduct project and quotations in this case are from an interview by the author with Bureau of Engineering chief deputy Deborah Weintraub and Julie Allen, principal civil engineer on the project at BoE, on January 4, 2021. 42

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03. INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: THREE STRATEGIES When the Federal Highway Act of 1956 allocated $25 billion for 41,000 new miles of cross-country freeways, the primary goal was unfettered mobility. In that regard, Eisenhower’s interstates have been an unprecedented success. The ease by which we can wander at transcontinental scale by choice or by necessity, temporarily or long-term, is ingrained as a characteristic of American postwar identity. Yet pure automobility is a twentieth-century proposition. Not only because the first two decades of the twenty-first century saw populations – particularly millennials and baby boomers – moving to walkable cities in unprecedented numbers, choosing density and access over sprawl, finally recognizing the true cost of limited, oildependent transportation choices, and getting driver’s licenses later in life for the first time in our country’s recent history, but because the prospect of a single exorbitantly expensive device doing a single exorbitantly expensive thing exactly as it did over a half century ago seems not just obsolete and wasteful, but environmentally, socially, and economically intolerable. Unlike these last generation infrastructure models, next generation infrastructure aims for broader holistic impact to quality of place and public life.

attention, like the long-awaited Interstate 11 freeway, which would fill the highway gap between Phoenix and Las Vegas and connect south to Mexico and north to Canada, can either be the continuation of decades of “flat and black” highway design that promotes more sprawl, increases greenhouse gas emissions, and encourages single-occupancy vehicle use, or it can invest that $17 to $75 million per lane, per mile in a much broader range of smart and symbiotic uses that are more appropriate for a booming drought environment. The Northside-Southside MetroLink expansion faces a similar challenge in St. Louis, but its context is plagued with generations of disinvestment and decay brought about by urban renewal policies and white flight and perpetuated by institutionalized racism and bad deals. In this case, the investment in transit has real opportunities to transform neighborhoods by prioritizing social equity needs over private profit. In both of these cases, which are explored in detail in the next chapter, the actors involved must use their momentum for greater gain to catapult opportunism into optimism. Strategies for how these cases might be implemented, and ways the design disciplines might influence a real paradigm shift, are explored below.

Infrastructural opportunism, in particular, seeks to leverage large scale investment in what has typically been monofunctional, efficiencyfocused infrastructure for improved social and environmental outcomes. Projects garnering

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Large scale infrastructure projects are often planned as drivers of economic development and intentional instigators of growth. Yet the

mindset that all growth is good growth, that all economic development is good economic development, has led to an unconscious blanket of urban and suburban sprawl and an unconscionable use and abuse of our natural resources. Socially, it has resulted in mass displacement of disenfranchised communities and erasure of potential wealth gains in the name of “urban renewal.” This growth-for-the-sakeof-growth model is supported by the delusion of measures like gross domestic product (GDP), which fails to discern between productive and unproductive spending, much less qualitative worth. The current global condition of rapid urbanization and steady infrastructural obsolescence provides innumerable opportunities for decision making about priorities and resources at every scale, though the scope of possibility often goes un- or underconsidered. To succeed in the shift away from last generation, status quo solutions and toward comprehensive Infrastructural Urbanism ones, indiscriminate economic growth must not be the sole driver of urban success, nor dollars its only measure. This is particularly true for opportunism projects – those often historically intended as steroidal injections aimed at economic expansion. This kind of opportunism has long been monopolized, covertly or overtly, for personal or corporate financial gain, favoring those already with wealth and in power while overtaxing the commons, often to the detriment of the least enfranchised. Infrastructural opportunism calls for those gains to instead increase equity and environmental health rather than grow private profits; benefits, then, can’t just be measured in increased dollars, but must prioritize a different list of things that matter. Pushback against this same kind of uneven, rapid development at the global scale – development that has clearly benefitted wealthy nations at the cost of undeveloped ones – was the root instigation for the United Nations’ creation of the World Commission on Environment and Development, more commonly

known as the Brundtland Commission, with its report proposing a path forward for a new movement of “sustainable development.” Gro Harlem Brundtland, then prime minister of Norway and chair of the commission, and her team were the first to formally insist that the perseverance of the human species relied on global interdependency and that the earth’s available resources were both finite and distributed across and within generations in a radically inequitable manner. The Brundtland Commission report attempted to mediate (but in some ways inadvertently reinforced) the oversimplified dichotomy – what urban planners call the “jobs-versus-the environment” or “economy-ecology” battle – that to improve lives, natural resources must be sacrificed, and to save the environment, opportunities for underdeveloped countries to catch up must suffer. Two additional fundamental faults are inherent in this already faulty zerosum myth: that the cost of social complications is negligible, and that economics should be the predominant filter through which all human value is weighed. The concept of “sustainable development” holds within it both an inevitable bias toward measurability (efficiencies, reductions, production, wealth) and an oxymoronic conflict between the pressures of conservation and a mandate for growth. Where the purer (though not more lucid) concept of “sustainability” has origins largely credited to the environmentalism movement (Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Ian McHarg) and the varying relationships of humans to nature (ecology versus conservation versus preservation), the concept of sustainable development is inseparable from the economic structure of market expansion in service of wealth production which relies on ever-increasing resource use.1 Metrics often focus on quantitative, easily identifiable gains, meaning complex social factors are undercounted or excluded. Scott Campbell rightfully questioned the lack of prominence of the social costs of development with his creation of the planner’s triangle, which

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Scott Campbell, The Planner’s Triangle Revisited, 2016. Adapted from Scott Campbell’s twentieth-anniversary reflection on the essay “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities?” originally published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, 1996.

critiques the limitation of the environment-versus-economy conflict and refutes the zero-sum endgame. If economic development and environmental preservation represent two opposing priorities of a planned future – Campbell’s “growing city” and “green city” respectively – pulling against each other on one side of the triangle, then equity, or the “just city,” is an additional apex that pulls against both, setting the three priorities into a more complicated and de-stabilized set of relationships. The leg between each vertex represents a set of competing priorities – the resource conflict (between the economic and ecological utility of nature), the property conflict (between private interest and public good), and the development conflict (between economic opportunity and resource conservation). In the center is the tenuous process of negotiation and the elusive goal of sustainable development. 2 The introduction of a social justice framework wasn’t entirely new in the larger urban planning discourse, but Campbell’s diagram was seminal in multiple ways. First, it normalized and, like all good diagrams, simplified dense information by translating complex dynamics that previously seemed difficult to comprehend, much less

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resolve, into clear, named concepts. Second, it recognized the significance of the urbanization/ development process itself as an ongoing and live set of unfixed negotiations. And third, it claimed a prominent space for social justice in the pragmatics of economic development. It is important to note, though, that Campbell (like Brundtland) still does, after all, equate social justice with economic opportunity and income equality in his triangle – telling labels that fail to disengage the new three-prong negotiation from the worldview where economic sovereignty is the overriding paradigm. Though sustainability is now commonly articulated as a three-E or triple bottom line proposition per this economy/environment/equity triangle, the triangle is hardly equilateral, as Campbell himself conceded in a twentieth-anniversary follow-up to the original article where the triangle first appeared.3 As numerous rankings, metric systems, and median house prices still show – supported by all kinds of entrepreneurial, creative-class, and innovation-based discourse – the successful city is still measured in dollars. In the decades since the Brundtland Report, numerous metrics frameworks have emerged to quantify criteria for triple bottom line assessment and provide ratings or rankings to help determine how seriously cities are taking their sustainability.4 If adopted at all, these efforts rely on an intensive and expensive governmental protocol of city funded sustainability plans with indicators or dashboards that routinely gauge progress toward measurable social, environmental, and economic metrics. For urban designers, architects, and landscape architects practicing, teaching, and researching in this exploding century of the city, both the obliterating predominance and anti-humanistic lunacy of the growth-driven economic development directive are apparent – and troubling. This next era of rapid urbanization provides an opportunity to reconsider our priorities. If the nation building of the nineteenth century and the city building of the twentieth reflect the classic economic structures of industrial and postindustrial

capitalism (adjust accordingly for global location and timing), then the opportunity of the twenty-first century is to shift from quantity to quality, from economic efficiency and excess productivity (also known as profits) as the default cure-all to ecological and social performance as design ambitions fit for the era of the Anthropocene.5 In small part this is happening as the tenets of Landscape and Ecological Urbanism take real root and challenge the predominance of fixed, finite, and object- and aesthetic-centered urbanism. Concurrently, the right to the city movement, various tactical urbanisms, and spatial justice efforts have tried to do the same for social equity. Infrastructural Urbanism, as defined in a previous chapter, combines these environmental and social urbanism movements, recognizing the very core role infrastructure plays in undergirding the systems of the city – from utilitarian to political – and seeking large gains in quality of life and quality of environment for all residents. As designers, we must ask, How do we help instigate a real paradigm shift to make these new priorities the default? Three strategies, explored below and tested in the cases in the next chapter, are key to meaningful change. BROADENING THE PROCESS, TRANSFORMING THE PROTOTYPE, AND MEASURING WHAT REALLY MATTERS TO EVOLVE THE PARADIGM Broadening the process means expanding the participant list and adjusting the power structure from the earliest project phases. Incorporating a range of voices, including architects, urban designers, landscape architects, artists, environmental scientists, ecologists, hydrologists, and engineers (among others) working with diverse community representation from the beginning of an infrastructure project, sets a standard of inclusivity and an enviro-social agenda that can influence a project’s priorities – and bring design skills and vision to the forefront of the process. Often community

engagement is more about rubber-stamping than collaboration, and Environmental Impact Statements can be bureaucratic reports done too late to change the course of a project. Broadening the process means creating interdisciplinary, cross-agency teams that include experts beyond the seemingly immediately relevant fields and agencies as well as engagement processes that don’t just consult or inform residents, but build real partnerships and share, or even delegate, real power. Local expertise is essential. Bold, risk-taking leadership for such an inclusive process, backed by the necessary political will and committed project champions, is also critical; clarity and transparency of objectives by all stakeholders – uncommon when private profits for silent property owners are often at stake – means real value and authentic values can be aired and negotiated. Two case studies explored in the next chapter, Interstate 11 (I-11) in the Arizona/Nevada Sun Corridor and the Northside-Southside MetroLink light-rail expansion in St. Louis, Missouri, were both early in the planning stages when we partnered with state and city agencies and took on their challenges in the design studio. By involving architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and urban design students and faculty as speculative thinkers for a reimagined I-11 Supercorridor, our external perspective and political neutrality helped siloed agencies soften their edges and see and embrace a more imaginative future. With economic development and expanded manufacturing touted as the predominant reason to build I-11, focusing only on increased car and truck traffic – the primary task of the assigned DOT agencies – was limiting and illogical. An alternative sustainability-first agenda for the corridor introduced by the Sonoran Institute, an Arizona-based conservation organization, in conjunction with the studio mission, revealed the possibility for higher collective value derived from preservation of significant natural landscapes, recharge of natural resources, and development of new green industries. One of the earliest technical memos on I-11 outlined a range of

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potential partners – the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Digital Arizona Program (a broadband initiative), the Bureau of Land Management, and several American Indian tribes – whose stake in this project, if treated as collaborators rather than simplified “opportunities” or “constraints,” could radically expand the value of the infrastructural investment. A shift in focus required dispelling several assumptions about traffic, growth, and autodependency that were at the core of the argument for building I-11. The first is that any growth in population inherently must also include equivalent growth in car traffic, ruling out other modalities as ways to transport people and goods. The second – often perpetuated by traditional traffic engineers – is that more and more lanes are then the sole answer to that projected growth. In actuality, more lanes just induce more traffic in the long run, which is only a positive form of growth if the desired result is more auto dependency (along with all its negative externalities). Third, if the larger aim of the investment is to accommodate – even encourage – new local industry, particularly in southern Arizona, then highspeed, limited access through-traffic is unlikely to produce environments of quality that would then attract long-lasting communities.6 Reframing larger questions of growth, manufacturing, and transportation demands a much broader range of voices beyond the state Department of Transportation. With rapid changes in mobility, technology, and energy on the horizon, accessing potential new amenities and accommodating a different kind of projected growth requires a wide suite of modalities and consideration of changing work/live, commute, and supply/demand patterns. These broader aims require cooperation across agencies beyond rail and road with waste and stormwater, parks and recreation, housing and urban development, and environmental protection, as well as nonprofits and private innovators. More broadly conceived, the idea of moving

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goods and people and access by humans and nonhumans demands a far more complex set of relationships than typical DOT-led projects provide. Starting early in the process requires receptivity to possible detours, but also builds broader, collective commitment to longer-term and higher levels of success across the board – socially, environmentally, and economically. Who is at the decision-making table has the potential to reveal unconsidered opportunities for cross-pollination, multifunctionality, and social productivity that traditional planners, agencies, and engineers might not consider under classical standards often focused on efficiency. A greater complexity of questions around the goals of mega-investments like infrastructure from a variety of perspectives might seem to muddy the waters, but in the end can produce exponentially more productive results for a much broader constituency. Transforming the prototype calls for questioning the status quo scenario of the rigidly homogeneous and repetitive infrastructural object. Freeways, for example, have historically been determined by efficiency of speed and traffic throughput regardless of environmental impacts, context specificity, or alternative opportunities. Next generation infrastructure questions the validity of these rigid, one-sizefits-all standards, particularly in the face of a radically transforming infrastructural landscape. Design-based collective speculation, as opposed to efficiencies determined only by engineering requirements, opens up the opportunity for a social and environmental performance-based agenda. Nowhere has the resistance to changing standards been more evident than in highway design. Though many of the ramifications of modernist planning are heavily criticized in both discourse and practice, for the most part, the success of auto-centric infrastructure is still measured on the same efficiency-first criteria –

(experience, contextual relevance, or convenience – not to mention environmental impact). Additionally, the necessary excess capacity of such unhindered mobility ignores the cumulative cost of creating infrastructure whose main objective is to be primarily underutilized; nearly empty roads rank high in ease of traffic flow.

National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), Zones of the Future Street. From Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism, 2019.

the ability to accomplish its single function at greatest speed and capacity – as it has been for well over half a century. Roads are commonly evaluated by a measure known as Level of Service (LOS), which predominantly values access of individual drivers to unhindered speed. An A rating, the highest, indicates free-flowing traffic at or above posted speed limits with low vehicle density and easy maneuverability. Ratings decrease as smooth traffic flow – also called uninterrupted throughput – decreases. Though Level C can be satisfactory but compromised, and D can be tolerable, grade inflation (building for an A rating when really a C will do) that perpetuates car dominance is common, for both political and logistical reasons.7 LOS as an evaluative metric institutionalizes flow efficiencies as the primary measure of infrastructural success. An A-rated road could, in fact, fail miserably in any number of other measures

More recently, factors like multimodal capacity, smart technology and innovation, and environmental impact have been gaining importance alongside LOS and, in some cases, have brought an end to LOS as the guiding design factor. California is shifting away from LOS as a primary determinant of street design and toward more inclusive measures that replace speed and efficiency as the goal with number of possible trips regardless of modality. This shifts the emphasis from a car-centric priority system to one that appraises mobility of people, a change partly due to the efforts of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO). Since its founding in 1996, NACTO has worked to change the efficiency-first paradigm through policies, handbooks, and built experiments, or “pop-ups.” As a professional organization with sixty-plus member cities, NACTO aims to help cities reclaim street space as diverse, multimodal public space. Janette Sadik-Kahn, the dynamic New York transportation commissioner responsible for four hundred miles of bike lanes, the launch of the country’s biggest and most visible bike share, and the tactical phenomenon that was the pedestrian pop-up precursor of a new car-light Times Square, spearheaded NACTO through the production of its Urban Street Design Guide. The first of a multipart series (which now includes guides on transit street design, urban bikeways, urban street stormwater, and – the very newest – streets for political protest), this publication shifted the paradigm from the safety and efficiency standards dictated by the engineers of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) to those that support quality of life and diversity of speed and access. By creating a coalition of

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agencies and leadership who share knowledge, NACTO has been extremely effective in creating policy and implementing projects-of-proof that serve as reference for transformation in other cities. The Times Square effect may be less known than the High Line effect, but the demonstration project strategy that allowed the radical transformation from traffic juggernaut to dynamic pedestrian oasis has been used in tactical urbanism, parklets, and pop-up bike lanes for long-term change in cities around the world. Of course, city streets and high-speed, limited access freeways are different beasts – but not so different, in that both were long considered the untouchable realm of traffic engineers in the age of auto dominance. If one can change so radically, the other can be reconsidered, too. The design of freeways is virtually unchanged since the first modern-era versions were constructed beginning in the 1940s. Rather than replicating the historical standard, Interstate 11 could exemplify a new prototype by adopting an entirely new kind of symbiotic multifunctionality. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake in creating new infrastructure, the option to choose rigid standards that are equally as inflexible for changing technology and demographic shifts and unable to adapt to the impacts of climate change is, in the words of our partners at the Arizona Department of Transportation, investing in a future that is already obsolete. As fewer resources are available to solve more and more complicated problems, infrastructural bundling is one strategy for doing more with less. Used informally for centuries in small, localized ways, bundling infrastructure became less prevalent with the modern era’s attraction to large-scale master planning and single-use efficiency as a guiding metric. Texas’s $175 billion Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) was the largest proposed case to date. As planned, the 4,000-mile-long, 1,200-foot wide network incorporated lanes for cars and trucks; space for commuter, freight, and high-speed rail tracks; and underground capacity for water,

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electric, gas, oil, and telecommunication lines. The advantages of the TTC included long-term economic efficiency, streamlined procurement and construction processes, and a dedicated long-range route to alleviate localized traffic congestion. The disadvantages, though, were numerous, including huge up-front costs, a wide swath of land impacts, security vulnerabilities, and, in this case, resident outcry against tolls brought on by the public-private financing model and the estimated 580,000 acres of private property at risk of appropriation by the state. The Trans-Texas Corridor’s critical fault, though, was its model of infrastructural adjacency rather than infrastructural symbiosis. Lining up infrastructural conduits, though potentially more efficient than scattered construction, takes vast amounts of space and does little to capitalize on their potential interdependence, provide new amenities, or lower the collective environmental footprint. The quartermile right-of-way necessary in the Trans-Texas plan would have consumed disproportionate amounts of property from individual owners and blocked a wide swath of transverse movement of people and animals. Taking resident feedback into account, the Texas DOT revised the project scope in 2009 toward narrower and shorter segments, then cancelled the project altogether in 2011. Infrastructural symbiosis, the most beneficial form of bundling, is one of the essential criteria for the creation of next generation infrastructure. In infrastructural symbiosis, systems coexist for mutual benefit, allowing the by-products of one system to be used as fuel for another. Also coined infrastructural ecology by researcher and practitioner Hillary Brown, these inter-reliant relationships can intentionally mimic the combined natural advantages of biodiverse ecosystem practices (like permaculture) with the human-cultivated advantages of industrial symbiosis.8 In permaculture, the integrated functions of particular co-located plants can maximize yield, reduce loss from disease and erosion, and eliminate waste or increase

efficiencies through the sharing of critical resources. In the late 1980s, practices of industrial symbiosis emerged that encouraged the co-location of cooperative commercial industries, complementary public amenities and energy production.9 The eco-industrial park in Kalundborg, Denmark, is a particularly productive model, where twenty-two separate systems exchanges between waste treatment, farming, energy production, and drywall manufacturing save 635,000 tons of CO2 emissions and four million cubic meters of water annually while also providing additional revenue for the partners.10 Now approaching its fiftieth anniversary, Kalundborg Symbiosis continues to expand and refine its model, aiming for an entirely circular economy within the eleven-partner set by 2025; the project is committed to a completely closed loop resource system, decoupling the relationship between economic growth and resource extraction – a radical proposition for industrial development and sustainability. As climate change impacts intensify, these infrastructural partnerships are also more adaptable and flexible, radically increasing infrastructural resilience. As Brown writes, This term [post-industrial infrastructural systems] highlights new ways of thinking in which constructed systems are continuous with and dependent upon natural systems and upon each other, and hegemony over nature is not assumed. A post-industrial outlook also implies less emphasis on things and more emphasis on relationships; greater attention to reciprocity between systems; more contextual, or ‘situated’ knowledge; and, ultimately, more-adaptable regulatory institutions.11 Symbiotic thinking between human-made systems, then, is better, but not enough. Infrastructural ecology calls for a readjustment in the paradigm of human dominance and a recognition in the value of integrated and site-specific thinking. Really transforming the prototype

Kalundborg Symbiosis diagram adapted by Hillary Brown, 2014, from Noel Brings Jacobsen (2006) and Teresa Domenech and Michael Davies (2011).

means a new basis for design, one that recognizes the limitations, waste, and risk of rigid monofunctionality and infrastructural isolation, where symbiotic thinking becomes the norm rather than the exception. Evolving the paradigm means beginning to think entirely differently about the role infrastructure plays in our social, spatial, environmental, and economic structure. It means considering mobility, energy, water, waste, food, parks and other green space, recreation, information, telecommunications, education, and air as systems designed to be interdependent, beautiful, and productive – a robust twenty-first century civic core designed for equitable access and distribution while supporting diversity and symbiosis. It means reconceptualizing infrastructure as the largest public space component of a twenty-first century networked city – public not just by nature of its funding mechanisms, but also supportive of a shared sense of collective evolution, occupation, ownership, and use, even (or perhaps mostly) if those uses instigate contestation and discomfort.

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Measuring what matters seeks to permanently shift both “measuring” and “what matters” from indiscriminate increases in economic activity to a more broadly encompassing and nuanced recognition of costs and benefits, particularly the costs and benefits to the commons, which allows for the widest and most equitable accounting. To do this we must take into account three factors: (1) the difference between good dollars and bad dollars; (2) under- and unaccounted for costs, including the costs of inequity; and (3) the systemic advantages of bundling. Developing metrics that transcend the predominance of economics is challenging. In the case of St. Louis’s Northside-Southside MetroLink, we tested three measurement approaches – Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), Opportunity Mapping (developed by the Kirwan Institute), and New York City’s Equality Indicators – to help determine the most critical, context-specific objectives to measure. In terms of shifting the paradigm, one approach fundamentally tips the scales. GPI is a framework intended to measure the degree to which a country or a state’s economic investments contribute positively or negatively to overall health and well-being. The method emerged out of ecological economics and takes added inspiration from more socially oriented instruments, like Bhutan’s Happiness Index.12 GPI aims to combat the all-growth-isgood deceit of GDP by differentiating the value of negative expenditures, like recovering from natural disaster and war, from the value of positive ones, like new schools and innovation. It also inserts costs that often go unaccounted for, like the community cost of incarceration or the value of rootedness or volunteering.13 Its environmental segment puts added emphasis on the heavy costs of water, air, and noise pollution and loss of wetlands, farmlands, and forest cover. Vermont and Maryland have both officially adopted GPI, and other states, including Oregon and Missouri, have made progress toward developing GPI frameworks. GPI mea-

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Genuine Progress Indicators diagram. Image courtesy of the Donella Meadows Project at the Academy for Systems Change

surements often show a stark contrast with GDP, and in particular dispute the positive gains claimed by the federal government since the 1980s.14 For example, though per capita GDP shows steady increases since the 1960s, due in part to large gains in the stock market, personal income and individual wealth of all but the most affluent have not kept pace, leaving a gaping disparity between the governmental claims of increased prosperity and the reality of most people’s lives.15 Ecological economics, the discipline under which GPI emerged, tackles the problem of the all-encompassing economic umbrella embedded in the Brundtland Report and Campbell’s triangle (among most every other model of development) by fundamentally flipping the presumptions on which neoclassical economics rests. Ecological economics is a relatively new offshoot of economics that disputes the premise that all resources exist within, are subservient to, and are defined by an economic market. Rather than assuming the value of natural resources is

as raw materials for sale or for manufacturing in service of economic growth, ecological economics sees markets and economies as embedded within rather than dominant over the natural ecological system (of which humans are a part); rather than assuming unlimited “natural capital” (an unabashedly biased term), ecological economics recognizes both the limited carrying capacity of the earth’s resources and the laws of thermodynamics that include the irreversibility of resource depletion. In 2009, author and academic Eric Zencey pointed to the Great Recession as an ideal time to finally ditch GDP, an outmoded measure that reflects “gross domestic transactions” – neither real growth nor real progress – and replace it with something that more accurately measures economic welfare: Common sense tells us that if we want an accurate accounting of change in our level of economic well-being we need to subtract costs from benefits and count all costs, including those of ecosystem services when they are lost to development. These include storm and flood protection, water purification and delivery, maintenance of soil fertility, pollination of plants and regulation of our climate on a global and local scale. (One recent estimate puts the minimum market value of all such natural-capital services at $33 trillion per year.) Nature has aesthetic and moral value as well; some of us experience awe, wonder and humility in our encounters with it. But we don’t have to go so far as to include such subjective intangibles in order to fix the national income accounts. As stressed ecosystems worldwide disappear, it will get easier and easier to assign a nonsubjective valuation to them; and value them we must if we are to keep them at all. No civilization can survive their loss.16 With the slow and sporadic adoption of GPI, states with more proactive agendas and more progressive politics are incorporating metrics that, though critical to human and nonhuman

well-being, are more difficult to quantify easily. GPI provides one method for that translation, and though its catchment of factors is more accurate and more inclusive, the bottom line is still translated into the common language of development – costs and benefits. In what is a surprising turn of events – as often happens in paradigm shifts – two recent proclamations seem to indicate a tipping point in evolution away from the twentieth-century infrastructure paradigm. First was the announcement in January 2020 by the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, that the notoriously oil-driven state will stop building roads. At a speech in San Antonio, he said, “The bottom line is this: The way people get around, the way people live is going to change. As a result, this generation of roads that [Texas Transportation Commission Chairman] Bruce Bugg is in charge of building is probably the last major buildout of roads we’ll have in the state of Texas, even considering the fact that Texas is the fastest-growing state in America.”17 Not only the fastest-growing state in America, Texas tops the country in total miles of public road (almost 315,000) as well as oil production (by far), so a move away from road building in Texas signifies a kind of trickle-up demand for urban sustainability. The lifestyle choices of millennials who are seeking independence from cars and higher density living are now reaching previous strongholds of resistance. The fact that the governor is recognizing that state growth depends on auto-free options rather than auto-centric ones hitches economic development to a new, more sustainably minded star. The second proclamation is even more shocking and comes from financial giant investment group BlackRock. In its 2020 letter to clients, BlackRock’s Global Executive Committee lays out the company’s new and unequivocal commitment to “sustainable, resilient, and transparent portfolios” with “sustainability as [its] new standard for investing.”18 Recognizing the undeniable risks of climate change and the looming energy transition, the firm is committing to an

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“ESG” – environmental, social, and governance – evaluation factor for all its investments. It is disinvesting in companies that focus production on thermal coal and improving the ability to screen out companies with fossil fuel connections of any kind. It is increasing its $50 billion investment in renewable energy infrastructure, green bond funds, and circular economy strategies. It is using its substantial voice to vote against companies and management that have not shown substantial progress toward planning for the climate impacts outlined in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and pressuring others to publicly announce their compliance with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures; BlackRock voted against or withheld votes from 4,800 directors at 2,700 different companies because they did not comply or were not complying fast enough. BlackRock has created a public-private climate finance partnership with France, Germany, and a host of global foundations to improve financing mechanisms specifically for infrastructure investment. In a letter to CEOs posted on the company’s website, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink explained, The need is particularly urgent for cities, because the many components of municipal infrastructure – from roads to sewers to transit – have been built for tolerances and weather conditions that do not align with the new climate reality. In the short term, some of the work to mitigate climate risk could create more economic activity. Yet we are facing the ultimate long-term problem. We don’t yet know which predictions about the climate will be most accurate, nor what effects we have failed to consider. But there is no denying the direction we are heading. Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change.19 One could argue that this is a capitalist, profit-based move no different from investing in

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fracking in the last decade or oil in the decades before, but this is a sea change in direction – away from, not toward, the use of limited resources. BlackRock, and others, are also finally pointing toward the high cost of NOT acting, a formerly abstract and immeasurable notion of value. With a political landscape divided, a recent president who took pride in exiting the Paris climate agreement, and conservatives in general still skeptical of global warming, the broad public coverage of BlackRock’s new policies amplified the position that environmental protection and positive social impact are directly tied to global wealth, and pressure for corporate conscientiousness may speed up the transition. If a global company that manages over $120 billion of assets is shifting its investment strategy to a sustainability-first model as a result of the massive – and yet indeterminate – social and environmental risks of climate change, and publicly pressuring others to come along, then perhaps a major shift in values is underway. As in all paradigm shifts, this one will be defined by the revelation that previous worldviews are radically incomplete or incorrect and that the next phase of infrastructural adaptation and conceptualization must pivot. For example, we know building I-11 the same way that interstates were constructed in the fifties, sixties, and seventies runs the risk of exacerbating the decentralized, low-density, highly destructive development patterns typical of Tucson, Phoenix, and Las Vegas today. Yet the growth machine continues to insist on the primacy of “highest and best use” – real estate development slang for maximized profit – and governments readily support the claim that engineering-first, with its standardized components, is the only path to financial efficiency. The former is playing out in 2020 in the negotiations for the alignment of I-11 near Tucson; select representatives for the surrounding county continue to push an environmentally destructive bypass option into Avra Valley, a road that would barely fit between Saguaro National Park and important Tohono O’odham tribal lands. Though the argu-

ment for the change away from a profit-driven infrastructure process and efficiency-first, monofunctional design is evident, momentum is often difficult to overcome. The paradigm shift necessary here is supported in part by changing “what matters” when we do the accounting on success. This is not an argument that takes aim at the root injustices of capitalism from a labor perspective, though a range of justice-focused planners have valiantly advanced those discussions, nor is it one that explicitly calls out tools like Community Benefits Agreements or more equitable allocation of tax incentives, though both are vehicles among many that can help mitigate the access and distribution imbalances found frequently in infrastructural siting. 20 The real paradigm shift will come either when there is broad recognition that costs and benefits involve value far beyond money made and lost, or when money made and lost relies far more heavily on the value of the commons than on the value of personal or corporate profit. Though the former might be a more ideal reflection of a society motivated by higher collective ethics, the latter is still a step closer to converting the system toward social and environmental gains. The Green New Deal (GND), one public works option of such a paradigm shift, will still be critiqued in Congress for its price tag, but like the WPA before it, the GND recognizes the value of big vision, collective thinking, and optimism as necessary wind in the sails of change.

Voices at the table empowered to prioritize values like neighborhood health, environmental justice, or equal education can radically shift project aims. In addition, prototypes that account for environmental losses as costs will aim to find symbiotic relationships that increase interconnectivity and decrease human and nonhuman ecosystem damage. When measuring includes “that which makes life worthwhile,” as Robert Kennedy said when pointing out the fatal flaw in GDP, then successful cities will be the ones where growth is measured in healthy years lived, volunteer hours, and the degree to which infrastructure supports clean air, clean water, and a vital public realm – all at the same time.

Together, broadening the process and transforming the prototype contribute to the transformation in measuring what matters, and the three together help shift the paradigm. With a more inclusive set of project stakeholders representing a broader range of interests able to work across more flexible and cooperative agencies, the diversity of values represented would shift away from the myopic task of singular problem solving and toward larger, across-theboard improvements in quality of services, health of the environment, and quality of life.

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NOTES

These ideas were first published in Linda C. Samuels, “A Case for Infrastructural Opportunism,” Technology|Architecture + Design 3, no. 1 (2019): 16–22. 2 Scott Campbell, “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities?: Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development,” Journal of the American Planning Association 62, no. 3 (1996): 296–312. 3 The Journal of the American Planning Association published an issue dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of Campbell’s article (referenced above): see Sandra Rosenbloom, “Celebrating a Special Anniversary: A Time for Reflection,” Journal of the American Planning Association 82, no. 4 (2016): 371–373. 4 See Kent E. Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). See Chapter 2 in particular: “Measuring the Seriousness of Sustainable Cities,” 37–122. 5 See Samuels. 6 The small-scale example of this same dilemma is the Downtown Links project in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson is in what I call an “infrastructural adolescence” phase because it is simultaneously – and often antithetically – trying to evolve in a more sustainable direction while still investing in last century mobility. The Links is a limited access bypass around the city’s small downtown that would direct traffic from the eastern suburbs to the interstate, avoiding the urban core. Dozens of buildings have been erased from the fabric to make way for this unneeded roadway. At the same time, the city has invested millions in a new streetcar that does the opposite: connect inner ring neighborhoods to downtown for greater access. The Links is what I call a zombie road, a project that should die but lives on and on because of some self-perpetuating force beyond desire or logic. 7 See William R. McShane and Roger R. Roess, Traffic Engineering (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990). 8 Hillary Brown, Next Generation Infrastructure: Principles for Post-Industrial Public Works (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014). 9 Brown. 10 Brown; for revised numbers, see Sönnich Dahl Sönnichsen and Jesper Clement, “Kalundborg Symbiosis for the ‘Win Win Gothenburg Sustainability Award 2018,’” accessed November 29, 2020 http://www.symbiosis.dk/en/systems-make-it1

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possible-people-make-it-happen/. Brown, 9–10. 12 For more information on Bhutan’s Happiness Index, see “Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index,” Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, accessed November 29, 2020, https://ophi.org.uk/ policy/gross-national-happiness-index/. 13 In particular, in defense of the value of natural capital – and the cost of its loss – author and academic Eric Zencey argued, “Wise decisions depend on accurate assessments of the costs and benefits of different courses of action. If we don’t count ecosystem services as a benefit in our basic measure of well-being, their loss can’t be counted as a cost – and then economic decision-making can’t help but lead us to undesirable and perversely un-economic outcomes.” Measuring what matters also entails taking into account the cost of losing it. Eric Zencey, “G.D.P. R.I.P.,” New York Times, August 9, 2009, https://www. nytimes.com/2009/08/10/opinion/10zencey.html. 14 See Lew Daly and Stephen Posner, Beyond GDP: New Measures for a New Economy (New York: Demos, 2011); and Lew Daly and Sean McElwee, “Forget the GDP. Some States Have Found a Better Way to Measure Our Progress,” New Republic, February 3, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/116461/gpibetter-gdp-measuring-united-states-progress. 15 Lew Daly, J. Mijin Cha, and Dan Thompson, “Does Growth Equal Progress? The Myth of GDP,” Demos, January 26, 2012. https://www.demos.org/research/ does-growth-equal-progress-myth-gdp; and David Leonhardt, “We’re Measuring the Economy All Wrong,” New York Times, September 14, 2018. 16 Zencey. 17 Quoted in Jackie Wang, “Gov. Greg Abbott: Emphasis on Building Out Texas Roads ‘Is Going to Change’,” Rivard Report, January 8, 2020, https:// sanantonioreport.org/gov-greg-abbott-emphasison-building-out-texas-roads-is-going-to-change/?. 18 BlackRock Global Executive Committee, “Sustainability as BlackRock’s New Standard for Investing,” BlackRock website, accessed November 29, 2020, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/blackrock-client-letter. 19 Larry Fink, “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance,” BlackRock website, accessed November 29, 2020, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/inves11

tor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter. 20 See Susan S. Fainstein’s The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), Chapters 1 and 2 in particular, for coverage of these ongoing discussions in the planning field.

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04. INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES I-11 SUPERCORRIDOR + NS-SS MetroLink The three strategies presented in the previous chapter – broadening the process, transforming the prototype, and measuring what matters – are fundamental to the paradigm shift necessary to move away from last generation infrastructure design and toward projects that advance more equitable and ecological solutions. As an academic, the test ground for these new ideas is often in the design studio environment, where students benefit from exposure to real-world projects and partners benefit from the research of faculty and the creative energy of young designers. The two primary cases of infrastructural opportunism explored here, Interstate 11 (I-11), which traverses the Southwest from the US-Mexico border north through Arizona and Nevada, and the Northside-Southside (NSSS) MetroLink light rail expansion in St. Louis, Missouri, emerged out of opportunities for architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design students in my design studios at the University of Arizona and Washington University in St. Louis to work with state and city agencies (respectively) to influence the paths of major infrastructural investments toward next generation rather than last generation scenarios. Because these are real works in progress that we hope to affect, it was critical that our work not be immediately dismissed as naive, overly idealistic, or inconsequential. Involvement of agency stakeholders from the beginning assured some degree of buy-in and regular cross-checks by

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those engaged in daily planning and implementation. One of the projects, I-11, is located in a booming region of the country, where expected population growth in the next decade for cities along the route varies from 40 to 400 percent, and which faces massive environmental challenges, particularly dangerous heat increases, water shortages, and continued loss of open space and natural land. The other, the NS-SS MetroLink, faces social justice challenges of a similar magnitude as it traverses high-vacancy areas of extreme disinvestment, rampant poverty, and life expectancy of roughly eighteen years less than in wealthy neighborhoods nearby. In each case, the academic/agency partnerships developed initially through an interdisciplinary urban design studio instigated by the scale of the infrastructural opportunity. As these projects show, amplifying the social and environmental advantages of billions of dollars and decades of investment could spark a sea change. The design studio setting has pros and cons. On the favorable side, faculty and students are seen as neutral in the political, ideological, legal, and economic conflicts often associated with public megaprojects. As disinterested participants with sustainability-based aims, we are able to make propositions, either radical or logical, without threat of repercussions from voters. By mandate of the learning objectives and the nature of grounding this work in a design

school, we typically think more projectively and progressively. Our process actively circumvents the traditional silos that limit cooperation across disciplines, agencies, and infrastructural types and questions restrictions that have otherwise become stiflingly habitual. Unlike formal engagement with practitioners, our collaboration with public agencies is mostly unscrutinized by their constituencies and free from taxpayer critique (unless it provides positive, appreciated returns, at which point it’s a win-win). Most importantly, students and faculty serve as a creative think tank for the agencies and stakeholders who rarely have the time it takes – or the job description – to pursue the research necessary for atypical solutions. The less progressive the city, the more this latter point rings true, and the more useful partnerships with academic institutions can be in developing creative alternatives. On the other hand, that same academic freedom, and the primary aim of student learning, means course deliverables are not intended to substitute for a professional product (though this can be different in community design centers or formal academic institutes, which often do work under a for-hire or pro bono model); our aim in these studios is not to provide official reports or pseudo-professional services – though research is conducted and substantiated – but to intervene in the process, shake up the paradigm, and show what is possible, rather than just probable. The limited academic timeline frequently misaligns with the progress of actual projects. Though we begin working far in advance of the slow pace of real implementation, and often continue the research after the semester ends, all of these major infrastructure projects – even those multiple years in – are unfinished. Because these are megaprojects that may take decades to realize, it is nearly impossible to engage them as a scholar or designer from instigation through to completion; primary stakeholders often mention the multi-administration, if not multigenerational perseverance necessary in projects of this scale, sometimes even to make microscopic level change. Yet because we are interested in impact

rather than historical analysis, engaging at a project’s embryonic phase is exactly what is necessary to change the long-term course of project priorities. In each of these cases, the research continued after the initial studios ended. Neither of these projects pursues ample enough relationships with residents or levels of community collaboration that would be appropriate were we to actually be engaged in project development or implementation. It would be misleading and an undue burden on neighbors to ask for their time without an assurance of our ability to directly influence the project. Many of the residents affected by the St. Louis project, for example, have been interviewed and surveyed for decades with little to show for it. In direct response to that deprivation, our work pilots several alternative models of engagement that were shared with city agencies and could be utilized to bring local experts into the center of the fold. Because the projects themselves are still works in progress, accurate assessment of our final, long-term impacts is difficult. However, some attempts to identify them are included below. These cases are intended to define strategies of Infrastructural Urbanism, explore the methods of interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary collaboration in an academic setting, and attempt to put forth a model for infrastructural evolution based in the next gen criteria and the four strategies for change. I-11 SUPERCORRIDOR In July 2012, President Barack Obama signed a $105 billion surface transportation act known as MAP-21 (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century). The first of its kind in almost a decade, this federal legislation updated a 1991 law by emphasizing multimodality and performance-based priorities. It also brought renewed attention to a proposed trading route connecting Canada, the US and Mexico (CANAMEX) that at full build-out would run from the port of Guaymas, Mexico, through Arizona and

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Nevada and eventually to the Canadian border. In addition to promising funding, MAP-21 gave the route a name, Interstate 11 – an anomaly in the east-west interstate naming system, which typically counts up in odd numbers from west to east.1 This multitrillion-dollar highway, in addition to generating up to $63 billion in projected combined economic and travel benefits, would remedy the highway gap between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona – the two largest US cities not connected by a federal interstate.2 The corridor justification report, which considers the entire Southern California megaregion in addition to Nevada and Arizona, makes a broad case for I-11 as an economic development tool and capacity building connector for integrated manufacturing between Mexico and the Southwest.3 With population in the Sun Corridor alone (the stretch from the US-Mexico border to just north of Phoenix) expected to reach 8 to 8.5 million by 2030, the report also argues that congestion levels demand road expansion, particularly in areas like Tucson, where no bypass road currently exists. But how growth and development happen next will prove this segment either the last piece of last generation interstate infrastructure, with all of its negative repercussions of sprawl, resource gluttony, and obsolescence, or the first piece of next generation interstate infrastructure, becoming instead a model of a new prototype and instigator of a new paradigm. Beyond simply prioritizing efficiency and flow over, say, experience and aesthetics, traffic planning tends to have an oversized role in the planning of our cities and regions. Designing a city – much less two booming, adjacent megaregions – based on traffic demands results in a place where moderating traffic flow is the highest priority and the dominant spatial determinant. Planning for cars and trucks first results in cities and regions that privilege cars and trucks over all other needs – as it has for the last seven decades. In addition, this approach to planning is self-fulfilling: the more roads are built, the more traffic fills them – the result of making driving easier, cheaper, and faster in

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the short term, which brings more drivers, hence more congestion, hence ultimately more negative impacts. Congestion relief through road expansion is short-lived; the environmental and social damage of road expansion, however, is not. But Interstate 11 is not really about congestion relief. For one, the congestion it claims to alleviate could be solved in other ways, all of which would contribute to the bigger stated goal of the I-11 justification report – a more robust, diversified, and sustainable region. In the area around Tucson, preliminary research by student planners showed that moderate behavioral shifts combined with even minor adjustments to anticipated transportation options (such as an expansion of intracity transit, new intercity rail options between Phoenix and Tucson, and increases in capacity from new technologies) would mean the existing interstate could likely accommodate currently projected needs at adequate levels. Their estimates also suggest that the cost of new commuter rail between Phoenix and Tucson would be equal to or less than that of a new I-11 bypass through Avra Valley, an area west of current Interstate 10 surrounded by significant animal habitat, Tohono O’odahm tribal lands, and Saguaro National Park. Certainly, in the “priority section” of the roadway – from Phoenix to Las Vegas, where no interstate currently exists – I-11 would promote greater travel efficiency and connectivity. Otherwise, based on the existing justification reports, I-11 is clearly a corridor intent on inducing a specific kind of demand: new economic growth. A primary objective of the new interstate is to make the Intermountain West and Sun Corridor more economically interconnected and nationally competitive in the growing global trade and manufacturing landscape. Whether raw materials come from a new port in Guaymas, Mexico, and move north through Nogales, Arizona, or manufactured goods from Asia travel east on Interstate 10 from Long Beach, California – two anticipated pathways of increasing trade activity – supporters project that a new corridor would facilitate an increase in economic activity throughout the

“Cognitive Mapping of the Big Picture,” Christopher Kosko, 2013.

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greater megapolitan region. Whether these projections would ultimately hold true and what the quality of that growth might be are unknown. Yet, as argued earlier in this book, growth for the sake of growth certainly brings major risks. Following the twentieth-century model of interstate building, the induced demand of I-11 would undoubtedly produce the same negative consequences as its ancestors in terms of pollution, sprawl, congestion, and wildlife disruption. Growth, particularly in areas of entirely new roadway, could spread across the desert in destructive patterns that demand high resource use, destroy sensitive wilderness and wildlife areas, and produce visual blight. The goal of the I-11 Supercorridor design project was not, however, to defend or deny the route or the alignment itself (other than taking the fairly vehement position that a new road through Avra Valley would serve limited interests and produce extensive environmental damage), but instead to encourage the alternative “green arrow” solution of next generation infrastructure. Green arrow solutions help solve infrastructural, environmental, and social crises rather than contributing to them. The green arrow thesis is: if an investment of $17 million to $70 million per lane, per mile is to be made in a new interstate,4 that massive investment should be leveraged to increase public benefit while reducing negative impacts. I-11 SUPERCORRIDOR STUDIO Completed in August 2013, the I-11 and Intermountain West Corridor Study: Corridor Justification Report, a study prepared for the Arizona and Nevada Departments of Transportation (ADOT and NDOT, respectively), remarkably suggested that a multifunctional, enhanced corridor was possible and desirable by both government agencies and community stakeholders and that further study of the concept was encouraged. From the report:

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There is considerable support for the study of a multifunctional Corridor that not only provides multimodal transportation opportunities but also houses assets that require similar rights-of-way. . . . Utility (including transmission lines and telecommunications) and energy (including liquid/natural gas, fiber/dark fiber, wind, and solar) options and other emerging/future opportunities were offered as potential candidates for shared or combined rights-of-way or easements. . . . The Corridor could be the opportunity to build a smart or “green” corridor of the future, serving as a new model for the movement of goods and people by learning from the best practices of previous corridor development.5 Capitalizing on this promising degree of agency interest, researchers and designers from architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and engineering departments at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University (ASU), and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) joined forces to investigate the possibility of transforming the proposed I-11 freeway from a limited-use, auto-dominant roadway into a sustainable, multifunctional, ecologically and socioeconomically focused “supercorridor.” Three design studios worked alternately in interdisciplinary and disciplinary-specific teams, both at our home institutions and together. Tasks fluctuated between the macro (network) and micro (node) scales of the I-11 route. Fourteen teams (seven from the University of Arizona, four from ASU, and three from UNLV) developed site-specific proposals, while additional teams of planning students investigated questions specific to route alternatives or macro concerns. Representatives from ADOT, the Sonoran Institute, Pima County, and Maricopa County as well as architects, landscape architects, and urban planners participated as real stakeholders throughout the course of the semester. Success was gauged by each team’s ability to test next generation infrastructure strategies and to capitalize on existing site conditions for larger, prototypical gains.6

Sited from Las Vegas to Nogales, the studio design proposals highlight a range of problems and opportunities inherent in a paradigmatic shift of this scale. Increasing temperatures, drought, fires, flooding, sandstorms, energy costs, and population are the predominant factors influencing the corridor planning and design processes. The rising use of big data and deployment of faster networks, along with disruptive innovations like driverless cars and smart surfaces, will have profound effects on its planning and design. Heightened energy demands and the need to reduce carbon emissions will force changes in technology and mobility habits. As the I-11 corridor will traverse world-class ecological landscapes with global value due to the high number of indigenous species, minimizing the corridor’s width in key areas is also essential. The I-11 Supercorridor scenarios in this chapter demonstrate co-location, multifunctional and symbiotic infrastructural bundling strategies which help reduce the corridor’s negative impacts and maximize its positive contributions. Infrastructures for renewable energy, water harvesting and distribution, and multimodal transportation as well as added public amenities and concentrated land use planning are considered collectively as part of the Supercorridor investment. The proposed route traverses territory with some of the highest capacity in the country for generating renewable energy, which can be both produced and distributed along its length and then used to feed all kinds of smart, related needs: autonomous vehicle charging stations, electric streetcars, and a range of new modalities and green industries. In the Tucson proposal, water harvested from condensate and cooling water from energy production are directed toward the dry Rillito River, where water recharge can revitalize riparian habitats and support recreation and tourism. The potential to co-locate renewable energy production and water capture with transit, freight, and auto traffic at this scale is an unprecedented opportunity. Designing their relationships symbiotically

means the Supercorridor has the potential for a net-positive contribution, making what seems to be a high initial investment an actual increase in long-term benefits. MAPPING AND METHODS The studios identified several relevant key conditions that defined both existing challenges and networks of opportunity in the 480 miles between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Nogales, Arizona. These areas of focus – poverty and economic growth, preservation of natural resources and ecotourism, population growth, transportation and mobility, water and energy – drove the criteria for determining how the investment in this regional infrastructure might be leveraged for greatest gain. The I-11 Supercorridor proposals attempt to mitigate impacts through smart land use, bundling of multiple services, and reduction of vehicle miles traveled to mitigate pollution and other negative impacts. They also add more public space to the corridor, include wildlife accommodations, and create new riparian areas for animals and people through water conservation and reuse. In addition to the designs themselves, each case shows existing and proposed improvements in the areas of energy, water, data, and mobility infrastructure. Three city cases – Tucson, Marana, and Casa Grande – were developed further, ending in more in-depth “results diagrams,” which speculate on anticipated gains from implementation of the design proposal. Amanda Gann and Jonell Diekmeier

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POPULATION AND TRANSPORTATION

Amanda Gann and Jonell Diekmeier

The introduction to this chapter mentions the region’s booming population generally, but it’s worth noting that even the smallest cities along the I -11 route – Nogales, Sahuarita, Kingman (each under 30,000 inhabitants), and Wickenburg (under 7,000) – are estimated to grow between 50 and 150 percent by 2030. Yet growth projections have, over time, gone down rather than up, dropping from a projection made in the late 1990s of 8.5 million new residents in the Sun Corridor by 2020 to a new projection, by the Morrison Institute, of 7.8 million new residents by 2030 – nearly a million fewer, and a decade later. This may reflect a slow to the boom or a recalculation following decades of faulty reliance on housing speculation as a growth indicator. For one of the fastest growing regions in the country, though, even a slight reduction could prefigure the potential and critical impacts of climate change on the region’s future. Tucson, for example, is preparing for a time when one hundred days over 100 degrees Farhenheit is the new norm. Water shortages, along with the increasing energy needs for moving that water, are often cited as the Southwest’s version of a growth boundary. Population projections drive traffic projections, too, so demand for congestion relief for future car miles that may not materialize is specious. Transportation behaviors are also changing for the first time in generations. Not only are millennials waiting longer to get driver’s licenses and purchase vehicles – if they do at all – new developments in rides-on-demand, car sharing, autonomous vehicles, and scooter and bike sharing are all changing the way we move around. Though some research dismissed early drops in car ownership or vehicle miles traveled as a result of the Great Recession, the trend is still sticking a decade on, and the

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impacts of these new technologies are just being sorted out. Demand for urban living is also on the rise for both millennials and baby boomers – two dominant American population sectors – so in addition to reductions in car ownership, alternative commuting patterns and labor and leisure practices are likely reducing miles traveled for existing vehicles and populations, too. Commuting changes are being further disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, while the West Coast’s worst fire season on record is further cementing the climate patterns of the last decade. If anything, car use due to widely and potentially permanently disrupted live/work patterns may be heading for a bigger dip and out migration from high -risk, low-water landscapes may be on the rise. Research by University of Arizona planning students based on existing Pima Area Gov ernment traffic projections showed that few road lengths in the southern portion of the proposed I -11 route experience substantial enough traffic delays that mitigation could not be achieved through increased investment in multimodal options, slight behavioral shifts, and incorporation of new technologies.7 Nearly two -thirds of the traffic around Tucson – the most congested segment – is intracity (com muters going from one part of the city to another), with an obvious rush-hour peak. This makes transit a well-matched alternative to increase urban connectivity while decreasing the peak of congestion. An averaging of all vehicles per hour per lane indicates that simply shaving off the peak would make existing road capacity sufficient. Other alternatives, like freight-only lanes, carpooling/HOV lanes, and increases in telecommuting and flextime (here, stay-at-home orders in 2020 are really opening up work options previously considered off-limits for many industries), also reduce the need for road widening. In addition, widening roads does little in the long run to relieve congestion problems – it only delays them. The rationale of traffic demand for I -11 is inherently faulty,

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TRAFFIC CALCULATIONS AND PROJECTIONS Amanda Gann, Jonell Diekmeier, and Robbie Aaron

EXISTING TRAFFIC 2010 5,000 UNITS PROJECTED TRAFFIC 2030 5,000 UNITS

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which promotes broader questioning of its justification and opens up opportunities for alternative visions. One option that could combat both poten tial traffic congestion (for both roads and overstressed airports) and the significant environmental impacts of truck-based freight is increased investment in rail. Both BNSF and Union Pacific operate freight lines in Arizona, with the majority of the roughly eighteen hundred miles of service running east to west across the state. In addition, two passenger rail lines also cross the state (a major reduction from years past), the Los Angeles– Chicago route, which stops at Winslow, Flagstaff, Williams Junction, and Kingman, and the Sunset Limited, which serves Benson, Tucson, Maricopa, and Yuma. However, no passenger rail connects the major cities of the Sun Corridor –Nogales to Tucson, Tucson to Phoenix, or Phoenix to Las Vegas – though ADOT has conducted over seven thousand public surveys on the topic and three proposed routes between Tucson and Phoenix alone have been under consideration for nearly a decade. These so-called orange, yellow, and green alternatives, with slight geographic branches, could serve between 1.5 and 2.5 million people between the state’s two biggest cities and in the multiple locations between. In 2011, the Arizona State Rail Plan called for expansive investment in both passenger and freight rail intended, per ADOT’s objectives, to: (1) improve mobility and accessibility to reduce congestion, leverage additional capacity on existing transportation systems, and catalyze smart growth planning; (2) support both economic growth and more livable communities to attract employers and employees; (3) promote sustainable transportation and land use coordination with dense, mixed-use development and multimodal options; and (4) preserve natural and cultural assets, protect wildlife corridors, and reduce energy use and transit-related pollution.8 They make a wellsubstantiated case for a network of intracity,

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intercity, and high-speed passenger rail (connecting the Intermountain West route to Las Vegas, San Diego, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles), plus expanded, separated freight lines. The environmental case for freight is strong: a single one hundred-car containerized train can carry the load of approximately 385 trucks; at full capacity, rail in Arizona could move about 8.3 million truckloads, or 23,000 trucks worth, of freight each day, reducing energy consumption by at least one - third and making a major dent in air pollution.9 The case for passenger rail is also well supported and centers on its role in sustainable growth, livable communities, environmental preservation, megaregional interconnectivity, and expanded tourism – with a side benefit of reduced traffic congestion and auto dependency. The state received a Federal Railroad Administration grant of $1 million and a matching state grant to more thoroughly study the extent of passenger rail advantages. Plans from ADOT show commuter, intercity, and high-speed rail integrated into the highway right- of-way of what was then called the Sun Corridor megapolitan regional spine – an early consideration of infrastructure bundling. Intercity rail between Phoenix and Tucson would be less costly and more environmentally friendly than building the I -11 bypass option through Avra Valley while solving the same stated goal of traffic reduction and providing an alternative route to the single interstate connection. The massive Port of Tucson also suggests the potential for increased rail activity. Sixty miles north of the Mexican border, with ten miles of private rail infrastructure and 1.8 million square feet of warehouse space, it is a gateway of both domestic and international intermodal connectivity. The port is an active foreign trade zone with customs-clearing capa bilities, meaning goods from other countries can bypass customs at the border and con nect directly through Tucson to the national rail network and the new I -11. As of March 2018, speculation was brewing about a possible Amazon distribution facility at the port, which

NAVAJO 2250 MW FOUR CORNERS 2,040 MW

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would add another two million square feet for goods distribution, including sixty -three loading docks and parking for almost four hundred transport trailers. Like the heated competition in 2014 between multiple western states to host the Tesla Gigafactory where electric motors and lithium ion battery cells are produced, the growth of privatized megadistribution and technology production weighs heavy on the demands of public infrastructure. Rail over truck distribution at that magnitude would tip the scales toward a green arrow scenario.

Energy and water Amanda Gann

Some of the biggest opportunities of major infrastructure investment in the state involve energy and water. Currently, solar power accounts for less than 1 percent of energy production in the Southwest, though the region has enough potential capacity to generate more than three times the equivalent energy consumption of the entire country. Though potential for renewables is high, and Arizona does rank second nationwide in non-fossil fuel use when hydro, nuclear, and solar are combined, the state still gets over a third of its energy from coal; cheap fossil fuels and high demand for cooling means Arizona still uses much more energy than it produces. In response to the demand for locations where land - intensive, utility- scale renewable energy could be generated, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved a new program in the six southwestern states identifying 285,000 acres of land in seventeen new Solar Energy Zones – two of which are in Arizona. The plan anticipates up to 27,000 megawatts of energy could be generated in those areas, which would power up to eight million homes – the entire projected 2030 population of the Sun Corridor. Arizona identified an additional 192,000 acres of BLM land and over 1.6 million acres in private and state lands as good candidates for further development of solar. These Renewable Energy Development Areas (REDAs) are located predominantly in the Sonoran Desert region of the state, much of which is within twenty miles of US Route 93 – the likely alignment for the proposed I-11 corridor. Co-locating renewable energy transmission in the I-11 Supercorridor would provide much-needed electrical transmission capacity to get Arizona’s renewable energy to markets in California and Nevada while empowering a future economy of more broadly realized clean renewable energy production, generation, and delivery. Arizona also invests a substantial portion of its energy in moving water through the state. Until

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EXISTING WATER SYSTEMS Amanda Gann

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the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station west of Phoenix closed in November 2019, over half of the energy it produced was used to move water through the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal, a relationship that was emblematic of the troubling energy-water nexus (some of that water was, in turn, used to cool the plant during energy production). In naturally hot, dry Arizona, agriculture counts for the largest use of water by a wide margin. The 336 -mile, concrete CAP delivers 2.8 million acre feet, half of the water needs of the four million people and 300,000 acres of irrigated farmland in central and southern Arizona. The rest is mostly pulled from rivers, streams, and aquifers, threatening both long-term sustainability and cooperative arrangements among neighbors (though greywater recycling and release is slowly increasing). As in all of the states served by the Colorado River, water rights are highly contentious and growing more so. The CAP is threatened by increasing extreme heat and drought in the Southwest, with reserves in Lake Powell and Lake Mead shrinking as temperatures rise and demand increases. Recipients in Mexico, further down the line, have been all but cut off because of shortages and drought. The politics of water are fierce, and the protection of water rights and priorities pits big agriculture and other water-hungry businesses (like energy production) against residential and environmental uses. In recent drought years, water-hogging cities like Los Angeles (though legally designated as high priority) have had to implement both voluntary and mandatory conservation efforts; in contrast to Phoenix, Tucson maintains an ethos of low water use, with policies aimed at recharging the aquifer and protecting nearly dry streams and plant and animal habitats. In a city with no stormwater system, averaging ten or fewer inches of rain per year punctuated by intense monsoons, many conscientious Tucsonans support DIY strategies including stormwater capture, condensate harvesting, and home cisterns. These are scalable models.

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PARKS AND POVERTY Amanda Gann

One of the most scenic and well-preserved states in the nation, Arizona has millions of acres of national parks, national forests, hiking and biking trails, and protected animal habitats. The abundance of recreation opportunities and a seasonally mild climate contribute to supporting 82,000 jobs and producing $350 million in sales tax revenues and about $5 billion in retail sales and services statewide. More than four million visitors go to the Grand Canyon alone each year, and over two million more visit Arizona’s state parks. Arizona’s public lands provide clean air and water for inhabitants and important habitat for native plants and animals, including Sonoran Desert species like desert bighorn sheep, mule deer, and the threatened Sonoran desert tortoise. The state is also home to over twenty American Indian tribes – including the two largest reservations in the US, the Navajo Nation and the Tohono O’odham Nation – in total incorporating one-fourth of the state’s total land area. The scale of this undeveloped land, including an additional 12.2 million acres of BLM public land in the state, contributes to its natural beauty, environmental quality, and preservation, but also carries social challenges. When the original research for the I-11 Supercorridor was completed, Arizona was struggling to get over the impacts of the Great Recession. The pre-recession economy relied heavily on construction and related services that provided rapid growth and opportunity for workers while the housing industry was booming, but the recovery has been slower than anticipated. In September 2014, Arizona’s unemployment rate was 7.1 percent – a full percentage point higher than the national average, including rates as high as 11 percent in Tucson, 13.8 percent in Avra Valley, and up to 17 percent in towns near the border. That same year, Arizona was the third-poorest state in the nation, with over 21 percent of its population living below the

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PARKS, FOREST AND SENSITIVE HABITATS Amanda Gann and Sandra Villatoro

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poverty line. In July 2020, a spike of coronavirus cases ravaged Arizona – like states all across the US – where tribal populations, like many populations of color, saw higher transmission rates and more fatalaties than white populations of the same region. Crises – from climate change to recessions to disease – hit populations of color the hardest, meaning investment in new infrastructure must also help fill gaps in access, land preservation, and health made by generations of institutionalized inequity. Much of the talk around I-11 is about diversifying the economy to create resilience in the job market. Arizona’s historically lucrative five Cs – cotton, copper, cattle, citrus, and climate – have been radically affected by temperature and water fluctuations and a changing cultural and economic landscape. Green and smart economies must be part of a broader solution, along with the renegotiation of water rights in defunct farmland for new kinds of more sustainable food production, public space, and recreation lands. Keeping complementary opportunities in mind made available through better and faster connectivity between cities (such as improved access to education, health facilities, and jobs) could make the corridor not just convenient, but more highly productive. If freeways are a double - edged sword, providing access but also causing disruption, the success of I-11 will be measured in part by how well it serves its vulnerable communities, increases opportunity for all residents, contributes to cleaner air and water, and protects important wildlife resources and natural areas.

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52,601 LAS VEGAS

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69,425

71,723

6.5

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME

$$$$$$$

TUCSON

36,939

11.1

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME

6.0

$$$$

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME SAHUARITA

$$$$$$$

NOGALES

27,500

17.3

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME

X = UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

$$$

$ = $10,000 ANNUALLY

ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE Amanda Gann and Sandra Villatoro

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE X = UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

$

$10,000 ANNUALLY

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

135

GREEN ARROW SOLUTIONS / FINDINGS The proposals completed in the studio were designed by teams of students in landscape architecture, planning, and architecture programs and show speculative responses to real conditions along the proposed I-11 route. Though context-specific, they are also intended to be prototypical. Wickenburg, for example, is a model of a small town potentially bypassed by a national-scale freeway concerned with its future relevance. Marana is a bedroom community for its larger neighbors in search of a unique identity and its own innovation-oriented urban core. Each proposal incorporates the next generation infrastructure criteria particularly maximizing opportunities for sustainable infrastructure by bundling energy, water, data, and mobility. Icons at the beginning of each project description show the infrastructure improvements proposed compared to existing conditions; the combined new infrastructure proposed across all the projects exhibits an impressive investment in renewable energy (primarily solar, but also wind and kinetic), extensive water capture and distribution, and pervasive expansion of transit, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure. While most of the projects focused on single sites, some focused

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INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

on broad approaches (like “tetrising” vehicles, where driverless cars self-arrange in tight configurations to save space, or wildlife crossings) for entire route sections. The final phase of the project was the “results” – measurements beyond simple proposed economic growth that were intended to be shared with a variety of audiences, including many who cared considerably about the single bottom line. The aim was to convince them that they couldn’t afford not to choose the green arrow scenario. The results were calculated at two scales, the network and the node. Network calculations (shown, right) focused on three large-scale changes that could radically shift the impacts of the entire interstate even prior to the more localized design interventions: (1) designing for high density, multifunctionality, and multimodality along the length of the interstate, rather than allowing predictable low density, auto-centric sprawl; (2) shifting a portion of freight movement from truck to rail and increasing inter- and intracity commuter rail by ADOT’s existing projections; and (3) shifting an additional 1 percent of vehicles from gas to electric. Using state projections for population and traffic growth, our estimates showed a substantial envi-

THE GREEN ARROW SCENARIO

SAVES 2.1

MIL

METRIC TONS CO2 EMISSIONS / YR

EQUIVALENT TO + 2.35 million + 2.35 million

residents in suburban growth residents in smart growth patterns patterns instead

+ 85,000 + 85,000

new vehicle trips/day new vehicle trips/day - shifts to rail & electric vehicles

= = + 4.8 million - 1.6 million

metric tons CO2 metric tons CO2 emissions/yr (sprawl) emissions/yr (smart growth)

+ 1.8 million - .1 million

metric tons CO2 metric tons/year for commuter emissions/yr (passenger) rail estimates

+ 4.1 million - .05 million

metric tons CO2 metric tons/year for 1% emissions/yr (freight) estimated electric vehicles

- .4 million

metric tons/year shifting 10% truck freight to rail

+ 10.7 MIL SAVES 2.1 MIL metric tons CO2 metric tons CO2 emissions/yr emissions/yr

180,000

households

540,000

people or

20

PERCENT of total projected population growth

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

137

ronmental cost differential between the status quo and next generation scenarios. Arizona is expecting nearly 2.35 million new residents by 2030, 1.2 million of whom will inhabit the seven cities we studied along the I-11 route. With that growth, the state expects the average annual daily traffic (AADT) to rise by 85,000 new vehicle trips per day. Freight typically accounts for 20 percent of trips. Increasing the estimated traffic by an additional 10 percent to account for induced demand brought about by the new interstate, freight trips would emit about 4.1 metric tons of CO2 per year. The other 80 percent of trips are made by passenger vehicles, which at an optimistic standard of 35 miles per gallon fuel efficiency would emit about 1.8 million metric tons of CO2 per year. The new residents, according to research by ASU scholars who study the impacts of development, would emit an additional 4.8 million tons of CO2 emissions per year simply by living in conditions similar to common densities of suburban Phoenix or Tucson.10 The same residents, if offered different options in terms of housing developments and modality, can make a big dent in the greenhouse gas emissions of the region. “Smart growth” development rather than sprawl (higher density living, greater walkability, and more integrated living, working, shopping, and recreation options) would save about 1.2 million tons of emissions of CO2 per year. Shifting just 10 percent of the total freight load from truck to rail saves an additional 400,000 metric tons. If only 1 percent of trips were made in electric vehicles rather than gas powered vehicles, 50,000 metric tons less CO2 would be produced. Along those same lines, even ADOT’s rather low projections for commuter and high-speed rail (around 2.9 million and 1.4 million riders annually, respectively) would contribute to an additional reduction of CO2 by 100,000 metric tons. These changes – some of which are happening already in cities across the country – would save, in total, an estimated 2.1 million metric tons of

138

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

CO2 emissions per year.11 That number is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 180,000 households, or 540,000 people – a full 20 percent of the anticipated population growth in the region. These numbers, though general, expose not only the cost of unchecked population and traffic growth, but highlight the benefits of better planning, regardless of the proposed advantages of next generation infrastructure. Most importantly, these three changes – “smart” planning, shift to freight rail, and increase in electric vehicles – and their accompanying behavioral shifts would accommodate predicted mobility increases without the need for additional highway lanes, freeing up space and dollars for other critical investments. The additional advantages of next generation infrastructure, at this point, are difficult to calculate accurately but worthy of greater consideration. Three of the projects sited in southern Arizona (Tucson, Marana, and Casa Grande) include a diagrammatic equation at the end of their respective sections that loosely sums the benefits of symbiotic energy, water, data, and mobility systems. Calculations and graphic representations illustrate estimates of the total renewable energy generated in each project based on quantities of solar, kinetic, and wind infrastructure plus the energy uses offset by renewable production. These diagrams also indicate rough amounts for total water harvesting and condensate collection and the resultant advantages to riparian areas. In Tucson, for example, 400 gigawatt hours of solar energy offset the energy needs of three streetcars, 500 electric car-share vehicles, and more than 250 houses, plus offices, restaurants, and hotel rooms. Over 6 million gallons of water harvesting from roof surfaces and 17 million gallons from air conditioning condensate supply 72 acre-feet of water recharge into the Santa Cruz River (see pages 166-167). Though based on square footages from the design proposals and accepted efficiency rates for the types of solar panels or embedded photovoltaics selected, these estimates make leaps between schematic design and real metrics.

The results diagrams are intended to show the scale at which holistic thinking could have major impact. The benefits of concentrating development in sustainable nodes where priorities are aligned with an agenda of environmental consciousness and livability make clear that the relevant comparison is not really between an old road and a new one; rather, it is between an old way of thinking and a new urban paradigm that seeks more from public infrastructure investment. In these green arrow scenarios, economic development grows from local resources and site-specific opportunities amplified by the increase in interconnectivity rather than from unreliable, uneven, and indiscriminately induced growth. What should be considered is the high cost of business as usual, the lost opportunity value of infrastructure development that is not holistically designed, context sensitive, and economically sustainable. In a place as hot, dry, and ostensibly poor as Arizona, building a red arrow project could be a true disaster.

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

139

I-11 Supercorridor Studio Projects The studio focused on eleven sites along the future I-11 route between Nogales and Las Vegas, each selected for specific attributes that suggested key prototypical conditions. The seven University of Arizona projects each tackled a different urban type: border crossing (Nogales), industrial brownfield site (Sahuarita), divided neighborhood (North Tucson), urban center (Tucson), suburban sprawl (Marana), obsolete manufacturing zone (Casa Grande), and protected landscape (Avra Valley). Several of the projects from UNLV focused on broader concepts applicable to numerous locations along the route. The ASU teams looked at the opposite extremes of Phoenix, a rapidly growing, multimodal hub, and nearby Wickenburg, a historical small town threatened by the bypass of I-11. Three projects (Tucson, Marana, and Casa Grande) were developed further than the others over an additional summer of investigation and also include results diagrams that illustrate the positive outcomes of designing for a next generation Supercorridor. The descriptions below include these three more extensive investigations, along with a selection of other studio projects.

Future I -11 between Tucson and Phoenix, 2014 Image: Linda C. Samuels

140

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

141

THE LINKAGE NOGALES

The Linkage is located in Nogales, Arizona, where the I-11 corridor crosses the US-Mexico border. The site comprises two ports of entry – the Nogales-Mariposa Port of Entry to the west, and the Nogales-Grand Avenue Port of Entry, located downtown and to the east – and the three miles between them. More than 2.8 million private vehicles, 307,000 commercial vehicles, and 3.2 million pedestrians cross northward through the Mariposa port each year. A $213 million expansion, designed by Phoenix-based firm Jones Studio, was completed in 2014. The Nogales-Grand Avenue port connects the downtown of Nogales, Arizona with that of Nogales, Mexico, two pedestrian-oriented areas that boasted cross-cultural connectivity before the reinforcement of the border wall in the 1990s. The studio design team identified the creation of an international link between the two ports as the highest priority. The link incorporates a recreation area that will connect both ports and both countries, and provide a safe public space for interaction between people and nature. The area also enhances the pedestrian crossing at the Mariposa port. The focus of the new program is a binational park and conference center to enhance existing but repressed links between the US and Mexico and create opportunities for international cooperation. Water

142

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

harvesting in a previously existing wetland and two interlocking walkways with intentionally programmed endpoints weave together the American and Mexican populations, visitors, and the natural environment. A created wetland uses greywater from the Mariposa Port of Entry and surrounding built structures. Natural slopes from the building create a greywater marsh where water purification takes place to allow for recharge and reuse. This marsh is a prime habitat for microorganisms that help clean the water by feeding on pollutants and transforms the harshness of the current dividing wall into a stitch of nature and public space. The conference center, located within this expanded border zone and accessible from either country, becomes a landmark for the port. International conferences will be hosted in this space, intended as a politically neutral territory promoting cross-cultural cooperation. To reach the conference center from the US side, visitors pass through new commercial buildings that include a hotel, restaurants, and shops to meet the needs of truck drivers, tourists, and conference attendees. The pedestrian promenade creates views into both countries, allowing visual but not physical access. Each site provides an opportunity for reflection on the social price of the politically contested space. Walking through the memorial pavilion, visitors gain a greater understanding

INFRASTRUCTURE MOBILITY

DATA

WATER

ENERGY EXISTING PROPOSED

WATER

SOLAR

KINETIC

WIND

GEOTHERMAL

CAPTURE

DISTRIBUTE

STORAGE

VISUAL

PEDESTRIAN

BIKE

BIKE SHARE

BUS

SEMI-TRUCK

AUTOMOBILE

DRIVERLESS CARS

STREET CAR

COMMUTER RAIL

FREIGHT RAIL

of the controversial situation at the border between the US and Mexico and, specifically, of the numerous victims of inhumane borderlands practices who have died in their attempts to cross. University of Arizona Edlin Hernandez, MS Planning Bradie Kissinger, B Arch Deyanira Nevarez Martínez, MS Planning Sunyoung Roh, MLA Samual Sanford, MS Planning Estefania Vásquez, MLA

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

143

144

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

145

WEST ENTRANCE

WETLAND

OPEN DECK FROM HOTEL SOLAR

FARMERS MARKET GREEN ROOFS MARIPOSA PORT OF ENTRY

WAREHOUSE + RETAIL TECHNICAL SCHOOL

HOTEL (VISA-LESS)

car south

VEHICULAR CIRCULATION

146

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

RECREATIONAL PARK

truck south

TRUCK CIRCULATION

NATURE EDUCATION CENTER

pedestrian

PEDESTRIAN CIRCULATION

MEMORIAL PAVILION

DOWNTOWN

PEDESTRIAN ZONE

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

147

SMART ENERGY CITY DOWNTOWN TUCSON

Tucson is the first US urban center in the Supercorridor, located sixty-eight miles north of the border with Mexico, and is the second largest city in Arizona after Phoenix. In 2014, the city had a population of just under 535,000 and was ranked the sixth poorest city of its size. Yet Tucson is situated in an area of the country that has the highest potential for solar and other renewable energies in the US and could grow these opportunities to enhance green economic development throughout the broader West and Southwest. Less than 1 percent of the city’s power needs are met by solar power; most of its energy is produced through the processing of coal. Very little of the city’s economy relates to sustainable initiatives. Tucson is home to many direct or indirect government employers, including city and county agencies and courts, Raytheon Missiles & Defense, and the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. The University of Arizona rounds out the large scale employment picture. The city’s eight months of ideal weather support a healthy tourism industry and fluctuating population of snowbirds. Adjacency to Mexico and affordability attract day travelers for shopping and recreation. Taking into account Tucson’s desire to attract

148

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

more forward-thinking, innovative industries and the area’s extensive capacity for solar energy, there is clear potential to create a prototype for the I-11 Supercorridor that is smart, high tech, and sustainable. The goals of Energy City are to capitalize on the westward shift of Tucson’s urban core, further densifying around the intersection of I-11 and an expanded smart corridor; to create intercity and international links through commuter rail and hyperloop; and to capitalize on untapped potential for renewable energy creation, distribution, and research. An extension of the growing downtown, Energy City would create a high-tech industry for solar and other forms of renewable energy as well as be a point of intersection for multiple modes of current and future transportation. In addition to producing renewable energy, Energy City harvests rainwater and HVAC condensate, collects it beneath new offices and residential projects, and cleanses it through manufactured wetlands, recharging riparian areas and the Santa Cruz River. At the juncture of nature, industry, and transportation, the proposal aims to create employment, housing, retail, and recreational opportunities for the new users and inhabitants of the next generation urban environment.

INFRASTRUCTURE MOBILITY

DATA

WATER

ENERGY EXISTING PROPOSED

ECONOMIC STATISTICS TRANSPORTATION STATISTICS

WATER

SOLAR

KINETIC

6

WIND

$153,700

GEOTHERMAL

MEDIAN HOME VALUE:

CAPTURE

DISTRIBUTE

STORAGE

VISUAL

PEDESTRIAN

BIKE

BIKE SHARE

BUS

SEMI-TRUCK

AUTOMOBILE

DRIVERLESS CARS

STREET CAR

COMMUTER RAIL

FREIGHT RAIL

University of Arizona Steven Giang, MS Planning Sally Harris, MS Planning Kendra Hyson, MLA Katherine Laughlin, MLA Bernardo Terán, B Arch

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME:

$36,939

TH POOREST CITY IN THE US

20.4%

OF THE POPULATION LIVES BELOW THE POVERTY LINE

AUTOMOBILES PER HOUSEHOLD:

1.0 - 1.7

VEHICLE MILES TRAVELED ANNUALLY

16 - 18,500 WALK SCORE 73 WALK SCORE 85 INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

149

150

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

the ENERGY CITY in Tucson

07. 04.

06. 06.

01.

MULTI-MODAL HUB

02.

ROBOTIC PARKING

03.

DATA CENTER

04.

PARKING

05.

MULTIUSE PATH/GREENWAY

06.

PEDESTRIAN OVERPASS

07.

REVAMP OF EXISTING PARK

08.

MULTI-USE PATH/GREENWAY

09.

ENERGY STORAGE

10.

RESEARCH CENTER

11.

HOUSING

12.

MIXED USE

13.

RETAIL/RESIDENTIAL

14.

TCC HOTEL

15.

HOUSING

16.

MIXED USE

17.

OFFICE/RETAIL

18.

HISTORIC RAIL STATION

19.

CONNECTION TO E.P.S.W.

20.

ENLIVENED RIVERFRONT

21.

HOUSING/RETAIL

22.

RIVERFRONT BUSINESSES

23.

HOUSING/RETAIL

24.

LUIS GUTIERREZ BRIDGE

25.

PLANNED MISSION DISTRICT

26.

DOWNTOWN PLAZA

27.

BIKE SHARE

05.

09. 01.

18. 27.

03. 02.

08. 17.

10.

16.

21. 26.

22.

11.

12.

15.

20. 27. 19.

13.

14. 23.

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

151

PHASE 01 : INTRODUCING MULTI-MODAL STATION

TRANSIT

PARKING OFFICE SPACE

PHASE 02 :

142,370

RESTAURANT RETAIL

64,067 99,659 199,313 28,474

DENSITY INCREASE + INCREASED CONNECTIVITY

DATA CENTER ENERGY STORAGE

98,780 57,689

OFFICE SPACE RESTAURANT

35,2002 46,358

RETAIL

203,065

OPEN SPACE PARKING

264,025 94,000

RESIDENTIAL

152

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

484,195

HOTELING

210,996

RESEARCH LAB

208,000

PHASE 03 : WATERFRONT HOUSING + RETAIL

RESIDENTIAL

38,579

RESTAURANT RETAIL

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

153

154

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

155

156

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

157

NEW URBAN SUBURBIA MARANA

The town of Marana is located twenty-five miles north of Tucson and is often considered a bedroom community for the larger city. With a 54 percent projected growth rate and a median household income nearly double that of Tucson, however, Marana has an opportunity to develop a unique identity through independent high-tech development, advanced educational opportunities, and a focus on green living. The current zoning in Marana, though, reflects that of a typical rural area transforming slowly into suburban sprawl – low density housing developments, strip malls, and office parks demanding car-dependent lifestyles. Yet Marana has the potential to shift toward a transit-oriented, economically viable, and highly livable city. The chosen site encompasses downtown Marana – much in need of revitalization – and spans across the new I-11 to the CAP canal on the eastern side of the interstate. This critical junction of downtown, the future I-11, the railroad, and the CAP water canal, combined with Marana’s agricultural legacy that provides expansive and coveted water rights, makes this site a perfect location for a full-scale laboratory in sustainable development. The project introduces various methods of energy collection and serves as the facility for

158

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

on-site wastewater processing and reuse. The transit hub establishes a connection from the CAP to the Santa Cruz River southwest of the site, for distribution of water and the creation of a public urban greenway. Unique to Marana, these green amenities support an expanded educational agenda at the local community college developed around a new industry of sustainable urbanism, urban agriculture, and new technology. A wetland on the eastern edge of town filters grey and black water from the transit hub and buildings within Downtown Marana. The purified water is used to support the local landscape and the urban greenway. The new green space also attracts and supports migratory and local wildlife, which creates an additional sustainable tourism component to the local economy. This next generation transit hub prototype is a vital component for Marana as a stand-alone town. The hub provides easy access to the rail line for light industry while creating a new commuter or, in the future, a high-speed rail stop that will shuttle people from Tucson to Marana to Phoenix and ultimately up to Las Vegas. New high-tech facilities on the western edge of the hub provide adequate space for two tech industries to locate their corporate and manufacturing headquarters along the future

INFRASTRUCTURE MOBILITY

DATA

WATER

ENERGY EXISTING PROPOSED

ECONOMIC STATISTICS TRANSPORTATION STATISTICS

$222,200

WATER

MEDIAN HOME VALUE:

MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIAL EDUCATIONAL RETAIL/SERVICE GOVERNMENT

SOLAR

MAJOR EMPLOYERS

KINETIC

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME:

$71,723

WIND

GEOTHERMAL

CAPTURE

DISTRIBUTE

University of Arizona Stratton Andrews, B Arch Daniel Aros, MLA William Greenway, MS Planning Alexandria Hines, MS Planning Yang Yang, MLA

STORAGE

VISUAL

PEDESTRIAN

BIKE

BIKE SHARE

BUS

SEMI-TRUCK

AUTOMOBILE

DRIVERLESS CARS

STREET CAR

COMMUTER RAIL

FREIGHT RAIL

high-speed rail line. The eastern side of the hub is dedicated to dense residential development, powered by facade-embedded solar and fed by harvested and recycled water. The goal of the multimodal center is a sustainably focused green ecosystem of live, work, and play.

1750 1160 1850 2250 760

11.2%

OF THE POPULATION LIVES BELOW THE POVERTY LINE

AUTOMOBILES PER HOUSEHOLD:

1.8 - 2.0

VEHICLE MILES TRAVELED ANNUALLY

21 - 26,000 WALK SCORE 29 INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

159

BIKE SHARE

ENERGY GENERATING ROADS

STREETCAR LOOP

COMMUTER RAIL

URBAN GREENWAY SUSTAINABLE INDUSTRY

SATELLITE UNIVERSITIES FACADE INTEGRATED WIFI

DATA ROADWAYS WATER PURIFICATION FACILITY

SCENIC OFF-RAMPS

160

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

161

162

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

163

1.386496

GIGAWATT HOURS

OF RENEWABLE ENERGY BY TRANSIT HUB

IN O N E YEAR

180,000 SF OF HOUSES

= 7,500 square feet

878,305 SF OF MIXED USE

= 18,000 square feet

439,152 SF

= 18,000 square feet

164

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

OF EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES

3,499m² OF SOLAR ROOF PANELS

27,625 KW/h

71,133m² OF SOLAR FACADE PANELS

1,358,871 KW/h

4,459,860ft² OF GREEN ROOF

16,934,088 gal

51.97 ACRE FEET

OF WATER REUSE BY TRANSIT HUB

IN O N E YEAR

CAP WATER

WATER FILTRATION

LOCAL USE

URBAN GREENWAY

RIPARIAN HABITAT

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

165

HIGH-TECH INDUSTRY CASA GRANDE

Casa Grande is a growing community of roughly 48,000 residents sixty miles south of Phoenix. The city is home to significant manufacturing, with plants or distribution centers for national businesses such as Walmart and Hexcel located within city limits. The 550-acre site northwest of the intersection of I-10, I-8, and the future I-11 is ripe for development. The Union Pacific Railroad main line runs along the site’s north side. Currently zoned for Industrial and Urban Ranch uses, it is surrounded by agriculture, commercial, and residential properties, with a community of twenty-five hundred homes planned just to the south. The City of Casa Grande has identified the potential for high-tech industry and business on the site; with I-11 added to the transportation landscape, it is a prime location to build the factory of the future as an integrated component of next generation infrastructure. In light of the national competition for the Tesla Gigafactory, which seems endemic of the future of American logistics, this proposal models a next generation factory prototype adjacent to a major rail line and at the intersection of three interstates in order to enable the most efficient manufacturing and distribution process possible. As a result of its location and its massive scale, this project also models sustainable

166

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

manufacturing by bundling transportation of raw materials and manufactured goods, renewable energy production, compact housing development, public space on reclaimed agricultural land, and water recycling as part of the Supercorridor development. Though Casa Grande was not selected by Tesla, this all-solar next generation factory has the potential to be an economic driver and employment hub for the mid-Arizona region, particularly for companies like Tesla and Amazon which seek wide open spaces, multimodal access, and strong solar capacity. University of Arizona Robbie Aaron, MS Planning Malerie Gamboa, MLA Mohammed Hafiz, MLA Darrell Ibanez, B Arch Matthieu Mayer, MS Planning Sam Thorley, MLA

INFRASTRUCTURE MOBILITY

DATA

WATER

ENERGY EXISTING PROPOSED

ECONOMIC STATISTICS TRANSPORTATION STATISTICS

55 mm ililee ss

s ile m 5

POPULATION STATISTICS

WAL-MART DISTRIBUTION CENTER WAL-MART SUPERMARKET FRITO-LAY INC. CITY OF CASA GRANDE ABBOTT LABORATORIES/ROSS PRODUCTS

MEDIAN HOME VALUE:

$122,400

18.5%

WATER

CASA GRANDE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL DISTRICT CASA GRANDE REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER

SOLAR

KINETIC

WIND

GEOTHERMAL

POPULATION DENSITY

CAPTURE

2013 POPULATION

50,111

10,000 10,000

DISTRIBUTE

POPULATION

0 0

STORAGE

10,000

!

VISUAL

0

10 miles

PEDESTRIAN

BIKE

BIKE SHARE

BUS

SEMI-TRUCK

AUTOMOBILE

DRIVERLESS CARS

STREET CAR

COMMUTER RAIL

FREIGHT RAIL

!

10 10 miles miles

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME:

$45,399

1030 860 560 450 450 421 425

OF THE POPULATION LIVES BELOW THE POVERTY LINE

AUTOMOBILES PER HOUSEHOLD:

1.7-2.0

VEHICLE MILES TRAVELED ANNUALLY

18.5-26,000 WALK SCORE 29 6 INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

167

INTERSTATE 10 THE INTERSTATE 10 CORRIDOR RUNS ADJACENT TO TESLA TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE BUILDING.

168

FREIGHT

WETLANDS

PASSENGER RAIL

CASA GRANDE IS A TOWN WELL KNOWN FOR MANUFACTURING AND DISTRIBUTION OF GOODS. THE NEW TESLA FACTORY CAN UTILIZE THE PROXIMITY TO RAIL SYSTEM

THE CONTROLLED WETLANDS ARE THE RESULT OF NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL DRAINAGE ON AND OFF SITE

PASSENGER RAIL WILL PROVIDE AN ALTERNATIVE MODE OF TRANSPORTATION TO LOCAL DESTINATIONS AND ADJACENT CITIES.

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

INTERSTATE 8

SOLAR

NEW RESIDENCES

INTERSTATE 8 FORKS INTO THE I-11 CORRIDOR

CASA GRANDE HAS AN EXTREMELY ARID CLIMATE WITH A HIGH POTENTIAL FOR SOLAR ENERGY COLLECTION. TWENTYFIVE PERCENT OF THE SITE WILL BE COVERED IN SOLAR PANELS TO GENERATE 20% OF THE POWER NECESSARY.

2500 NEW HOMES WILL BE BUILT JUST SOUTH OF THE NEW TESLA PLANT.

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

169

66,860 H

170

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

O

M

E

S

6,500

EMPLOYEES

861,186m² OF SOLAR PANELS PRODUCES

757,401GW/h

in one year POWERS

76% OF TESLA

15 GW/h

per year in stationary energy storage

batteries for

500,000 CARS

11,212,760 G A L L O N S

OF ROOF RUNOFF

FILTRATION.SYSTEM

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

171

wildlife crossing wikieup, az

Located five miles south of Wikieup at the confluence of the Big Sandy River and US Route 93, the Sycamore Creek wash provides a natural migration path for a number of species and is located near sensitive habitat for both land and water animals. According to the Arizona Wildlife Linkage Workgroup, there are more than forty collisions between wildlife and vehicles on the thirty mile stretch from Las Vegas to Phoenix every year. The construction of Interstate 11 will further fracture many animal habitats and migration routes. This design proposal exemplifies tactics for habitat-sensitive development by considering both wildlife crossings and the future intelligence of autonomous vehicles. For the safety of both animals and people traveling on the Supercorridor, strategic placement of wildlife crossings will reduce the number of fatalities and increase knowledge of animal migration paths. Adjacent to the new interstate, a rest stop, trailhead, and information center are embedded within the wall of the nearby wash. The complex integrates technologies such as

172

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

solar-powered charging stations and a closedloop water treatment system. The design uses local materials, natural ventilation strategies, and local building tactics to create a sensitive and evocative experience for visitors to this landscape. In order to promote awareness, a series of information centers are located along the edges of the paths paired with charging stations for visitor convenience. These charging stations also help support the rising number of hybrid and autonomous vehicles, which will also reduce the incidence of human and nonhuman fatalities as sensors improve the ability for cars to avoid animals who continue to cross the road. University of Nevada, Las Vegas Emylanie Carnate, BS Arch Amanda Gann, M Arch

INFRASTRUCTURE

EXISTING PROPOSED

WATER SOLAR KINETIC WIND GEOTHERMAL

CAPTURE DISTRIBUTE

STORAGE VISUAL

PEDESTRIAN BIKE BIKE SHARE

BUS SEMI-TRUCK AUTOMOBILE DRIVERLESS CARS

STREET CAR COMMUTER RAIL FREIGHT RAIL

173

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: TWO CASES

40

20

10

0

ENERGY WATER DATA MOBILITY

NEVADA

ARIZONA

TULE SPRINGS *SITE OF PROPOSED NATIONAL CONSERVATION PARK

LAS VEGAS Lake Mead

RED ROCK NATIONAL CONSERVATION

Mount Wilson

SLOAN CANYON NATIONAL CONSERVATION

MOUNT WILSON WILDERNESS

N

mount tipton mount perkins o River

A

LI

D

A

A

C

EV FO RN

Colorad

IA

MOUNT TIPTON WILDERNESS Mount Tipton

ck ns Bla untai Mo

Lake Mohave

I-40 + US 93 kingman, az

bat ns Cer untai Mo

black mountains cerbat mountains

Mount Perkins

KINGMAN

MOUNT NUTT WILDERNESS

WABAYUMA PEAK WILDERNESS

Topock Marsh

k ee Cr rro Bu

pai Huala ins Mounta

hualapai mountains cerbat mountains

Big Sandy Riv

er

WARM SPRINGS WILDERNESS

WIKIEUP

UPPER BURRO CREEK WILDERNESS

r

hualapai mountains bagdad

GIBRALTAR MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS

174

25

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

MI

pa Has

say

am

nt Sa

TRES ALAMOS WILDERNESS

RAWHIDE MOUNTAINS WILDERNESS

HASSAYAMPA RIVER CANYON WILDERNESS

r Ha 50

Riv

Ma

Alamo Lake

HARCUVAR MOUNTAINS WILDERNESS

wickenburg 0

ARRASTRA MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS

SWANSEA WILDERNESS

CACTUS PLAIN WILDERNESS

N

a

AUBREY PEAK WILDERNESS AREA

tres alamos wilderness prescott national forest

er

ria

Ri

ve

Lake Havasu

cu

r va

Mo

un

ta

ins

WICKENBURG

to PHOENIX

DRIVERLESS LOGISTICS

EDUCATION

WILDLIFE CROSSING

UNDERPASS WITH WATER FLOW

LANDSCAPE BRIDGE

MODIFIED CULVERT

SMALL TO MEDIUM ANIMAL UNDERPASS

MULTI-USE OVERPASS

LARGE MAMMAL CROSSING

INCREASED AWARENESS

AMPHIBIAN + REPTILE TUNNEL

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Tetris Highway next generation corridor

Interstate 11 will have economic implications on and improve connectivity between the Las Vegas and greater Phoenix regions; however, by focusing predominantly on economics, the I-11 and Intermountain West Corridor Study overlooks the opportunity and obligation to respond to climate change and current environmentally friendly shifts in transportation technology. This proposal addresses this opportunity by capitalizing on the future of autonomous and embedded technologies to increase vehicle efficiency and reduce the need for road expansion. Continuing the Southwest region’s support of experimentation in these areas, the interstate in this proposal fosters the assimilation of driverless vehicles to reduce congestion and ensure safer roads. In addition, through the strategy of co-location, the right-ofway is used to produce and transport renewable energy to market. On this interstate of the future, striping and signage are eliminated; the road is a flat, smart surface where vehicles autonomously self-sort by class, type (passenger or freight), size, and destination. Vehicles communicate with one another through a wireless network that reports speed and position, moving through the system like Tetris game pieces relocating for the tightest fit. The reduced need for space between aligned vehicles to account for human delay and error

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instantly increases capacity of the roadway. Wireless charging and LED communication are embedded in the road surface and lane speed and directionality can be determined by need and controlled remotely. The message on the smart surface can range from Amber Alerts to weather warnings and is shared through the network to create a mobile community and help avoid disasters. University of Nevada, Las Vegas Andres Diaz, BS Arch Burim Kalaveshi, BS Arch INDUCTIVE CHARGING Coils in road vibrate with same resonance frequency as coil below car, allowing energy to fow between each other.

DRIVERLESS VEHICLES Sense surrounding environment and navigate without human input or error.

INFRASTRUCTURE MOBILITY

DATA

WATER

ENERGY EXISTING PROPOSED

MASS TRANSIT - HYPERLOOP

WATER

Wind turbines are the cleanest source of renewable energy in this desert region. Unlike solar thermal they do not require water. BLM and RDEP projects in this region include a sizable portfolio of wind energy assets.

SOLAR

WIND ENERGY

Although wind is favored over solar thermal; RDEP still considers solar development and encourages solar to be interspersed between wind turbines or confned to the Southern Mojave REDA lands.

KINETIC

SOLAR ENERGY

Underground superconductive cables will be safer, nearly 100 percent effcient and reduce impact to the environment.

WIND

GEOTHERMAL

CAPTURE

DISTRIBUTE

STORAGE

VISUAL

PEDESTRIAN

BIKE

BIKE SHARE

BUS

SEMI-TRUCK

AUTOMOBILE

DRIVERLESS CARS

STREET CAR

COMMUTER RAIL

FREIGHT RAIL

SUPERCONDUCTIVE TRANSMISSION

Capsules traveling within low pressure tubes may provide fast and inexpensive transportation for people and goods.

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HABITAT CONSERVATION

ELECTRIC DRIVERLESS VEHICLES

Driverless Technology will sense animals and road hazards. Minimized corridor width will allow for more wildlife crossings.

RENEWABLE ENERGY DEVELOPMENT

Driverless Vehicle Northbound Traffc

Raised Mass transit ROW will allow for wildlife passage. Southbound Traffc Right-to-Lane Charging Lane

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Superconductive transmission line installed. Renewable energy connected to market. Economic growth for urban areas adjacent to REDAs. Electric vehicle sales increase to 2.1M (110K in 2013).

PHASE 1 ENERGY TRANSMISSION

Southbound shoulders are retroftted with Inductive charging lanes. All traffc is rerouted to travel on previous southbound lanes. Northbound lanes are designated as ROW for mass transit (Hyperloop).

PHASE 2 TETRIS HIGHWAY

All phases of “Tetris Highway” completed. All lanes maximized by autonomous vehicles technology. Right to lane changes according to traffc heading in each direction. Mass transit in service from Las Vegas to Phoenix reducing travel time.

PHASE 3 MASS TRANSIT

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WATER

ENERGY PRODUCED

EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE

water

KINGMAN solar

kinetic

wind

geothermal

capture

WICKENBURG distribute

PHOENIX BUCKEYE

DATA

storage

visualization

CASA GRANDE pedestrian

MOBILITY

rail + vehicle +

pedestrian

bicycle

MARANA bike share

TUCSON bus

SAHUARITA

automobile

driverless

street car

NOGALES

commuter

freight

Existing and Proposed Infrastructure totals, all sites, Jonell Diekmeier and Amanda Gann, 2014.

180

AVRA VALLEY

semi-truck

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

Existing Proposed

WATER

ENERGY PRODUCED

PROPOSED INFRASTRUCTURE

water

KINGMAN solar

kinetic

wind

geothermal

capture

WICKENBURG distribute

PHOENIX BUCKEYE

DATA

storage

visualization

CASA GRANDE pedestrian

MOBILITY

rail + vehicle +

pedestrian

bicycle

MARANA bike share

TUCSON bus

AVRA VALLEY SAHUARITA

semi-truck

automobile

driverless

street car

NOGALES

commuter

freight

Existing Proposed

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AFTER THE PROJECTS: I-11 SUPERCORRIDOR IMPACTS Though speculative, these proposals were a significant step in shifting the internal agency conversation toward measuring a different set of performative criteria beyond traffic counts (now addressed through modal shift) and economic growth (which needed more mediating than instigating). ADOT publicly supported this shift in emphasis, claiming infrastructure’s protracted timeline demands futuristic and comprehensive thinking to avoid nearly immediate obsolescence.12 In addition, ADOT planned to include a Sustainable Return on Investment (SROI) analysis in the I-11 Tier 1 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for each Build Corridor Alternative. The first of its kind in an ADOT report, such an SROI “would adequately capture and analyze the total investment, not just the financial impacts but the benefits and costs associated with environmental and social impacts” of the built project.13 To evaluate the success of the overall effort, ADOT also plans to use INVEST (Infrastructure Voluntary Evaluation Sustainability Tool), a tool developed by the Federal Highway Administration’s Sustainable Highways Initiative, for the first time. Though the final EIS is still in progress, a draft Tier 1 EIS was published in March 2019, and a few months before that, NDOT conducted a new Planning and Environmental Linkage analysis for the northern segment of I-11. The latter evaluated a range of corridors north of Las Vegas with a new set of criteria, from most to least favorable, that include community acceptance, technology, land use and ownership, modal interrelationships, capacity / travel time and speeds, economic vitality, transportation plan and policies, and environmental sustainability. Their immediate next steps included scouting partnerships with utility and data providers to explore the possibility of co-locating fiber optic and other technology in the I-11 alignment.14 The three options with the highest technology, community accep-

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INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

tance, and environmental sustainability rankings – not just those with the best travel times and economic viability – are the ones NDOT has selected as the most promising. This indicates a shift in thinking. The draft Tier 1 EIS of the southern portion of the route, the segment studied in the I-11 Supercorridor project, includes several changes from the original plan. Rather than selecting a specific road alignment, the Tier 1 EIS is advancing a two-thousand-foot-wide band that could accommodate road placement plus co-located utilities and future rail. Care must be taken to not make the mistakes of the Trans-Texas Corridor, where parallel adjacency of systems rather than symbiosis ultimately killed the project. One route option spatially aligns 1-11 with the CAP canal, which transports over a million acre-feet of water a year from the Colorado River to central and southern Arizona. According to Ian Dowdy, our original partner from the Sonoran Institute, aligning I-11 and the CAP was inspired by the concepts behind our next generation infrastructure criteria and is intended to improve wildlife connectivity and increase investment in ecological mitigation through co-location and agency collaboration. The Tier 1 EIS also incorporates a section called Future Corridor Opportunities, which discusses the accommodation of autonomous vehicles, truck platooning (or tetrising), electric vehicle infrastructure, electric highways, solar roads, and hyperloop – all aspects of our next gen scenario proposals and all included in the final report we shared with ADOT, the Sonoran Institute, the Walton Sustainable Solutions Initiatives at ASU (one of our primary project funders), and other project stakeholders. Dowdy, now working at the Center for the Future of Arizona (an affiliate of ASU), continues to engage the planning of I-11 and uses our research and proposals to promote next gen strategies. Perhaps the most interesting development since the completion of our work is the planning of a new town near Phoenix called Belmont.

With $80 million from Bill Gates, Belmont Properties, an Arizona real estate investment firm, is planning a “smart city” development on 25,000 acres, forty-five minutes west of Phoenix on the future I-11. According to their marketing, Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs.15 Whether Belmont will actually be “smart” or not, or whether it will even happen, is up for debate,16 but the effort around the initiative by numerous partners at ASU and the sizeable funding together imply, at the very least, that this won’t be the average exurb. ASU’s interest in I-11 started before the brainstorming “sandpit” where the three-university I-11 Supercorridor partners first met, and it clearly continues. Before it evolved into the smart city of Belmont, an earlier development option was a private initiative on a thirty-thousand-acre parcel for a West Valley logistics hub (not unlike the I-11 Supercorridor proposal for Casa Grande, which capitalizes on the convergence of two interstates, rail, and water in a speculative pitch for Tesla’s Gigafactory). After joining forces with ADOT and eventually with Gates, the project pivoted to a more future-focused vision of highways and logistics. ASU was tasked to lead the effort around innovation. The university put out a call for two- to three-year funded curricular proposals, netting twenty faculty teaching various related coursework. In January 2019, the University City Exchange, the ASU unit now leading the Belmont Future project, organized a forum with industry leaders, designers, infrastructure experts, local governance, BNSF Railway, policy experts, and the Arizona Commerce Authority. The four primary areas of focus were infrastructure, mobility, technology, and governance. In a phone inter-

view at the beginning of 2020, Melissa McCann, director of the ASU University City Exchange (UCX) and the university’s coordinator for the Belmont initiative, said the I-11 Supercorridor Report produced from our design work and research is being used as a model for smart city Belmont. It was sitting on her desk when we spoke.17 The convergence of Interstate 10 and the future I-11 will have substantial impact on the Phoenix region where ASU is located, and affects the university’s combined interest in both growth and sustainability. Under Executive Director Wellington “Duke” Reiter, UCX is also running a project called Ten Across, or 10X, focused on the east-west I-10 freeway. The description of Ten Across claims I-10 may provide the most compelling window on the future of the U.S., one which presents the challenges of the 21st century in the highest relief. This singular transect strings together the most pressing societal, economic, political, urban, and environmental issues of our time. As such, it offers a laboratory for understanding the present condition and the creation of new narratives for the future.18 The 10X project is expansive. The third annual Ten Across Water Summit was to be held in Houston in 2020, collecting experts, politicians, agency reps, and academic researchers, before COVID-19 rapidly halted the ability to travel and gather in groups. Similar to the I-11 Supercorridor project, 10X continues speculation around the highway as an organizing spine of people, resources, access, and investment, recognizing, as we did, that infrastructure projects – particularly ones of this cross-national scale – have potential far beyond moving people and goods, by organizing collective thinking and action through coalition building and collaboration. If one green arrow solution is radical, imagine a green network at the scale of the country.

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MOBILITY FOR ALL BY ALL: NORTHSIDE-SOUTHSIDE METROLINK EXPANSION Everyone in St. Louis seems to share the same dreams about the city’s future: St. Louis will stabilize and begin to regrow its population, its unique neighborhoods and quality of life will retain and attract the nation’s (and world’s) best and brightest, and the resulting prosperity will be shared by all, across the city and region. But decades of disinvestment have left St. Louis’ body politic with such low self-confidence and bruised spirit that no one will even let themselves entertain such a future. This pessimism is not fated. It is a choice, a learned response. By committing to a pragmatic and strategic plan to realize the region’s shared dream of equitable prosperity, optimism can replace pessimism. This plan is that plan. – A Prosperous & Equitable St. Louis: An Incremental Strategy to Develop the NS – SS Corridor, August 2019, Farr Associates for Bi-State / Metro TOD study An expansion of St. Louis’s MetroLink light-rail system has been under consideration since the late 1990s, but more pressing problems inside the city limits, persistent political languor, and economic struggles (particularly the Great Recession) have repeatedly pushed the project down the city’s list of priorities. It wasn’t for lack of paperwork, though; no fewer than five major studies were completed between 2000 and 2019, several focusing on the potential for transit-oriented development, or TOD, to bring mixed-use, density, and economic opportunity to North and South City, where far less investment has occurred than in the central east-west corridor. After years of weighing alternatives and infighting between city and county officials, a full build-out route was honed from the various versions of the last decade through negotiations between Bi-State Development, Metro Transit (a subsidiary of Bi-State), East/West Gateway, and the City of St. Louis Mayor’s office, with input from engaged community members

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and aldermen; that route runs seventeen miles through fifteen political wards and twenty-three neighborhoods, has twenty-nine stations, and is estimated to cost $2.2 billion. If built, it would be the largest infrastructural investment in the city of St. Louis in generations (see page 189). Selected specifically for its social justice potential, the Northside-Southside route is explicitly intended to help stabilize and revitalize some of the most challenged neighborhoods in St. Louis while better connecting them to jobs and services. Once thriving areas, many North City neighborhoods in particular have for decades been experiencing declining population, degraded property conditions, high poverty rates, and some of the lowest percentages of car ownership in the city. This lack of mobility results in some of the longest commute times and greatest separation from necessities and amenities in the region, but is perhaps, more importantly, symptomatic of a much more deplorable and destructive lack of access that results in an untenable health and opportunity gap.19 Over 40 percent of households on the north side and nearly 30 percent on the south side are at or below the poverty line. Life expectancy, which is nearly eighteen years lower in some parts of North City than in neighborhoods just a few miles west, sums up the disparity in aggregate. In addition, after generations of “urban renewal” and eminent domain paired with false and unfulfilled promises, trust in developers and agencies is deservedly low. Two new changes in the route – one to accommodate the highly controversial headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA; a development that cleared the last remaining residents of the historic St. Louis Place neighborhood) and another for budget reasons that shortens the length of the line by a handful of stops at each end – have again caused concern over whose needs are being prioritized. The multibillion-dollar infrastructure investment of this new MetroLink line plus the re-emergence and redesign of a new greenway (now also connecting North and South City to the central core) has the potential to help narrow these

detrimental gaps, but only if the business-asusual model of rewarding the white and wealthy and displacing and erasing the Black and poor is stopped. After sixteen years leading the city (2001–2017), spanning most of the two-decade effort to expand transit, Mayor Francis Slay announced a final push for the project as an outgoing effort of his administration. In 2017, city voters weighed in on Proposition 1, a half-cent salestax increase expected to generate $20 million annually, with 60 percent dedicated to the NS-SS MetroLink extension and 10 percent each to neighborhood revitalization, workforce development, public safety, and infrastructure. The mayor called Prop 1 a “moral and economic imperative,” claiming that, combined with a $30 million Choice Neighborhood Grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the programs and initiatives it supports “represent a holistic approach to urban revitalization and solutions to racial inequity, joblessness, crime and blight.”20 Prop 1 passed with the approval of over 60 percent of the city’s voters. Those ambitions were also reflected in a reenergized planning process that produced a new study in 2017 that reassessed the existing conditions and need for the line. In addition to updating an expansive 2008 study, this report focused on maximizing the competitiveness of the case for federal funding through the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts Capital Investment Grant Program. A major change in this funding game was an expansion of the criteria from a ridership-based model (demand driving need) to one that more broadly recognizes the importance of other factors like transit dependency, economic development benefits, environmental benefits, and increasing new ridership. A 2013 Federal Transit Administration guide, Proposed New Starts and Small Starts Policy Guidance, uses calculations that give double weight to transit trips estimated for neighborhoods with low car ownership and

a high number of low-income households. It also gives credit for proposals that maintain or increase levels of affordable housing, including policies like rent stabilization and low-income mortgage assistance, explicitly aimed at increasing mobility access for diverse populations and reducing the risk of displacement through gentrification.21 This point system makes the St. Louis case both more competitive for federal funding and potentially more accountable by financial contract to a broadly conceived social agenda. The approval of Prop 1 also secures at least a portion of the required local matching funds. Though Mayor Slay’s departure meant losing a champion of the project, even if his investment of political will was extremely slow to move the needle, it meant the incoming mayor, Lyda Krewson, was ostensibly well positioned to move the project forward. This was a good moment for our studio to intervene in the process. Similar to Interstate 11, the NS-SS MetroLink project is also a potential case of infrastructural opportunism, but one clearly focused much more extensively on social and spatial justice than environmental and climate challenges. A grant from Washington University’s Mellon Foundation–funded Divided City initiative supported our pilot project, Mobility For All By All (MFABA), which was driven by the motivation to assure that the coming $2 billion investment in infrastructure expansion on the horizon for the city of St. Louis is more than just an expensive train with economic development benefits for a limited few.22 The goal of MFABA was to reframe the literal connecting of this divided city as a moment of infrastructural opportunism, a chance to leverage megascale regional and federal investment for greater local social and environmental gain while also amplifying the voices of residents along the alignment. Under three grant co-principal investigators (Penina Acayo Laker, Matt Bernstine, and myself), MFABA brought together a team of designers, scholars, artists, and activists in

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partnership with Bi-State Development and East-West Gateway Council of Governments (regional planning) to experiment with an approach that inserts arts-based thinking, bottom-up resident engagement, and equity-focused, quality of life–based metrics into the infrastructure design and planning process. MFABA was a three-part project: (1) build and test an alternative metrics system that prioritizes opportunity, well-being, and justice over simple economic development; (2) commission collaborative community projects (CCPs) developed by neighborhood-based artist-activists to amplify the voices of residents; and (3) integrate the MFABA mission into urban design coursework, where both alternative metrics and strategies of Infrastructural Urbanism would support the development of new priorities and innovative design solutions with the next generation infrastructure criteria as a guide. The goal was to consider and deploy the three components in conjunction and across scales, stakeholders, and disciplines to encourage the city to maximize this opportunity to lessen the gap. The CCPs were intended to amplify the agency and promote broad vision from within the communities by working with resident experts to identify their own needs and aspirations for a future St. Louis. The alternative metrics would determine which factors actually matter (and therefore which criteria should be measured), in this location specifically, to improve quality of life and increase equitability. Analysis and synthesis of this wealth of information would then serve as design instigators for a studio focused on the nodes and networks of the Northside-Southside alignment. In the end, results diagrams for the design studio proposals would support an argument for how welldesigned, Infrastructural Urbanism versions of a future St. Louis would fare in improving the quality of life of residents along the line. The overarching goal was to influence MetroLink’s planning to include both new kinds of strategies for engagement and new kinds of priorities for

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design, in line with a next gen infrastructural system. This was the “green arrow” scenario for MFABA and, hence, for NS-SS. Though this was only a pilot project, it harbored big ambitions; the results of the one-year experiment taught the team and potentially the city a great deal. The collaborative community projects, in addition to identifying neighborhood partners and invested residents, modeled alternatives to top-down surveys and meeting-based strategies of community engagement and connected with harder-to-reach, atypical user groups, like youth. Using methods and media of the arts and humanities – in this case, quilting, storytelling, ethnography, photography and videography, and hip-hop freestyling – separated visions of increased mobility and the value of that increase in quality of life from the strictures of economic metrics alone. Working with artists embedded in the community established a conduit of communication directly from inside neighborhoods, where the real experts reside; using alternative methods provided expressive avenues to communicate the dreams of future generations and the often-unheard voices of those unlikely to attend a more formal meeting called at the convenience of the city. As a result of our distribution of funding from the grant, each CCP lead was also able to leverage the investment in their project to extend the work of their organization. For example, the nonprofit Sewcial Impact purchased new sewing machines for their Sewing Futures of Mobility project, which now are used to continue their mission to train youth and others to sew. Creative Reaction Lab trained five African American young men to become local engagement specialists in their home neighborhoods through its Community Design Apprenticeship Program – building skills they can use far beyond this project. This is a new kind of social resource symbiosis that shifts the paradigm, where community engagement mandated by the agency can actually give back rather than take time and resources from residents. Determining what “matters to measure” and

MFABA Collaborative Community Project: Sewing Futures of Mobility Project leads: Alix Gerber, Designing Radical Futures; and Umeme Houston, Sewcial Impact Project. Participants: Brandi Elrod, Brooklyn Lewis, Cameron Lewis, Don’ya Elrod, Emma Carter, Imani Holmes, India Jackson Images: David Johnson

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MFABA Collaborative Community Project: Hip Hop Transit, with Louis ConPhliction Project lead: Sunni Hutton, Dutchtown South Community Corporation Images: David Johnson

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then how to measure criteria that are often slippery is complicated. We worked with Eric Zencey and his Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a framework that emerged out of ecological economics and attempts to replace the “all growth is good,” GDP model of measurement with a conservation and quality-of-life lens that differentiates between positive and negative expenditures. GPI also fills in uncounted or difficult-to-measure gaps, like the value of work in the home or of volunteering, or the family and community cost of incarceration. Under the guidance of Iris Patten at the Geospatial Collective, we tested the Opportunity Mapping method from the Kirwan Institute, a geographic information systems–based strategy that helps neighborhoods identify high-priority needs and opportunities by mapping overlapping intensities of data and then assessing them with residents to determine a triage of crisis points. In Opportunity Mapping, the most need (i.e., the darkest areas of overlap on the maps) equals the most opportunity, a translation we quickly realized was both confusing and oversimplified. Simultaneously, the city was conducting its own Equity Indicators assessment, which resulted in a thorough report that reinforced many of the existing assumptions – that families are struggling, and education, child well-being, financial empowerment, and health and public safety rank among the most inequitable concerns.23 After a year’s investment from the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative in support of the indicators project, the work was discontinued by the city and the position of Equity Indicators Project Manager eliminated. Though a dashboard exists to track improvements, it is woefully out of date.24 Finding the right data at the right scale, and assuring its accuracy, can be time-consuming and sometimes daunting. This pilot would need more time on the ground with residents to verify conditions and rank the hierarchy of criteria. The starkness of inequity in St. Louis – where opportunity maps of the north side

show high-intensity red for almost every factor – means data often reinforce both common knowledge and existing racial and economic divides. However, taking on the challenge of measuring criteria that really do matter – such as justice or health – beyond dollars spent is crucial in holding agencies accountable for valuing equity and making more complex, structural changes. It also requires researchers to better understand the interconnected, nonquantitative components that add up to quality of life. Factors like “rootedness” and social cohesion, which often underlie networks of social resilience, are extremely important in neighborhoods where houses can be passed down from one generation to the next or where matriarchy or other informal power structures work to protect and support residents. Measuring a range of social criteria, which means valuing a range of social criteria, also helps combat displacement and other negative effects of gentrification. If the value of unique culture or long-term social relationships, for example, is quantified – or, at the very least, recognized – then the degradation of neighborhood fabric and culture can be properly accounted in the overall sum of gains and losses. MFABA STUDIO: MEGAREGION TO RAIL Megaregion to Rail: Systems-Based Urban Design, was an interdisciplinary Master of Urban Design (MUD) studio at Washington University’s Sam Fox School that focused on the interconnectivity of megaregion, city, and district systems and their spatial, social, and environmental design potential, with the NS-SS MetroLink line serving opportunistically as the catalyst. The aim was to use strategies of Infrastructural Urbanism to develop next generation design solutions that increase environmental sustainability and equitability around the alignment. Taught in conjunction with visiting faculty member Paola Aguirre from Borderless Studio in Chicago, and teaching assistants Anu Samarajiva and Melissa Betts, the class consisted of twenty-nine students, roughly one-third archi-

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tecture and urban design dual-degree students, one-third landscape architecture and urban design dual-degree students, and one-third one year urban design students.25 The balanced interdisciplinarity of the group worked in the studio’s favor, allowing extra peer-to-peer learning and cross-disciplinary expertise to inform both the mapping and the design proposals. The act of mapping is a critical component of systems-based urban design thinking and is a methodological commonality of Landscape Urbanism, Ecological Urbanism, and Infrastructural Urbanism. As James Corner writes, “Through rendering visible multiple and sometimes disparate field conditions, mapping allows for an understanding of terrain as only the surface expression of a complex and dynamic imbroglio of social and natural processes.”26 The hidden forces – those we must excavate to understand more fully the rationale behind the production and reproduction of that terrain – include the vast range of histories and contestations, legislative and legal conditions, power structures, and metamorphosizing conditions within which we operate as urban designers. Mapping exposes both product and process, both the activities of negotiations (or unnegotiated violences) and the results of their outcomes. Mapping goes beyond data gathering, or even synthesis and analysis, and translates information into knowledge: the understanding not just that a condition exists, but why it matters and what it means. This thick mapping presents findings and develops arguments that “re-territorialize” the new site and set up a critical framework revealing latent questions for further intervention. Mapping also differentiates performative from object-oriented urbanism, foregrounding the results of relationships and complexities over the static condition of figure and ground. The mappings created in this studio were organized under broad themes: opportunity corridors, distribution systems, catalytic land use, urban renewal over time, accessibility and mobility, cultural anchors, power and influence, demo-

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graphic divides, pollution and ECONOMIC vulnerability, VIOLENCE urban green space, health, vacancy and erasure, industry, and education (see pages 192–205). The projects included here are responses to the findings revealed through the mappings, including the initial selection of nodes and network segments based on intersecting infrastructural systems (see pages 206–219). The design proposals create spatial arguments that aim to respond specifically to performative conditions that are lacking, either environmentally or socially or both, and the opportunities the maps elucidate.

CITY 2016 POPULATION

311,404

2.5%

COUNTY 2016 POPULATION

998,581 METRO 2016 POPULATION

2,807,002

0.0% 0.7%

CITY 2045 POPULATION (PROJECTED)

308,604

PROPOSED NORTHSIDE-SOUTHSIDE METROLINK

17 15 23 29 $2.2 billion miles // city alignment wards

neighborhoods

neighborhoods

investment for full build out

EXISTING EAST-WEST METROLINK

46 38 56,900

miles // 14 built in existing rail right-of-way stations // 16 initial stations in 1993 average weekday riders

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ECONOMIC VIOLENCE Opportunity Corridors, Christine Doherty and Tom Klein

An analysis of economic investment in St. Louis shows there is an “opportunity corridor” where the level of resources and assets far exceeds that of other locations in the surrounding metro area. Running roughly east to west and bounded by Delmar Boulevard to the north and Interstate 44 to the south, this corridor con tains most of the region’s largest employers, remaining Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure. Downtown St. Louis, Clayton, and West County are all within this zone, as are Interstate 64 and the existing MetroLink light-rail lines, the two primary mobility conduits connecting residents with large employers. This zone is also home to the city’s “eds and meds” – three major hospitals and two renowned universities – plus public amenities including museums, parks, and monuments. This focused economic investment has been spatialized through a series of policy decisions that have brought substantial funding and provided considerable tax incentives to this corridor. The Missouri Department of Transportation’s reconstruction of I - 64 is perhaps the most visible manifestation of this investment axis, yet ongoing decisions by local and regional leaders to deploy both tax increment financing (TIF) and tax abatement continue to further the imbalance of big investment toward the central corridor and away from communities to the north and south. This analysis showed that nearly all of the projects successfully deploying TIF as a development tool – totaling over $400 million – occurred within this “opportunity corridor.”

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This mapping also exposes the census tracts where high concentrations of individuals live below the poverty line and lack access to a personal vehicle, spotlighting the physical mobility barriers to employment and educational opportunity. The areas most in need of that public transportation infrastructure are those outside of this opportunity corridor, and to date have not had the benefit of light rail or even BRT investment. The proposed NS -SS MetroLink is thus a notable shift from how infrastructure dollars have been distributed in the region historically, and, if built, could help rebalance the benefits to the north and south sides of St. Louis.

power, territory, and politics Overlaid Influence, Bryan Arias and Hallie Nolan Power, Bryan Arias and Hallie Nolan This mapping analyzes the ways in which City of St. Louis power structures enable a handful of elected and unelected individuals to wield an inordinate amount of power over policy and planning decisions, and how decades of this structure have resulted in social, economic, and environmental challenges within the city. Combined with the opportunity map, it further highlights how large investments have been focused in target areas often around projects with limited benefits for the bulk of city residents. Perhaps most stark is the prominent role the developer Paul McKee has played in the continued degradation of North St. Louis through decades of speculation. While McKee has made numerous promises over the past twenty-plus years, residents of North St. Louis have little to show in the form of meaningful investment. Meanwhile, McKee’s activity has resulted in the accumulation of more than 30 percent of all land within a half mile of the $8 billion Northside Regeneration project, which includes the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) – and its wholly anti-urban approach to development – as the anchor. Some of this property he bought and resold to the city at a hefty profit, while also receiving tax deferrals and maintaining development rights for the old Pruitt-Igoe site. While McKee has played a leading role in shaping the present spatial conditions of the near north side, he is not alone. Several others have engaged in similar practices within specific terrains of St. Louis, accumulating land and developing entire neighborhoods in their image.

This activity has gone largely unchecked by city leadership, and is even embraced by current mayor Lyda Krewson and Lewis Reed, president of the Board of Aldermen, both of whom feature prominently within the structures of city governance as currently organized. Unlike McKee and his wholesale land grab, community developer Jason Deem has taken an incremental approach to reshaping Cherokee and Chippewa Streets, two areas on the south side that will directly benefit from NS-SS MetroLink stops. His team has rehabilitated historical buildings at risk of decay and supported micro-businesses by subdividing larger spaces to create more affordable commercial rentals. At least one structure has been rehabbed with affordable housing units. His defining investment is a coworking space that has helped build a culture of innovation on the south side of the city. With the introduction of new clientele, local government initiated more streetscaping and property remediation, but that meant introducing a tax district, a tactic that tends to hit poorer residents harder than others and generate fears of gentrification. Though Deem’s approach differs markedly from the clean sweep and abandonment of McKee, some still criticize the scale of this investment as a threat to the historical Latino presence on Cherokee Street and a risk to housing affordability on the south side. With the area facing a range of spatial struggles arising from decades of neglect, there is a great need in St. Louis for sensitive stabilization without gentrification.

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ECONOMIC VIOLENCE Opportunity Corridors, Christine Doherty and Tom Klein

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POWER, TERRITORY, AND POLITICS Overlaid Influence, Bryan Arias and Hallie Nolan (left) Power, Bryan Arias and Hallie Nolan (right)

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legacies of urban renewal and racial segregation Vacancy Is Not Vacant, Xiaohan Qiu and Yuxuan Chen Renewal Rampage, Rachel Burch and Nic Smith The heyday of St. Louis is often associated with the 1904 World’s Fair and Summer Olympics, when twenty million people visited the city. At that point, population was projected to reach one million residents by mid- century. Instead, the city’s population peaked in 1950, at 856,796 and has been dropping ever since, with many residents staying in the region but moving west to richer, whiter suburbs. In 2016, the city population was 311,404, a drop of over 60 percent from its height. As of 2019, that number is still dropping. Like in many American cities, the exodus resulted from a combination of factors, including the urban renewal projects that simultaneously destroyed less affluent (and hence less powerful) neighborhoods and made it easy to live in the suburbs and commute on new highways to the city center. This mapping identifies vacancy within the city of St. Louis and analyzes the relationship between present vacancy and the legacy of urban renewal projects, race -based zoning, and restrictive covenants within the city. The red on the Renewal Rampage map is additive – the more times a site has been erased or restricted, the darker the red becomes. Overall, there are more than 25,000 vacant lots and buildings, representing one in every five total properties within the city. An analysis of the location of vacant parcels coupled with historic urban renewal events shows that areas sub jected to continual urban redevelopment are more likely to remain vacant today. Clearly, the addition of the Northside-Southside MetroLink line could provide stimulus for those vacant properties to be revitalized and reused, first in support of remaining or returning residents. However, the clearing of the St. Louis Place neighborhood for the new National Geo -

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spatial- Intelligence Agency and the property arrangements made with Paul McKee (see Power maps) for the Pruitt-Igoe site call into question the city’s commitment to halting renewal and beginning repair.

environmental justice Opportunity for Equity, Briana Coleman, Ayman Rouhan, and Yuhan Zhang Distribution Systems, Lyle Hansen and Eric Kobal The Northside-Southside MetroLink alignment runs through an expansive area with a very poor environmental justice rating. Though often associated with the aftermath of industrialization, as seen at the riverfront, these inner- city areas of high contamination are also the result of deferred maintenance, obsolete infrastruc ture, and decades of policy decisions leading to immoderate risk factors. Within city limits, there are 404 acres of Superfund sites – highly contaminated locations that the Environmental Protection Agency has identified as needing long-term cleanup efforts. While many of the contaminated sites are located along both active and legacy industrial corridors within the city – namely the riverfront and east-west rail corridor – lead contamination is widespread in schools and residences located in historically underserved areas. Within the city, there are three areas where lead contamination has been found on 20 percent or more of all parcels – two in North St. Louis and one in South St. Louis. While the federal standard states that acceptable lead levels are at or below 20 parts per billion, thirty-two schools tested significantly higher, with nine schools showing lead levels above 100 parts per billion. Over 9 percent of school-aged children in the city have tested positive for lead, generating concern for the development and future health of over three thousand youth in a city already plagued by other health and academic outcome issues for children within the public school system.

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LEGACIES OF URBAN RENEWAL AND RACIAL SEGREGATION Vacancy Is Not Vacant, Xiaohan Qiu and Yuxuan Chen (left) Renewal Rampage, Rachel Burch and Nic Smith (right)

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ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Opportunity for Equity, Briana Coleman, Ayman Rouhan, and Yuhan Zhang (left) Distribution Systems, Lyle Hansen and Eric Kobal (right)

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Composite analytical site model synthesizing content of critical mapping. Model team: Lyle Hansen, Haoyu Li, Ian Miley, Xiaohan (Ray) Qiu, Ayman Rouhani, Nicolas Smith, and Kevin Ulmer, with Danielle Bagwin, Xiaoti Hu, Xiang Huang, Thomas Klein, Eric Kobal, Yueying Lu, Xiaotong Shan, Peihao Tong, Yong Yuan, Weitu Zeng.

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Northside-Southside Metrolink Studio Projects

THRIVE AT THE CONVERGENCE

old north / new refuge

karst urbanism

two rivers

NORTHSIDE

75,200 5,000 36% $59k 42% population

households with no vehicle

people / mi

2

median housing value households at or below the poverty level

TOTAL STUDY AREA

155,800 5,200 27% $103k 33%

households with no vehicle

72,800 6,000 28% $121k 29%

households with no vehicle

population

people / mi

2

median housing value households at or below the poverty level

SOUTHSIDE population

2

people / mi

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karst urbanism Tom Klein and Shuailin Wu

South St. Louis City is a contested terrain, subject to fluctuations in socioeconomic migration, shifts in economic identity, and continual infrastructural challenges, particularly the dwindling capacity of urban stormwater systems due to infrastructural aging and increasing risk of flood. Understanding the conflict between human and nonhuman actors within the context of the watershed enables the creation of a new urban form, one that supports both cultural and ecological needs within the South St. Louis combined sewer overflow (CSO). The CSO is the mechanical manifestation of the watershed within the urban fabric and, in this obsolete form, results in frequent backups and flooding when river levels rise. By framing the planning through the lens of the CSO, this project challenges the typical process, where boundaries are defined by political or economic constructs – e.g., the business district, neighborhood, or municipality – and instead proposes that systems take priority and set the scope. The proposed NS-SS MetroLink light rail provides a catalyst for imagining this systems-based approach. In South St. Louis, much of the alignment is along Jefferson Avenue – a physical and political boundary between the Benton Park and Benton Park West neighborhoods. The light rail provides an opportunity to reimagine the Jefferson Avenue corridor as both a socially and ecologically productive next generation infrastructural system by introducing urban-scale, interconnected green spaces for water-based social, economic, and environmental programming. This new, multifunctional green infrastructure zone supports additional infill housing that accommodates increased demand and provides a range of residential types intended to increase socioeconomic and racial diversity. Building on the existing local economies of Cherokee Street (small restaurants, bars, galleries, local goods), productive landscape infrastructures provide additional food for an estimated sixty thousand inhabitants, storm-

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water management capable of capturing and utilizing 95 percent of stormwater within the CSO-shed, and adequate space for micro-production facilities such as breweries and bakeries – a growing economic opportunity in South St. Louis. Perhaps the greatest opportunity uncovered by Karst Urbanism is the layering of infrastructures to serve a myriad of constituencies simultaneously. By building on the combination of local culture and the need to mitigate pressure on the overburdened CSO, Karst Urbanism reclaims the public right-of-way as a productive space for growing crops, creating energy, managing stormwater, and supporting small business start-ups. Specifically, the creation of a food production incubator acts as a tool for increasing social mobility and economic opportunity. Long-term affordable housing for low-income residents is coupled with job training and resource allocation within the food production sector, resulting in a live/work district that actually serves current residents while becoming a regional amenity.

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THRIVE AT THE CONVERGENCE Bryan Arias and Kevin Ulmer

Elleardsville, formally incorporated into St. Louis in 1876, initially attracted German and Irish immigrants, but even early on the neighborhood was a haven for St. Louis’s African American population. The Ville, as the neighborhood would grow to be called, evolved from being a landing point for European immigrants to the cradle of the city’s African American culture, contributing significantly to Black history in the United States and extending its influence far beyond the boundaries of the north St. Louis neighborhood. Though the area’s African American population totaled less than 10 percent in the 1920s, calculated legal restrictions imposed by the city, most notably restrictive covenants, made the Ville one of the few areas in St. Louis where African American residents could find housing. By 1930, African Americans represented 90 percent of the population, and the Ville became a cultural incubator for the community. The neighborhood was home to several prominent figures including musicians Tina Turner, Chuck Berry, and Luther Ingram; athletes Arthur Ashe and Sonny Liston; and activists, entrepreneurs, and educators including Annie Malone, Julia Davis, and Dick Gregory, among others. Historic institutions that were founded in the Ville during its period of economic entrepreneurialism included Homer G. Phillips Hospital, Sumner High School, Annie Malone Children and Family Services, Tandy Recreation Center, Antioch Baptist Church, and Stowe Teacher College, all of which created and greatly advanced opportunities for the African American community in St. Louis. This period of economic entrepreneurialism was short-lived, though, as forces that spread across the city in the 1950s made their way to the Ville. Urban renewal projects, disinvestment in neighborhood resources, and widespread population decline resulted in vacancy and property blighting that degraded this community that had so profoundly influenced Black history and culture in the US. The rich history, culture, and structures

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of the Ville were – and still are – at risk of vanishing from the city’s history. The project title Thrive at the Convergence refers to the convergence of the Ville and the Northside-Southside MetroLink expansion. The convergence of economic pressures brought about by a citywide infrastructural and development effort must be made compatible with the need to revitalize and protect this historically critical neighborhood. The foundation of the proposal calibrates these potentially at-odds forces by positioning the three planned MetroLink stations along Natural Bridge Avenue, with historic buildings in the Ville as anchors. These historic structures are complemented by institutions and programs specifically intended to increase equity and benefit community residents, including but not limited to justice services, legal counsel, entrepreneurial services, job training, sources of healthy food, and financial centers. A blend of public spaces is inserted between the new anchor institutions and programs, enabling the street to perpetually serve as a site for protest, gathering, and expression. Ultimately, the proposal builds on the strong history of the Ville and provides residents new community resources and spaces where local voices and culture can be amplified.

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OLD NORTH/NEW REFUGE Ayman Rouhani

At 311,000 residents, the population of St. Louis is currently at its lowest level since 1880. With a density of only 4,900 persons per square mile in Old North (the neighborhood where this proposal is sited), adding to the mere hundreds of refugees the city accepts annually (816 in 2016) could catalyze and contribute to an enhanced economy and vibrant social fabric. Considering potential redensification, the neighborhood could house 9,245 residents at maximum capacity, nearly five times its current population. Supportive resources already exist throughout the neighborhood and in the larger city. During the 1990s, tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees were welcomed to St. Louis and integrated into the social fabric. Between 2003 and 2013, over four thousand of those new residents became naturalized citizens. Many of the Bosnian refugees have rehabbed homes, opened businesses, and continue to be a vital workforce integrated into the city’s economy. Most of those refugees entered the city with support from the International Institute on the city’s south side, an organization that connects refugees to a web of resources. Additional efforts are required to serve the various needs of new arrivals on the north side. This speculative proposal creates a social infrastructure along a segment of the proposed MetroLink that seeks to serve and host a new population of refugees in St. Louis. Old North currently sits isolated between the highway, the old Pruitt-Igoe site, and the future National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The neighborhood faces several challenges, including high vacancy rates, low access to healthy food, and a poor connection to the river and natural green space. By densifying the neighborhood, stitching the urban fabric with green infrastructure, and reimagining the industrial waterfront, the MetroLink can act as a spark to support and improve the quality of life for current residents, while also supporting for a new diverse and robust neighborhood population.

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TWO RIVERS Ian Miley and Eric Kobal

To tackle the environmental justice issues in the Dutchtown and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, Two Rivers employs a strategy that addresses the areas’ underlying issues and leverages their existing assets. Three objectives emerged out of focused research and local interactions: remediation of lead-contaminated soils, production of healthy sources of food, and increased access to natural amenities. Noting the existing and future flows of the area, our concept uses a metaphorical framework of “two rivers.” The first river, the long and narrow corridor nestled between the Mississippi River and South Broadway, nurtures and expands emergent ecologies and habitats while simultaneously producing agricultural crops on remediated soils. The second river, more urban in scale, repurposes the sunken I-55 as a dense and diverse corridor for mobility, distribution, community, and habitation. In order to connect these two rivers and, more importantly, this neighborhood to the larger urban fabric, several cross-grain land bridges are strategically situated. Once paired with the proposed NS-SS MetroLink line, these two rivers can begin to work in tandem to help spatially integrate St. Louis as a whole. One of the major issues currently facing the area is the lack of east-west connectivity caused by the construction of I-55. Individuals on the east side of the highway are separated from the rest of the neighborhood, while individuals on the west are blocked from the river and its assets. The introduction of community land bridges built from remediated soil not only allows individuals to walk and bike along this east-west axis but also provide an aggregation of community space and markets along the MetroLink line. For this new market row, produce is grown in small-scale community gardens, supplemented by larger-scale cropland. Value-added prep and food distribution then occurs at a new Broadway food and transit hub. Once processed and packaged, food is

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distributed to markets along the community land bridges and further up the proposed MetroLink line to various pop-up markets, reducing the expanse of food deserts along the line. Lead contamination in St. Louis soil is ubiquitous, if invisible. The negative effects are inflicted on both humans and nonhumans as lead makes its way into aquifers and waterways. This project proposes a process of remediation using existing

barges in the area to contain contaminated soil from St. Louis, Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) sites, and surrounding the highway. While in barges, the soil would go through remediation by means of phytoextraction into plants that are then handled by existing hazardous management facilities in the immediate vicinity.

landscape between the river and the city and create new food production and a new food industry in two south city neighborhoods. The remediation of soil is part of the ecological cycle of the processes and both that new soil and new food contribute to the larger health of the city.

Two Rivers uses the addition of the NS/SS MetroLink line to bridge gaps in the physical

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AFTER THE PROJECTS: MFABA IMPACTS In 2019, after the first phase of Mobility For All By All, the City of St. Louis commissioned a TOD study completed by Farr Associates out of Chicago, entitled A Prosperous & Equitable St. Louis: An Incremental Strategy to Develop the NS-SS Corridor. This followed an earlier TOD study by H3 Studio completed in 2013. As expected, the Farr Associates process involved many of the same partners as ours; our work was shared with their team and is noted in the group’s study. Though the Farr Associates study calls out numerous fatal flaws in need of attention – the lack of a guiding plan for the city, the massive population loss, the glacial pace between study and implementation – it paints a promising picture overall. As the quote taken from their report at the beginning of this case study implies, Farr Associates has unbridled faith in the power of optimism to overcome the inertia of the city’s inaction. Unlike previous reports or studies, the tone of Farr’s 2019 study is action oriented, focusing on a ten-year plan to make the city most competitive for New Starts funding by initiating incremental and spatially substantial interventions now. The plan suggests a four-quadrant vision – community, leadership, economy, and placemaking – with three pilot projects focused on public space, walkability, and local character. Principal Doug Farr has suggested the city develop an ambitious initiative that would create one net-zero building per ward as a placeholder signaling its commitment to this incrementally improved future. Though the objectives are laudable and the aims admirable, the accumulation of previous stalled efforts – 2008, 2013, 2017, 2019 – seems to indicate that something more radical, comprehensive, and systemic is needed to move the needle. The continued emphasis on economic development, real estate investment, and access to jobs through transit connectivity alone glosses over the structural fault lines in the city. A primary focus on economic develop-

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ment continues to promote an argument that growth is the answer, even in the face of continued discrimination, population loss, abysmal life expectancy, and spatial erasure. When the city itself is responsible for displacement, resulting in schools and health facilities being shuttered, and leadership has yet to emerge that fights for bottom-up decision-making by, with, and for the good of residents, arguments for high-density, mixed-use development seem both inadequate and invalid. As this book argues, infrastructural opportunism requires radically broadening the process, transforming the prototype, and measuring what matters to shift the infrastructure paradigm. By looking at systems rather than forms – social systems, environmental systems, cultural systems, and spatial systems – and their interconnections and codependencies, an Infrastructural Urbanism strategy would seek performative goals that improve social outcomes through projects that are flexible, adaptable, local, networked, bottom-up, inclusive, ecological, and outcome-driven rather than object-focused. Ultimately, the aim for the Northside-Southside light rail line, particularly through the lens of the MFABA project, is to increase spatial justice – the production of a more equitable physical city, which includes both process (who has a voice and how decisions are made) and product (what happens where, how costs and benefits are distributed, who has access). Spatial justice demands prioritizing improvements in access to information, healthy food, quality education, neighborhood stabilization, and housing affordability, certainly, but also trickier metrics to trace, like civic engagement, rootedness, fairness, and optimism – all of which rely on intact democracy and both personal and collective agency. 27 Creating just cities requires commitment from top-level stakeholders to invest in these priorities as integrated – and accountable – objectives of infrastructural expansion. As of August 2020, the City of St. Louis is still investigating options for the NS-SS MetroLink

expansion, including the possibility of a bus rapid transit (BRT) route instead of a lightrail line. The future presence of the NGA, a controversial, modern-day urban renewal/ removal project adjacent to the notorious Pruitt-Igoe site (and currently under irreverent redevelopment), resulted in a spatial kink in the alignment that would reroute the light rail around the NGA for a stop directly in front of its doors. Not only does this reduce access for the existing residents, it misses an opportunity to purposefully create a line of connectivity between the community and new employees of the agency. This slight is one of the least of the sins of NGA planning, though. Though the city touts the project as a large financial gain, when we “measured what matters” the bottom line was a compounded loss of generational wealth, independent small businesses, local amenities like caregiving, and rich social cohesion. In addition to those complicated social costs, the supposed tax benefits themselves simply don’t add up, resulting in layers of giveaways by the city through selling and reselling property to shell investors who have repeatedly betrayed the community. As in many projects with equity objectives, equalizing the playing field requires first leveling the ground, then building the steps to elevate the historically marginalized. There’s a long way to go. With the COVID-19 pandemic in progress, combined with the newly energized Black Lives Matter movement, though, investment in the north and south sides of St. Louis, where African Americans are in the majority, is more urgent and necessary than ever. A recent note of optimism is a new partnership between the Ville’s famous Charles H. Sumner high school and city-wide arts agencies as a way to honor and extend the legacy of this historically significant place with such notable alumni as Arthur Ashe, Tina Turner, and Chuck Berry. A NEW GREENWAY Another project originated in 1999 that also hopes to provide alternative forms of connectivity across St. Louis. Re-emerging in 2017 via

a global design competition, the Chouteau Greenway sought interdisciplinary design teams to answer its call. From the brief: Imagine changing the landscape in a way that transcends traditional physical, cultural or political barriers. Picture a place where natural systems and the human spirit are equally renewed and restored. Designing Chouteau Greenway is a complex and challenging opportunity that we seek talented and innovative design teams to undertake. We are embarking on a process that values community engagement to establish a greenway that’s uniquely St. Louis. We want to consider equitable social, environmental and economic impact at every turn, leaving a legacy for future generations. This green line of connectivity sought, from its beginning in the 1990s, to offer more than bike and pedestrian access by also incorporating green infrastructure – stormwater mitigation, brownfield remediation, environmental restoration – as well as recreational lakes and economic revitalization for the central core.28 The recent competition, supported by an impressive Design Oversight Committee of public, private, nonprofit, and institutional partners led by local nonprofit Great Rivers Greenway (GRG), sought solutions spanning geographically from “arch to park,” for an eastwest greenway that would reinforce the existing transit line and connect Washington University through Forest Park to the midtown Cortex district (a growing high-tech/biomed development), downtown, and the St. Louis Arch grounds at the Mississippi River. Early on, the competition organizers made some strategic moves to broaden the design process. In addition to the official organizational partners, forty city residents spanning age groups, genders, and races were selected from over two hundred applicants to make up a Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC). Regional agencies were represented on a Technical Advi-

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+StL: Growing An Urban Mosaic, Chouteau Greenway competition entry, 2018. Team leads: TLS Landscape Architecture, OBJECT TERRITORIES, [dhd] derek hoeferlin design and team. Above aerial view, drawing by Jess Vanecek. Below Community Engagement Strategy: Systems of Advocacy, by Casey Ryan, Linda C. Samuels and Paola Aguirre Serrano.

sory Group of nearly sixty people who provided feedback to competing teams at intermediate presentations. In answer to some controversy over adequate diversity in the process, an additional group, Artists of Color, was formed to contribute to the process. The CAC helped compile and prioritize over two thousand neighborhood surveys into a list of fourteen community goals that would contribute to the jury’s selection. The jury was also a diverse, cross-disciplinary group of recognized professionals representing government, arts, planning, transportation, nonprofits, architecture, urbanism, academics, industry, and cultural affairs. Of the nine members, four were people of color and four were women.

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Our team, +StL: Growing An Urban Mosaic, was populated by a substantial group of local experts highly familiar with the conditions on the ground. As one of the four finalist teams in the competition, we took the opportunity to help shift the narrative away from an east-west only line, which would connect money to money and reinforce existing successes while continuing to ignore the portions of the city most in need, and instead insisted on spreading the investment also north and south. In addition, we proposed that the contemporary greenway tackle an expansive range of both environmental and social challenges – in other words, embrace the tenets of Infrastructural Urbansim.29 Where the east-west route connected two

public space gems of the city, Forest Park and the St. Louis Arch grounds (each a recipient of millions of dollars of investment in preceding decades and a regional, if not national, destinations), we argued that the north-south link (not unlike the NS-SS MetroLink) should rebalance the investment into other areas in an effort to lessen the gaps. The vertical line of our plus sign–like plan would connect Tower Grove Park in South City to Fairground Park in the north in phase one, and expand farther south and north, to Marquette and O’Fallon Parks, respectively, in additional phases. Tower Grove Park has benefited in recent years from strong neighborhood growth and nonprofit engagement yet retains a diversified population that includes immigrants and people of color and a mixedscale housing stock. Fairground Park, site of one of the city’s earliest race riots over the attempted integration of a public pool, has not fared nearly as well. Both our extension to the greenway and the NS-SS MetroLink, if built, would connect to Fairground Park. The historical significance of the park, which is of the same era as the connecting public parks, deserves attention and merits investment. Capitalizing on existing strengths along the stable and growing east-west corridor and the historically and culturally rich north-south axis, we identified three types of systems – ecological loops, equitable extensions, and economic assets – that could work together synergistically and symbiotically to increase physical, social, and economic access for all. A re-envisioning of Scott Campbell’s planner’s triangle, these three “advocacy loops” work not in conflict but in cooperation; the “systems of advocacy” incorporate ways in – politically, economically, culturally, and spatially – for residents in the region. These types of systems included, more specifically: education and innovation, culture and heritage, health and food, and finance and housing. An ongoing residents’ council would be integral in deciding where and how funds should be spent within the new systems emphasis. In an

embodiment of infrastructural optimism, this proposal radically transforms the prototype and shifts the infrastructure paradigm in addition to broadening the process. This greenway would be no simple bike path. Following the first design review with the CAC, north-south connectivity became an additional requirement for all the finalist teams to consider. Though we didn’t win the commission, there are many similarities between the winning proposal by Stoss Landscape Urbanism and team, and the +STL entry, including the importance of memorializing the African American neighborhoods lost to urban renewal and the inclusion of an expansive list of local artists of color in that process. One additional recommendation from our scheme that would boost the socially productive component of the project is providing land reparations to families originally displaced by the urban renewal process. The inability to build wealth through property ownership is a primary contributor to the wealth disparity between Black and white families in St. Louis and elsewhere. Anticipating property value increases along the greenway, offering property to families that have suffered generations of repeat displacement could begin to reduce another gap. Implementation of the greenway has begun. A very short segment around the most recently constructed MetroLink station (the first in over twenty years), was completed in 2018. Recently, the project was renamed from Chouteau Greenway to the Brickline. Though GRG lists numerous reasons, including difficulties in developing a legible identity and simple spelling, the beleaguered legacy of the Chouteau family – the fur traders (and slave owners) who cofounded the city and sold it to Thomas Jefferson with blatant disregard for the existing American Indian inahabitants – potentially adds to the reason for the change. COVID-19 has slowed the ability to conduct further community engagement, as it has for many aspects of design and planning. The map on the GRG website, though, shows three segments in

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progress – two single east-west lines, and a pair of designated greenways connecting Fairground Park to the central core. At the height of this pandemic and in the wake of newly energized social unrest, completing the northsouth greenway first, including the plethora of promised amenities, would be an active effort toward equity and an important line of access for a wide range of St. Louisians. THE SLOW PACE OF IMPLEMENTATION These cases exemplify ways cities, regions, agencies, communities, and designers working together can reimagine some of the most entrenched infrastructural systems as complex, multifaceted contributors to more productive cities. And though they do model intervening in the process (the sooner the better), transforming prototypes, and measuring what matters, what they don’t tackle is the long, arduous, often convoluted process of moving projects at an infrastructural level of complexity and scale from conception and planning to full completion. The implementation of megaprojects is an intensely complicated process, one which often seems to blame economics or a combination of economics and politics for its failures. The pace at which citywide, regional, or megaregional projects like I-11 or the NS-SS MetroLink happen can be sluggish, if not entirely invisible to the naked eye. Successful projects of this scale with atypical ambitions (and sometimes even without atypical ambitions) historically have required a seemingly miraculous alignment of circumstances. Yet based on the changes outlined in previous chapters regarding shifts in the discipline and the greater pressures of twenty-first-century global conditions, more and more stakeholders are sympathizing with objectives supported best by next generation infrastructure solutions using strategies of Infrastructural Urbanism (even if they don’t yet know it). When all team members are collectively on the same page, paddling hard in the same direction, key values

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for a project are commonly held and therefore prioritized, perhaps even sacrosanct. The earlier a project team can come together around shared objectives – preferably at the outset, embedding them in the very seeds of the work – the more likely a project is to succeed with its bigger ambitions intact, not just in implementation but in moving the needle on what matters.30 Successful projects are also most often steered by powerful project champions and persevering project shepherds. The first is the formal face of the project – the rainmaker, public booster, and top-level connector. Champions are unwaveringly optimistic about both the possibility and importance of their plans. Project shepherds, on the other hand, work behind the scenes to make things happen, steering the project clear of roadblocks, or, even better, turning challenges into opportunities that lead to improved solutions. When the plans for Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle were at risk because of an important salmon migration pattern, for example, the project shepherd found ways to create an enhanced habitat within the site itself and supported it with additional funding from the Environmental Protection Agency. The champion is often a skilled politician, executive, director of an institution, or other type of charismatic public figure; the shepherd is someone who seems to manage the process effortlessly, a consistent presence in the project, an agile thinker, and a tenacious worker. The timelines of these projects, potentially spanning decades and multiple election cycles, means champions like mayors or governors must be willing to spend political will even if they don’t reap immediate political rewards. I once asked Robin Blair, the senior director of operations at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, why he thought a particular project for the 101 Freeway was a failure. It’s not a failure, he replied, it’s just not done yet. After thirty years, the project plan had resulted in taking back a single car lane on a cross street over the 101 to create two widened sidewalks. Change is slow, but in some instances, it’s enough to indicate progress.

The new Sixth Street Viaduct design by Michael Maltzan Architects and HNTB Engineering was selected by a two-phase process to replace the historical bridge originally built in 1932. The project, shown under construction in 2021, is shepherded by a multi-disciplinary team under the City Engineer of Los Angeles and is expected to be completed in 2022 (see pages 82–85). Image: Gary Leonard.

The two studio cases included here are defined by their opportunism – preexisting initiatives, with real teams of stakeholders and communities, and very large investments that can go toward either red arrow or green arrow scenarios. The red arrow is the status quo that reproduces the environmental damage and historical inequities common in old infrastructure planning; the green arrow scenarios utilize the skills of designers and systems thinking to create multifunctional, socially and environmentally productive solutions, with complex performative demands, in place of last gen scenarios. These sample efforts are models of collaborative and

innovative thinking intended to show that the real cost of infrastructure is not the risk of new thinking, but of continuing costly past mistakes in a blind effort to support narrow, outdated, and damaging objectives. Leveraging design competitions (with appropriate compensation, of course), which at their core are meant to instigate innovation, and academic settings, which allow for broad exploration without political or radical economic consequences, can help break down stubborn silos and take risks that further paradigm shifts.

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NOTES

I-11 runs primarily east of I-15, but the correct designation, I-17, was already taken. 2 At the time of the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, the size of Las Vegas didn’t merit a major connection point in the system, resulting in a north-south gap between Phoenix and Las Vegas. 3 The Arizona Sun Corridor, often called just the Sun Corridor, is a designated megaregion in southern Arizona and along the Mexico border that includes the large metropolitan regions of Tucson and Phoenix. According to the 2010 census, the population was approximately 5.6 million inhabitants, a number projected to reach 7.8 million by 2025 and over 12 million by 2050, according to America2050. The Southern California megaregion includes the major metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, San Diego, Anaheim, Long Beach, and Las Vegas, with a 2010 population of 24.4 million and projected populations of 29 million by 2025 and 39.4 million by 2050. See “Arizona Sun Corridor,” America2050, accessed November 29, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20180809114412/ http://www.america2050.org/arizona_sun_corridor. html; and “Southern California,” America2050, accessed November 29, 2020, https://web.archive.org/ web/20180809121957/http://www.america2050.org/ southern_california.html. 4 The estimate of $17 million to $70 million represents the range of costs between constructing greenfields (on the low end) and urban freeways (on the high end). 5 CH2M Hill and AECOM, I-11 and Intermountain West Corridor Study: Corridor Justification Report, August 21, 2013, 84, http://i11study.com/IWC-Study/ PDF/2013/I11_CJR_08_21_13_FINAL.pdf. 6 Teaching faculty included Arlie Adkins, Mark Frederickson, and Linda C. Samuels (University of Arizona); Jason Boyer (Arizona State University); and Ken McCown (University of Nevada, Las Vegas). Partners included Mike Kies (ADOT) and Ian Dowdy (Sonoran Institute). The I-11 Supercorridor project was generously supported by the University of Arizona’s Renewable Energy Network and the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at ASU. The original “sandpit” pitch was an event supported by the Walton Sustainable Solutions Initiatives, where the case of I-11 was first introduced to our team by Wellington “Duke” Reiter, now executive director of the University City Exchange at ASU, a leading partner in the Belmont initiative (see later in the chapter). 7 This is spelled out in the report by the planning 1

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students and backed up by research conducted in collaboration with Mikhail Chester, an associate professor at ASU’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. 8 Arizona Department of Transportation, Arizona State Rail Plan, March 2011, 5–6, https://azdot.gov/ sites/default/files/2019/05/state-rail-plan.pdf. 9 Arizona Department of Transportation, 7–9. 10 These calculations were developed in conjunction with Mikhail Chester at ASU. Transportation energy and greenhouse gas factors are from Argonne National Laboratory’s Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) model. Smart Growth emissions are from Mindy Kimball, Mikhail Chester, Christopher Gino, and Janet Reyna, “Assessing the Potential for Reducing Life-Cycle Environmental Impacts through Transit-Oriented Development Infill along Existing Light Rail in Phoenix,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 33, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 395–410, http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/0739456X13507485. Population statistics are from the Arizona Department of Employment and Population, accessed November 14, 2014, https://population.az.gov/population-projections. Passenger rail projections are from Arizona Department of Transportation, Arizona State Rail Plan, 14–17; and Arizona Department of Transportation, Ridership Modeling Plan Technical Memorandum, May 25, 2012, 14, http://origin.azdot.gov/docs/default-source/ planning/aprcs-ridership-modeling-plan-2012-05-25. pdf?sfvrsn=2. Traffic projections are from ADOT Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT) counts, accessed November 14, 2014, https://azdot.gov/planning/ transportation-analysis/traffic-monitoring. 11 In these estimates, CO2 is more accurately CO2e, or what is known as carbon dioxide equivalent. CO2e incorporates emissions over time rather than simply material amounts of CO2. CO2 is used here for the sake of simplicity. 12 ADOT expressed verbal support during the February 20, 2015, meeting of the southern Arizona chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. 13 United States Department of Transportation and Arizona Department of Transportation, ADOT Tier 1 Environmental Impact Statement Annotated Outline and Methodology, October 2017, http://i11study. com/Arizona/PDF/I-11_Tier_1_EIS_Methodology.pdf. 14 Nevada Department of Transportation, I-11 Northern Nevada Alternatives Analysis: Planning and Environmental Linkages, November 2018.

Belmont Partners news release quoted in Sophie Weiner, “Bill Gates Is Buying Land in Arizona to Build a ‘Smart City’,” Popular Mechanics, November 12, 2017, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/ a29005/bill-gates-smart-city/. 16 See, for example, Leanna Garfield, “Bill Gates’ Investment Group Spent $80 Million to Build a ‘Smart City’ in the Desert — and Urban Planners Are Divided,” Business Insider, November 22, 2017, https:// www.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-apos-investmentgroup-163200468.html. 17 Melissa McCann, email messages to and interview with author, March 2020. 18 “A Living Laboratory,” Arizona State University, University City Exchange, accessed November 29, 2020, https://universitycityexchange.asu.edu/content/10-across. 19 These ideas were first published in Linda C. Samuels, “A Case for Infrastructural Opportunism,” Technology|Architecture + Design 3, no. 1 (2019): 16–22. 20 Francis G. Slay, “Prop 1 Is a Moral and Ethical Imperative for St. Louis,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, April 3, 2017, https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/ prop-is-a-moral-and-economic-imperative-for-st-louis/ article_97ebf449-4832-53fb-9f3d-61058e7dde38.html. 21 United States Department of Transportation Federal Transit Administration, Proposed New Starts and Small Starts Policy Guidance, January 9, 2013, https:// www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/docs/NewStartsPolicyGuidance.pdf. 22 The name “Mobility For All By All” was inspired by the work done by the Ferguson Commission, which produced a report, called “For the Sake of All,” documenting the racial and economic disparities of the metro region following the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police. Co-Principal Investigators on the grant were Penina Acayo Laker, Assistant Professor of Communication Design; Matthew Bernstine, Senior Urban Designer and Lecturer; and Linda C. Samuels, Associate Professor of Urban Design, all in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Bryan Arias was the project research assistant. Creative collaborative partners (CCP leads) were Alix Gerber and Umeme Houston (Sewcial Impact Project), Antionette Carroll (Creative Reaction Lab), and Sunni Hutton (Dutchtown South Community Corporation). Organizational partners included Lisa Cagle and Liza Farr (Bi-State Development) and Courtney Mueller (Vector Communications). Project partners focused on data were Iris Patten, Eric Zencey, 15

and Rodrigo Reis. For more information, see the project website: https://www.mobilityforallbyall.com. 23 City of St. Louis, in partnership with Forward Through Ferguson and United Way of Greater St. Louis, Equity Indicators: Baseline Report, January 2, 2019, https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/mayor/initiatives/resilience/equity/documents/ upload/Equity-Indicators-Baseline-2018-Report-Document.pdf. 24 See, for example, “Child Food Insecurity Indicator,” City of St. Louis, last updated September 14, 2017, https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/data/dashboards/equity/ indicator.cfm?id=2, which notes the “next update” is scheduled for September 13, 2018 – over two years ago. Many of the indicators list the next update date as “unknown.” 25 Note that this was a proudly all-female, majority nonwhite teaching team. 26 James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention,” in Mappings, ed Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion, 1999), 214. 27 On justice and equality, see Susan Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and on the relationship between democracy, optimism, and agency, see Oliver Bennett, Cultures of Optimism: The Institutional Promotion of Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 28 “History of the Chouteau Greenway Project,” Great Rivers Greenway, accessed November 29, 2020, https://greatriversgreenway.org/chouteau-greenway-history/. 29 +STL team members: TLS Landscape Architecture, OBJECT TERRITORIES, and [dhd] derek hoeferlin design (design leads), plus Paola Aguirre Serrano, Bryan Cave LLP, Amanda Colón-Smith, Econsult Solutions, eDesign Dynamics, EDSI, Kristin Fleischmann Brewer, Jeremy Goss, James Lima Planning + Development, Langan, Sal Martinez, Preservation Research Office, Project Controls Group, Prosperity Labs, Jason Purnell, Ramboll, Linda C. Samuels, Silman, and Terra Technologies. 30 The analysis and interviews referenced here were part of my dissertation, “Reinventing Infrastructure: The 101 Freeway and the Revisioning of Downtown Los Angeles” (University of California, Los Angeles, 2012). See also Linda C. Samuels, “Resistance at the Trench: Why Efforts to Reinvent the 101 Freeway in Downtown Los Angeles Continue to Fail,” Journal of Planning History 16, no. 4 (March 28, 2017): 323–351, https://doi.org/10.1177/1538513217697440.

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05. Conclusion: next generation + 10 options for a Contentious era Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods. The ceaseless flow of information throughout the Republic is matched by individual and commercial movement over a vast system of interconnected highways criss-crossing the Country and joining at our national borders with friendly neighbors to the north and south. Together the uniting forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear – United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts. — Dwight D. Eisenhower, message to congress regarding a national highway program, February 22, 1955 Martin Luther King’s definition of power was very simple . . . [power is] the ability to either supply or withdraw needed resources. — Bernard Lafayette Jr., civil rights leader

In the decade that followed the WPA 2.0 competition, the aggressive impacts of ongoing climate change and the widening chasm between “winning” cities (where abundant demand creates copious wealth) and “losing” cities (those which are shrinking, less desirable, or off the radar) spurred the rapidly growing discourses of first sustainable urbanism and then resilient cities. The second decade of the 2000s saw the proliferation of expansive metrics frameworks, like STAR Communities and LEED-ND, formulated to gauge progress toward ideals of sustainability in cities, projects, and communities. These kinds of self-reporting efforts were followed by an influx of high-ranking philanthropies creating partnerships with governmental agencies (like Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Innovation Teams

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and the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities) in an attempt to fill financial and political gaps to attack the most wicked social and environmental urban problems with new strategies inspired by the private sector. Media explorations of social justice issues exploded. Books that explored the pervasive structural inequalities of American cities and suburbs reached broad, populist audiences. For example, Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s deep exposé on housing and poverty in a slanted system, ranked highly on Amazon and iTunes, was recognized by Oprah’s book club, and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The Color of Law, on redlining, reached similar critical attention and broad readership. Films like

13th, a documentary that draws lines between slavery and today’s epidemic of mass incarceration, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2016 and won a Prime Time Emmy the same year, but viewing soared 4,665% in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd.1 The film has over six and a half million views just on YouTube. The severity and frequency of natural disasters were also on the rise. In October 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report showing that the impacts of global warming – including weather extremes and human displacement – were approaching more rapidly and more severely than previously anticipated. Scientists warned that planetary warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, anticipated as soon as 2030, may replace the 2 degree threshold previously considered the point at which climate change impacts like drought, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events would be exacerbated beyond repair; just to stay within that threshold, much less roll back the damage, they recommended that radical changes in resource use and emissions happen more quickly and steeply.2 The fourth National Climate Assessment Report, released a month after the 2018 IPCC report, stated that “without substantial and sustained global mitigation and regional adaptation efforts, climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.”3 The severity of coinciding infrastructural, economic, and environmental challenges at an intensifying scale of global competitiveness and urbanization continues to demand that changes be made in the way cities are designed, made, and remade.

polarized political positions. The “Legislative Outline for Rebuilding Infrastructure in America,” proposed by the Trump administration, was based on a classic neoliberal framework focused on economic incentives to spur private investment while increasing so-called project “efficiency” and “streamlining” project delivery by reducing or removing “barriers.” What those terms translate into is the elimination of protective oversights (say, to safeguard public health) and regulations (say, to reduce air and water toxins or deforestation) long considered “barriers” to (or, what others call checks and balances on) industry, including the fossil-fuel industry and corporations whose primary objective is maximum resource extraction at highest profit. Examples from the plan include the consecutive sections “Protecting Clean Water with Greater Efficiency” and “Reducing Inefficiencies in Protecting Clean Air,” which both address critical commons resources – water and air – that might benefit from qualitative boosts rather than quantitative value engineering. The word “climate” appears nowhere in the document, nor do the terms “equity,” “inequality,” or “renewable.” As the Trump administration rolled back portions of the Environmental Policy Act from the 1970s and tried to open up 1.5 million acres of the National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling, the scale and severity of the risk to the environmental commons in the hands of dangerously careless skeptics became all too apparent. In this scenario, the commons is insignificant compared to individual or corporate wealth. The obvious problem is that the threat to human and nonhuman species, water, air, and the natural environment has no value in an equation based only on profit. This plan isn’t just last generation, it’s three generations ago.

With the reality of the Anthropocene and the recognition of a finite world in direct conflict with the continued insistence on a growth-at-all-costs economic model, the future of infrastructure planning and implementation is at a contentious crossroads. In the pre-election cycle of 2019, two very different visions emerged, exemplifying

This obstructive tug-of-war also isn’t news; the forty-year history of underfunding infrastructure at the federal level has resulted in the ongoing shortages and obsolescence discussed at the beginning of this book and evident in every American city. Yet innovation keeps happening, and – as the case studies and proposals

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included in previous chapters show – there are better ways to meet our infrastructural needs and improve quality of life for more people. Entering the third decade of the twenty-first century, monumental technological advances in autonomous vehicles and the dropping cost of renewable energy storage in particular, seem poised to finally catapult us toward a post-carbon, or at least a carbon-light, future. The “High Line effect” is real; reclamations of obsolete and underutilized infrastructure in the service of public space and slow mobility no longer seem as implausible as they did barely a decade ago (threats of gentrification, though, are also just as real). Infrastructural Urbanism, Landscape Urbanism, and Landscape Infrastructure projects are materializing, and they are bringing compounded advantages to their micro and macro contexts. WPA 2.0 + 10 Further evidence of the expansion of the discourse and the practice of Infrastructural Urbanism is the maturing and enduring work from the professional finalists of the WPA 2.0 competition. In the last decade, all of them have continued to expand the seminal ideas in their submissions through exhibitions (including several inclusions in the Venice Architecture Biennale), lectures, teaching, built work, and publications. Four teams created sublime and substantial books – Coupling (InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office, 2011), Local Code (Nicholas de Monchaux, 2016), Borderwall as Architecture (Ronald Rael of Rael San Fratello, 2017), and bowling (Urban Lab, 2017). These publications, all tied directly to the original competition proposals, continue the strategy of design as iterative prototype, with projects that spatially test and retest their core WPA 2.0 concepts for different sites, scales, climates, and clients. They cover vast geographical territory, from the militarized desert of the Southwest US to the barren arctic, and vast typological territory, from technological tools to teeter-totters. All continue to exemplify and reiterate the importance of

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the next generation criteria. Speaking with each team recently, common threads emerged across their reflections on the last decade.4 For all the teams, the WPA 2.0 proposals have been integral to the evolution of their practices and often their teaching, meaning governmental agencies they’ve engaged are being exposed to more symbiotic and adaptable systems thinking and a new generation of students are seeing and incorporating Infrastructural Urbanism into their design work. While the 2009 call tapped into inchoate ideas, the competition format and funding provided fuel and momentum for new thinking and broad speculation. The precise form of the competition, including both the structure of the initial open “sketchbook” and the multiphase process – from shortlist, to workshop, to symposium – was credited with providing a wide opening for entry and a supportive platform for experimentation and refinement (as Ronald Rael said, “If competitions were to enter competitions, WPA 2.0 would be one of the best.”).5 The framing of infrastructure as critical and instrumental to the revitalization of cities and the civic realm by architects was a way for those already thinking about the intersection of public space, systems, and rising social and environmental challenges to find form and audience for that content. It also provided a way of visualizing and communicating those types of design ideas – performative, disciplinarily hybrid, potentially political – to audiences outside of the architectural silo. Working through the projects helped some of the younger firms shape their identity and ethos. PORT developed a direction guided by “public space as infrastructure as opposed to public space and infrastructure,” which encouraged a transition away from object-oriented Architecture (capital A) toward their own hybridized and instrumentalized version of public space design. The practice’s current work continues to explore the way practical processes and astute observation can create unexpected design solutions, what its principals call “hyperbolic pragmatism,”

particularly in middle-market cities – Louisville, Knoxville, Bentonville – where lower resistance to strategic experimentation and more direct relationships with agencies make the process of design and implementation easier to negotiate. Aershop, the youngest firm of the group, whose project started as an academic thesis, was hired after the competition and symposium by three different jurors to work on major Infrastructural Urbanism projects at their firms. According to partners Darina Zlateva and Takuma Ono, aershop’s WPA 2.0 project, Hydrogenic City 2020, circulated widely among students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Rhode Island School of Design, where they taught, and was displayed prominently at the GSD by Dean Moshen Mostafavi, who also referred to their project when speaking about Ecological Urbanism. As several teams mentioned, WPA 2.0 legitimized a form of interdisciplinary systems thinking not commonly taught or seen in architecture schools or firms at the time and validated this trajectory for future work that failed to fit neatly into any single slot. How the ideas of the competition have transitioned into built reality have varied. For UrbanLab, the bio-streets of the Free Water District Chicago prototype led to conversations with Mayor Richard M. Daley that were moving toward implementation possibilities until his term ended and he left office. Fragments of the plan have been built, though mostly as limited green infrastructure rather than the more complex social and environmental agenda proposed in the prototype. Those governmental connections and that work, though, led to UrbanLab’s hiring as the lead architects and urban designers for the federally funded 2050 comprehensive regional plan for Chicago, a collaborative framework across seven counties and 284 communities that will guide built environment decisions for the metro area’s 8.5 million residents. Free Water District and a related initiative, Growing Water, have been pitched for other locations, including successfully in China, where top-down planning could result in the first

UrbanLab, masterplan for Changde, China, intended to accommodate 600,000 people in 5 square miles (13 square kilometers). “Eco-boulevards” (in orange) pre-treat stormwater runoff as part of a larger system of waterfiltering infrastructure.

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Lateral Office, An Ocean of Electronic Waste, 2017. The geography of electronics material extraction, manufacturing, and disposal reveals a vast and inequitable global footprint of e-waste where wealthy countries consume goods and poor countries absorb waste in a form of toxic colonialism.

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Lateral Office, Uncommons: States of Disassembly, 2017. This project proposes a series of building and landscape types which envision a new e-waste commons that embraces existing practices of reuse, repair, education, and entertainment. By making our collective footprint on the globe more visible, the design of this commons hopes to instigate new economies out of existing objects of consumption.

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full scale bio-street built prototype. For Nicholas de Monchaux and team, Local Code is coming to fruition as intended as both “an infrastructure of cities and an infrastructure of design.” The heart of the project is a parametric software tool used to tap into the maximum social and ecological uses of underutilized spaces; the tool is able to create infinite project iterations with shared macro objectives while providing siteand community-specific micro-customization. Local Code is part of a family of similar tools developed by others being utilized globally to assist in planning the complicated relationships between housing and critical infrastructure in informal settlements. This kind of “software in the public interest” contrasts with existing technological tools in being more open, more adaptable, and more of service to people and cities (rather than inertly reflecting existing conditions, as geographic information systems do).

Local Code, Nicholas de Monchaux, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016

Following pages: Ronald Rael installing the teeter-totter wall at the US-Mexico border, July 2019. Photo © Rael San Fratello Project Credit: Rael San Fratello (Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello) with Colectivo Chopeke

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The broadening of processes, transforming of prototypes, and shifting of paradigms, particularly the dismantling of agency and disciplinary silos, recurs in nearly all of the stories from finalists. The work of Lateral Office is still very much about architecture being entrepreneurial, helping communities to identify multiscalar and symbiotic networks of economies, particularly those that elevate new opportunities in the face of climate disruption. The combined effort of Lateral Office / InfraNet Lab (a research arm with overlapping team members) produced Pamphlet Architecture 30, titled Coupling (discussed more extensively earlier in the book), a strong thesis in favor of the complex, expanded field of architecture to be more inclusive of the discourse and methods of landscape, urban design, and infrastructure. One aspect of the firm’s work is a concerted effort to shift away from discussions of form, which are often limited to solving immediate spatial problems rather than instigating opportunities for new ways of thinking. “We like to think beyond individual buildings,” argues Lola Sheppard, “to engage social, political and environmental questions. This requires designing across scales,

from the local to the regional or territorial.” It also demands working not just across one city’s agencies, but across multiple projects, even multiple continents. Lastly, all the finalists consistently recognized their work as necessarily political. The original symposium in Washington, DC, and concurrent lobbying effort emphasized the importance of engaging high-level decision makers, particularly those who set national agendas and control funding for big initiatives. That story of politics and power weaves throughout this book. Control of public resources, though, and the consequences of their abuse are part of the capitalist system, and part of the ongoing contestation over the health and vitality of the public realm. The renegotiation of, for example, property rights and zoning laws, or water rights and contamination levels, engage the legal structures of American spatial production and spatial protections and are not just evident in but often drivers of the Infrastructural Urbanism work these firms cultivate. One of the embedded goals of UrbanLab’s bio-streets, for example, is the even distribution of quality public space, clean water, and good jobs, taking the idea of the democratic grid to heart. No WPA 2.0 project, though, is more overtly political than Borderwall as Infrastructure, which started as one of two proposals submitted by Rael San Fratello and has gone on to focus and deepen their practice while engaging some of the most timely and distressing questions of infrastructure in this decade and beyond. Fundamentally, says Rael, next generation infrastructure must use design to challenge infrastructures of power and instigate social change. As a person of color in a largely white discipline, he simultaneously felt compelled both to engage the prolonged racism and violence embedded in much of our large-scale infrastructure and question the dogma of the profession itself, whose narrow scope excluded the consideration of this culturally and personally destructive, multibillion-dollar investment

in the built environment as a valid architectural endeavor. Defining what is and isn’t architecture is one form of regaining power. His borderlands work, along with much of the work of the finalists and throughout this book, has further challenged that disciplinary stubbornness. Many of the original Borderwall proposals were not new ideas, but a formalization of informal activities (volleyball, sharing food, playing music) already existing on and over the wall; some took physical components of the structure or immediate context and reprogrammed them for productive use. “We didn’t design anything; we’re just telling the story,” Rael explains. That story became more urgent when the Trump administration amped up promises to double down on wall construction and then started separating children from their parents at the border. Rael San Fratello began trying, in 2016, to temporarily install one particular variation of their proposal, the teeter-totter wall, as a commentary on the delicate and inequitable balance of power and resources between the United States and Mexico. After years of formal denials, on July 30, 2019, Rael and an arts-based team of multinational collaborators slipped three teeter-totters onto the bottom steel angle of the wall. It was overrun with kids even before the installation was complete. US border guards stopped and asked questions, but didn’t intervene; when the Mexican National Guard approached on the south side with machine guns, moms shooed them away. Kids and adults, including the architects responsible, spent forty minutes transforming the wall into a joyous playground – perhaps not full on optimism about border reform, but certainly an act of playful and exuberant resistance. As Rael says, just as the wall has evolved and matured, so has the work, growing in relevance and complexity. Far beyond the thirty programmatic variations of the original WPA 2.0 submission, the wall project has grown into a broader borderlands practice; questions of belonging, ownership, indigenousness, and repair are integral to all of the work of Rael San

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Fratello, whether obvious to the observer or not. Who infrastructure is for and how it can serve all constituents equally – not security for one group and exclusion for the other, or mobility for one group and toxicity for the other – is perhaps the most important infrastructural concern of our time. MAKE NO LITTLE PLANS / INFRASTRUCTURE AS PUBLIC WORKS Public works are developed by and for the benefit of people. Designed to protect and enhance the human environment, they represent investments in the future for the people who create them and for succeeding generations. “Public works” is a generic term broadly defined as: “The physical structures and facilities developed or acquired by public agencies to house governmental functions and provide water, waste disposal, power, transportation, and similar services to facilitate the achievement of common social and economic objectives.” In the United States, questions such as when, where, and what kinds of public works should be constructed are largely determined by the actions of people exercising their private rights and responsibilities as individuals. These include but by no means are limited to, their right to vote. – Robert D. Bugher, History of Public Works in the United States In 1976, the American Public Works Association (APWA), in honor of the country’s bicentennial, published a two-hundred-year history of water, power, waste, transportation, parks, and public buildings in the United States. The organization’s aim was to mark the significant role these projects, though often taken for granted in daily life, played in the fundamental growth and development of the country. More than simply recounting chronological logistics (as if that wasn’t task enough), the many scholars, authors, and industry experts who contributed included cases intended to illustrate achievements and challenges in nation-building; the

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aim was to be of interest not only to “government officials, engineers, and administrators but to the citizenry as a whole, and especially to the youth of the nation.”6 Though certainly an exhaustive factual history, the tone of the contributors is often as much projective as reflective, perhaps sensing that the mid-1970s were a period of renegotiation in both their works and their practice. Environmental pressures, political struggles between state and federal authorities, and technological changes in design and construction methods were all putting external pressures on the public works fields.7 At the same time, the national investment in public works dropped precariously between the mid 1960s and the late 1970s.8 Within an uncertain context of urban renewal and social unrest, the APWA history was intended as a self-proclaimed reminder of public works as a commitment to democracy and a shoring of confidence in governmental institutions.9 That kind of collective rallying is still needed. The idea that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or President Obama’s efforts to establish a longer-term Infrastructure Bank (still unfulfilled), could be a true twenty-first-century equivalent to the Works Progress Administration was lofty, but improbable. In addition to the political and economic hurdles of the moment, the infrastructure agenda that re-emerged at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries had drifted far from its origins both as public space and as public works – public, in this sense, meaning both government sponsorship and a sense of collective occupation and ownership by a diverse, potentially discordant set of participants. The original WPA spanned a vast array of disciplines across an expansive range of scales in an effort to elevate the relationship between public works and civic art. Its physical products reified an optimistic, creative vision of a country in recovery, a picture of resilience that saw design and culture as integral to a better future. It was as much about collective identity and morale through advancing a celebratory infrastructural aesthetic as it

Pedacito de la Tierra / A Little Piece of Home is a project by Ronald Rael working with Alight (formerly The American Refugee Committee), bringing radical hospitality to migrant shelters along the United States–Mexico Border. Shelter residents build community through the design and construction of traditional earthen ovens, called hornos, and the literal baking and breaking of bread and the sharing of meals around this traditional cooking technology. Image: Alejandro Mendivil, courtesy Ronald Rael.

was about desperately needed employment in the Depression-era economy. By the middle of the twentieth century, any vision of infrastructure as cultural producer and cultural asset at the governmental agency level was absent. With vast modernization in the 1950s and 1960s, and a rising emphasis on function and efficiency over social connectivity, the concept of public works (“the facilities and services that provide the foundation of America’s civilization”10) was replaced with the concept of infrastructure (“the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities [e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies] needed for the operation of a society or enterprise”11), even if the use of the term “infrastructure” itself

would not become widespread until the 1980s.12 “Public works” described the collective components that shaped American culture and reified civic commitment; “infrastructure” implied the functional, structural systems that allowed for the efficiencies of utilities and economies necessary for modernization. But there can be neither optimism nor hope without visionary plans. The concept of infrastructural optimism, originally described in my article of the same name (Places Journal, May 2009), was a reference to post-disaster response and the rallying cries necessary to rebound and rebuild better. Current colliding disasters – a global pandemic, an exploding moment of racial unrest, and a deepening political chasm

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WPA 2.0 Lineage Diagram, Linda C. Samuels and Bomin Kim. © Linda C. Samuels 2021

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that, among other fundamental beliefs, also separates those who prioritize the commons from those who prioritize personal wealth – land atop the ongoing crisis of climate change. We must find a way to build a shared narrative of a better future.

tion, and high-speed rail. Notably, the Green New Deal recognizes both global interconnectivity and the importance of communities and community members to engage in a democratic, inclusive, and transparent process and to be “full and equal participants” in the mobilization of the plan.

The Green New Deal is one such effort. Put forward by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts as House Resolution 109, the Green New Deal (GND), whose name references the original New Deal Depression-era public works and social prosperity programs, is an aspirational government initiative with five broad objectives focused around greenhouse gas reduction, high-wage jobs, sustainable infrastructure and industry investment, security of common resources, and promotion of justice for historically disadvantaged communities. The fourteen-page resolution is a comprehensive framework detailing a range of possible infrastructural initiatives and design opportunities for an inclusive and aspirational public realm, affordable housing, and universal education. Inspired explicitly by the acceptance of humancaused climate change and its catastrophic, looming impacts, in direct response to the IPCC’s special report on global warming, the Green New Deal calls for the United States to own up to its disproportionate contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and its potential as a technologically advanced nation to “take a leading role in reducing emissions through economic transformation.” HR 109 recognizes the interrelated crises of income inequality, economic stagnation for low-wage workers, and declining life expectancy as a result of systemic injustices that will only be exacerbated by the rising impacts of climate change. The GND goals are interdependent with investment in sustainability-focused infrastructure. Specifics include transitioning to 100 percent renewable, zero-emission energy, building smart power grids, cleaning up polluting agriculture, and overhauling transportation with an emphasis on zero-emission vehicles, public transporta-

Like most big plans, there is widespread support and widespread opposition. The GND was lambasted by conservatives as fantasy and even critiqued by some liberals as overly ambitious. It’s been embraced by those who consider themselves “democratic socialists,” who recognize that the current system has both overtly and covertly repressed opportunities for millions of Americans, and that protections for the commons of air, water, and land have been too lenient in service of private profit. Though not universally or blindly, architects, landscape architects, and urban designers seem to be in broad support of the plan now that they have begun to own the scale of the consequences, both good and bad, of our work on the physical built environment and the production of space in social and political terms. An annotated critique of the resolution produced by the Architecture Lobby, an organization founded in 2013 that advocates for the public value of architecture and design and supports structural change within the profession, praises the overdue commitment to greenhouse gas reduction while raising useful questions about how and by whom development is controlled and to what degree top-down must meet bottom-up effort. Landscape architects have truly taken up the cause of the GND, also not blindly, with some of the sharpest critiques and strongest support coming from the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, led by Billy Fleming. His primary critique is not of the plan itself, though he rightly points out that it is less of a plan and more of a “Request for Proposals” (which suits designers just fine), but of the profession of landscape architecture, which, in his opinion, is both taking too much credit and doing too little work.13

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As journalist and climate activist Naomi Klein has said of these challenges and of the Green

New Deal: There is a grand story to be told here about the duty to repair – to repair our relationship with the earth and with one another. Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mind-set, by a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the “gig and dig” economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview at every level, a transformation to an ethos of care and repair. Repairing the land. Repairing our stuff. Fearlessly repairing our relationships within our countries and between them. . . . These failures to confront difficult truths have long made a mockery of any notion of a collective “we”; only when we reckon with them will our societies be liberated to find our collective purpose. In fact, delivering that sense of common purpose is perhaps the Green New Deal’s greatest promise. Because it isn’t only the planet’s life support systems that are unraveling before our eyes. So too is our social fabric, on so many fronts at once.14 The public nature of a twenty-first-century infrastructural network, one that rejuvenates the commons and collects and supports this social fabric while, at the same time, being made by and with the people (rather than to or for them), has the potential to serve both social and environmental repair – and to generate the collective optimism that human agency and narrative provide. The precedence of equity in the Green New Deal is what differentiates it from any other infrastructure plan of the last three-quarters of a century; the clarity and honesty with which it recognizes the dual disasters of wealth disparity and climate catastrophe, and the degree to which their interconnectivity exacerbates the damage to poorer populations, is a long time coming.

In this 2020–2021 academic year, one fraught with epic unknowns in the face of an uncontained pandemic, Fleming and the Landscape Architecture Foundation have organized an open call for collaborators to engage in work inspired by the Green New Deal. Already, over eighty schools, firms, and individuals from across North America and a handful of other continents have registered to participate. This is not a competition, but a generous sharing of resources and coming-together in collective effort. If top-down politicians, agencies, and other administrators are unable to muster appropriate leadership, perhaps a long-overdue uprising of designers will answer this RFP at a scale that meets the cause. It is an optimistic moment for a WPA 3.0.

Of course, alternative future narratives also exist, some less collective than others. The capitalism-first model of vast resource extraction continues, even in the face of a global pandemic, where the wealth of America’s very richest has surged.15 Two of the biggest benefactors, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man (valued at $200 billion as of October 2020), and Elon Musk, Tesla founder, tech innovator, and now the fifth-ever $100 billion man, both have fingers on the scales of infrastructure’s future. Bezos, who leads the largest e-commerce platform on the globe, influences the flow of millions of transportation and communication dollars monthly. The spike in home delivery as a result of coronavirus-related quarantines contributed to an 80 percent increase in Amazon’s value in the first eight months of 2020.16 Though his commitment to net-zero logistics is laudable, his near-monopolization of the e-commerce market and his recent labor practices in the face of the coronavirus are highly concerning. If Bezos’s impacts on infrastructure are somewhat accidental, Musk is very much intentionally involved. As a stand-alone force, Musk – with his

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suite of investments and innovations including Tesla, Space-X, and the Boring Company, along with his open-source white paper on hyperloop technology – is single-handedly reconfiguring the landscape of high-speed ground, space, and energy infrastructure. Tesla’s Gigafactory in northern Nevada intends to produce thirteen million lithium-ion battery cells a day – that’s eighty megawatt hours a year – in partnership with Panasonic (which recently invested $1.6 billion in the factory to get up to thirty-five gigawatt hours of production in 2020 – equivalent to supplying 500,000 Tesla vehicles per year, or more lithium ion battteries than the entire globe produced in 2013).17 Tesla power packs and micro-grids have been deployed in post-disaster Puerto Rico and converted American Samoa from diesel generators to off-grid renewable energy. Market analysts predict that one million electric Teslas will be sold in 2021, a fleet that is pushing the limits of innovation in autonomous navigation. Since successfully launching the first privately funded satellite into orbit – the only reusable rocket ever – the multibillionaire founder of PayPal has eliminated the kinds of boundaries that historically were nonnegotiable in infrastructure progress. Projects like space travel were simply too large, too expensive, and too risky to be taken on by private industry, much less by a singular champion. A reusable rocket is a global game changer. SpaceX now offers “ride share” that provides satellite space for smaller industry partners (starting at $1 million for two hundred kilograms) and has a waiting list for private passengers interested in trips into lunar orbit. Though not without skeptics or controversy, and certainly deeply embedded in a capitalistic framework, Musk’s research and development initiatives are prompted by the threats of climate change and unabashedly aimed at a radically more sustainable energy future that reduces the impacts of global warming. Reaching Mars is Musk’s back-up plan given the current human path of Earth’s environmental destruction – one of the ways, he says, “to think

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about the future and not be sad.”18 The Hyperloop Alpha white paper has that same blend of challenge and flabbergasted proactivity. Baffled by the highly publicized short-comings of California high-speed rail (“How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL – doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?”19), Musk ostensibly worked up an alternative that combines the best of current transportation options – the convenience and affordability of the road, the speed of air, and the environmental friendliness of electric vehicles – without their accompanying negatives. Speculating on the same general route as California high-speed rail from LA to San Francisco, Musk estimates his pods, traveling seven hundred miles per hour floating on an air cushion in a vacuum tube, will accommodate 7.4 million annual trips, take half an hour, and cost around $20 per ticket. Using his opensource paper as instigation, Virgin Hyperloop One, with a full-scale test track in the northern Nevada desert, is gearing up to build the first route in the United Arab Emirates and the next one, potentially, in Missouri. Musk has certainly made major missteps, including offensive and unfounded remarks about individuals, jokes about stock pricing that put his company’s financial stability at risk, and unreasonable demands of state health officials during the coronavirus pandemic. He is also simply quirky; he and his girlfriend, the singer Grimes, recently named their newborn X Æ A-12 Musk, a name that combines symbols for love and the unknown with their favorite aircraft model. His commitment to equal access and the commons is specious at best. Though the Boring Company eventually claimed any car could zip to the other side of Los Angeles in its new tunnels, the project was originally planned for Teslas only, and seemingly aimed to help a narrow few avoid the aboveground gridlocked traffic of the commoners. Projects like those

tunnels, and the Boring Company overall, have increased the skepticism around his work because of their blatant disregard for property ownership, existing utility lines, and geology, among other blind spots. But his efforts to intervene in both “the system” and several actual systems makes his work extremely valuable, if somewhat dangerous, when shifting the paradigm is at stake. The sheer scale of investment and boldness of vision, paired with actual implementation, makes it – and him – impossible to ignore. Like other private innovators before him, though, big questions arise about the value to the public: Who is infrastructure for? Whose quality of life is improving? Who gains and who loses with the ceding of the commons? Public and private strategies are, of course, not mutually exclusive; PPPs (public-private partnerships) are common ways to leverage investment with access. But in questions of infrastructure, each must keep the other in check to remain both contemporary and competitive and to serve the best interest of the broader public – not just the wealthy, not just the business community, and not just the ones already in power. The “fundamental good” of Tesla, argues Musk, is to “accelerate the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.” This aim serves Musk’s self-proclaimed double motivation: a desire to work for humanity’s long-term good, and a desire to do something exciting; in other words, a green Mars shot. “We need to inspire humanity, and this is a way to inspire,” he says in a TED talk interview. “The value of inspiration is very much underrated.”20

Ocasio-Cortez plays hero and for others, Elon Musk does). In this moment of great distress, when neither heroes nor villains successfully exemplify universal collaboration or a shared environmental ethos, it is naive and risky – and potentially adverse to great leaps of progress – to dismiss the disruptors as unimportant in the larger trajectory. As we plan for the next generation of Infrastructural Urbanism, proactivity is a key component in assuring this is also a generation of infrastructural optimism. Another common thread among the WPA 2.0 finalists is self-invention. None of their firms is defined by common projects with typical processes. When recruited to design water infrastructure, they create social spaces of equity. When asked to improve shelter, they find new economies. When redesigning dead-end streets, they create entirely new technologies. As Martin Felsen said in our interview, one thing architects, landscape architects, and urban designers do better than anyone else “is not only predict the future, but visualize the scenarios and show people what that future might look like.” As teachers, practitioners, advisors, citizens, scholars, and creators, projecting optimism is part of our skill set. This book is intended as a complement to that shared project and a manual to support a collective future of infrastructural optimism.

Planning for the next generation of infrastructure must include the dreamers, the risk-takers, and the outsiders – those working within the system to increase pressure on existing levers or adding new kinks, and those working at the edges or beyond. Stories of infrastructure are often ones of conquest, where villain and hero are two sides of the same very large coin. Sometimes the role is relative (for some, Alexandria

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NOTES

Emma Nola, “‘13th’ Netflix Documentary Viewers Surge by 4,665 Percent in Three Weeks,” Newsweek, June 17, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/13th-netflix-youtube-documentary-watch-ava-duvernay-race-movies-1511535. 2 Jonathan Watts, “We Have 12 Years to Limit Climate Change Catastrophe, Warns UN,” Guardian, October 8, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed15c-warns-landmark-un-report; see also International Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5º Celcius, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/ sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Full_Report_Low_Res.pdf. 3 United States Global Change Research Program, “Summary Findings,” Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, vol. 2, 2018, https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/. 4 I interviewed all seven finalist teams between January and August 2020. Unless indicated otherwise, statements by the finalists in this chapter come from those interviews. 5 I was a team member for WPA 2.0, but the brilliance of the plan originated with cityLAB cofounders Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman. WPA 2.0 directly reflected the ethos of cityLAB’s mission as a platform for rigorous scholarship, design experimentation, and practical application. There was true investment in evolving the seven finalists’ raw ideas into more polished propositions that, when presented in Washington, DC, at the National Building Museum to a panel of implementers, could actually move the needle at a high governmental level. Following the symposium, we visited lawmakers in hopes of sharing these solutions in an effort to influence policy. 6 Ellis L. Armstrong, “Introduction,” in History of Public Works in the United States (United States: American Public Works Association: 1976), vi. 7 Armstrong, xii. 8 See Pat Choate and Susan Walter, America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure (Durham, NC: Duke Press Paperbacks, 1983). 9 See Ray W. Burgess, foreword to Armstrong, vi. Burgess further supports this claim: “The History of Public Works in the United States, 1776–1976, describes the nation’s efforts to protect and enhance the human environment. It also offers an historical analysis of some of the basic workings of self-government. This 1

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is especially important in 1976 as the United States struggles to determine the most rational way to use its resources and to provide essential services without jeopardizing the health, safety, and well-being of its people. This history not only demonstrates the vitality of democracy, but it also rekindles confidence in the people of the United States – past and present – and their institutions.” 10 Armstrong, 1. 11 Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed. (2010), s.v. “infrastructure.” 12 I credit Choate and Walter’s America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure with reintroducing the term “infrastructure” into wide use through press coverage. The word did not appear in the title of their original policy paper, America in Ruins: Beyond the Public Works Pork Barrell (United States: Council of State Planning Agencies, 1981), but it did in the book two years later, indicating that this time period was pivotal in the terminology shift. 13 Billy Fleming, “Design and the Green New Deal,” Places Journal, April 2019, https://placesjournal.org/ article/design-and-the-green-new-deal/. 14 Naomi Klein, “Naomi Klein: This Is How a Green New Deal Could Save the Planet,” Features (blog), Penguin Books, September 16, 2019, https://www. penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/sep/naomi-klein-on-thegreen-new-deal-climate-change.html. 15 James Phillipps, “Billionaires’ Wealth Surges to a Record $10.2 Trillion during the Pandemic,” Forbes, October 6, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesphillipps/2020/10/06/billionaires-wealth-surges-to-arecord-102-trillion-during-the-pandemic/. 16 Jonathan Ponciano, “Jeff Bezos Becomes the First Person Ever Worth $200 Billion,” Forbes, August 26, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/08/26/worlds-richest-billionaire-jeff-bezosfirst-200-billion. 17 Estimates of current and future battery production and energy capacity from Tesla internal document, accessed December 23, 2020, https://www.tesla. com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/gigafactory. pdf, and Tesla website, accessed December 23, 2020, https://www.tesla.com/gigafactory. 18 Elon Musk, “The Future We’re Building – and Boring,” interview with Chris Anderson, TED Talk interviews, video, 40:50, May 3, 2017, https://www.

youtube.com/watch?v=zIwLWfaAg-8. Elon Musk, “Hyperloop Alpha,” white paper available on Tesla website, accessed November 28, 2020, 1, https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/ hyperloop-alpha.pdf. 20 Musk, “The Future We’re Building.”

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06. Notes from sheltering in place You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars. – Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre- corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature. – Sonya Renee Taylor, poet, author, and activist, on Instagram, April 2, 2020

During the initial big wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial interstellar travel company, SpaceX, managed to launch the Crew Dragon Demo-2 to the International Space Station for a two-month mission and return it and its human cargo successfully to Earth, accomplishing the very first private industry, manned space travel and providing an undeniable moment of awe and optimism. Most of us on Earth, between its liftoff on May 30 and water landing on August 2, were barely figuring out how to safely get a haircut. Those first six months of various degrees of lockdown (and unlock and lock again) beginning in March of 2020 jolted the norms of every aspect of daily life. The global scale of disease and loss of life were – and still are – tragic. When I first wrote this in August of 2020, there were over 22 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and nearly 800,000 deaths worldwide. The United States remained a hot spot still in November, with an average of 46,000 new

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cases a day.1 Though no one is immune, rates of severe illness and death are much higher in communities of color, likely owing to generations of excessive exposure to toxins, lower access to quality healthcare, and the necessity of working high exposure, high risk (and often low-paying) jobs. A pandemic, an economic crisis (for the lower 99 percent), and rising social unrest in support of Black lives is a colliding of circumstances magnitudes wider, deeper, and far more erratic than those that defined the Great Recession just over a decade ago. Perhaps the magnitude of possible change is equally large. Demands on infrastructure changed almost overnight in March 2020 as the real threat of the virus became apparent, and now, as millions continue remote working and learning in a new school year, there is an odd kind of stasis to the limbo. Universities across the country made meticulous plans, considering time-zone differences,

Launch of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and SAOCOM 1A satellite, October 7, 2018. Some INFRASTRUCTURAL rights reserved OPTIMISM by Official SpaceX Photos.

six-foot radii, and the availability of hand sanitizer foremost on the logistics list, all against the backdrop of a new (and painfully delayed) social awareness. Institutionalized racism, the gaping tech divide, and the very whiteness of faculty and curriculum – particularly in the spatial design world – haunt these efforts, though not nearly enough. A recent Imagining America webinar kicked off not just with introductions of names and pronouns, but with Black Lives Matter acknowledgements (what violence inflicted on others allowed you to get to this day?) and land acknowledgements (who are the indigenous inhabitants of the land beneath your institution?) by each participant. Do architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, engineering, or planning schools – the very places that teach students to shape and reshape the land – readily recognize the exploitation of others that has enabled their success? Not enough. If we slice a section through our infrastructure, through space and across time, how do we come to terms with what is made visible in that exposure? The “hope” in the subtitle of that particular webinar – “The Activist Academic: Engaged Scholarship for Resistance, Hope, and Social Change” – is a partner to optimism, but not a twin. Hope is action-oriented, fueled by personal agency, and often motivated by challenge. If optimism is the belief in a better future, a projection and a state of mind, then maybe the igniting of hope adds fuel to the flame of progress. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, the recurrence in this moment of the word “optimism” in media coverage, interviews, op-eds, and Google searches is regular and real, and perhaps the result of the stirring need to do something in the face of racial unrest, pandemic malaise, and constant threats from a maligned federal administration. Regardless of whether this is in fact the greatest moment of infrastructural optimism the modern globe has ever seen, it is undeniably a moment for radical reconsideration. What this moment brings to light is the potential for significant transformation, at a truly vast range of scales. Observations gathered over the

last several years and tested in new ways over the last six months have reinforced some existing beliefs about our infrastructural systems, dispelled others, and contributed urgency to novel and unexpected new directions. In the face of this round of compounding crises and emerging occasions for designers to engage, speculation can be made on three scales of opportunity and the systems they impact as addenda to the broader ideas in this book: logistics at the national and megaregional scales; shared mobility at the city and metro scales; and density and social resilience in the neighborhood, block, and lot. Lastly, one addition to the next generation criteria list critiques the biggest flaw in the most broken system. POST- COVID URBANISM AND THREE SCALES OF OPPORTUNITY NATIONAL AND MEGAREGIONAL: Zero -Emissions Logistics, Geographic Symbiosis, Equitable Access and Distribution At the national and international scales, one of the most compelling questions right now is the future of logistics. Though unemployment numbers have broken every record since the Great Depression, including a peak of nearly 25 million (14.7 percent) unemployed in mid-May (almost equal to the Great Depression and 50 percent higher than the peak of the Great Recession) and twenty straight weeks with new unemployment claims topping a million,2 Amazon is scrambling to hire 115,000 new employees, offering double overtime pay and healthcare from day one.3 Existing employees are getting raises of $2 an hour. In Septem ber 2019, Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO, announced a partnership with Rivian, Tesla’s first big rival in electric vehicles, to build one hundred thousand custom electric delivery vans. Given Rivian’s initial plans to begin rollout in 2021 and deliver the first ten thousand by 2022, what more does it mean for clean logistics if this green fleet is fast-tracked to meet current demand? The company estimates that the full

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fleet of vans will save four million metric tons of CO2 each year. Bezos was already committed to his version of a “climate pledge” – reaching the terms of the Paris accord ten years early. At 40 percent renewable energy in 2019, Amazon will be 80 percent renewable by 2024 and 100 percent by 2030, Bezos claims. Having $250 billion of our e-commerce committed through 100 percent fossil free fulfillment and over 935,000 workers globally guaranteed healthcare and a living wage – should he commit that audaciously – would tip some very large scales indeed, and potentially very quickly. Granted, that level of audacity is a big “if”, and, even if accomplished, it doesn’t absolve Bezos or his corporation of their contribution to the wealth divide, damage to local economies, and monopoly of e-commerce. Yet, no matter how green, trucks are still controlled by speed limits, mechanical and physical constraints, and the arcane monofunctionality of a vast highway system. Assuming a reasonable degree of congestion returns post-pandemic, it’s time to conceptualize a world beyond peak interstate, where new highway construction and expansion are things of the past. Even without a full transition to autonomous personal cars, the rise of autonomous trucking could contribute to radically expanded capacity in existing road space. Dedicated highway lanes for commercial delivery vehicles allow for coordinated smart control and “tetrising”. Gaps between autonomous trucks could be minimized and speed increased; some estimate that capacity could nearly double on the existing road system. Smart interconnectivity allows gangs of trucks to operate more like railcars, with the added flexibility of peeling off as needed. When these much larger vehicles are separated out, safety also improves for other drivers. Excess highway capacity could be dedicated to co-locating environmentally sensitive utilities, like renewable energy production, and capitalize on the continuity of road space for energy transmission, and, better yet, no-emission high-speed transportation. Speed was of the essence early in this pandemic,

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and both short- and long-range auto and truck mobility is still slow, costly, and spatially and environmentally greedy. As the red dots of infection scattered and ballooned on the map by the hour, Navy ships called to serve as makeshift hospitals lumbered toward California and New York, taking weeks rather than hours. What personal protective equipment (PPE) could be found amid astounding shortages was flown across the country (at great environmental cost), distributed scattershot by committed friends of the medical community, with their own vehicles (logistically uncoordinated and personally dangerous), or traditionally trucked (slow and fossil fuel intensive). Quite entrepreneurially, much of the PPE was being made in digital fabrication labs in empty architecture schools or innovation spaces, but it still had to get where it was most needed. Other ideas for faster, cleaner, and smarter distribution are out there. Asian and European countries have successfully built networks of high-speed rail for decades, making the typological rigidity and obsolescence of the US’s large-scale mobility systems blaringly evident. As mentioned in the conclusion, Elon Musk felt the same way about the costly and comic bureaucracy of California High-Speed Rail. Sketching out an alternative in his “Hyperloop Alpha” open-source white paper, he modernized an old idea of low-pressure tube travel combined with air-cushion levitation, and estimated building a system from Los Angeles to San Francisco at a fraction of the cost that would take a fifth of the time.4 In his paper, he calculated a capacity of over seven million people a year moving between LA and San Francisco in twenty-eight-person pods, leaving each terminal at thirty-second intervals. Too busy reinventing the car and space industries, among other diversions, Musk gifted the outline of hyperloop technology to open innovation. Two entrepreneurial companies have heavily invested in exploring hyperloop technology with significant success: Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO), primarily out of Los Angeles with a second location in Dubai, and Hyperloop Transportation Tech-

Hyperloop MO diagram, Hyperloop I One Missouri route map and high-speed train image by Bass Kwong, composite by Linda C. Samuels.

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nologies (HTT), with offices in Los Angeles, São Paulo, Barcelona, Toulouse, and Dubai. Thanks to a proactive champion at the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) and a relatively conducive physical landscape, Missouri became the top US finalist route in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge in 2018.5 In theory, hyperloop combines the best of air, train, and car travel: high speeds, large capacity, low energy use, and flexible timing. Though hyperloop pods are unable to veer out of the tube at high speeds, there is the possibility of lower speed spurs and certainly interconnectivity at portals (stations) with a variety of multimodal options. More like an airplane on the ground, hyperloop is exceedingly fast – up to seven hundred miles per hour on straightaways – yet because of the near-frictionless environment and lack of need for a gravity-defying takeoff, movement of the pods requires far less energy than planes, all of which is planned to come from co-located wind, geothermal, or solar energy-generating elements mounted along the tube infrastructure. Excess power generation from those co-located renewables could also contribute to meeting local power needs, increasing the systems benefit to rural areas and reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions. Other co-located infrastructure, like fiber optics, could upgrade the data capabilities of the entire US network, including currently poorly connected rural areas. The most valuable benefit of hyperloop is time, brought about by the spatial collapse that such incredibly fast speed provides. In normal moments, such high-speed travel exponentially expands the attainable mobility radius for commuting, living, and leisure. Megaregions – areas defined not by political and state boundaries but by interconnected economic, cultural, or environmental networks – can more readily share resources, from jobs to sports teams, and the “drive to qualify” distance to affordable housing multiplies supply without added pollution, road space, or time loss. In times of crisis, though, rapid access to resources is vital. Response to natural disasters – getting both

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resources in and people out – could happen swiftly and widely. With hyperloop, medical personnel could dispatch across regions in minutes rather than hours; pods could be upfit to operate as high-speed ambulances, diagnostic or operative equipment rooms, and even isolated intensive care units, meaning people who live in places lacking permanent medical resources could more easily receive high quality treatment. Evacuation plans for disaster-prone areas, which have proven lacking particularly for the carless and poor, could be included in the implementation of the hyperloop, as could plans for deployment of food, water, temporary shelter, and other aid. A new national network of interconnected, intelligent transportation hubs could operate as smart, localized disaster response centers with banks of solar back-up batteries, data storage, and emergency medical supplies. These hubs could be planned to respond to site-specific critical needs (with tornado shelters in the Midwest, for example), particularly those intensifying because of climate change. They could also be visual indices, through data collection and communication, of changing national conditions. Vacuum pump stations – the intermediate locations where hyperloop pods receive additional energy boosts to keep speeds high – could be rural sub-hubs and house smaller amounts of pre-distributed emergency supplies; in addition, they can operate as renewable energy micro-grids, warning sirens, and weather stations. This latter function could boost our ground-based meteorological coverage, connecting it to a data distribution system, meaning some responses could be automated or some aspects of the system immediately adapted in response to emergencies (the way flood walls inflate in the Netherlands to protect from flooding, or the Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel – SMART – in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, shifts from car traffic to water control in a monsoon event). To further increase multifunctionality and value to the eco-economy, concrete hyperloop tubes could be made of carbon-absorbing cement; a tube that changes color could make visible

dangerous increases in air particulates or, like solar roads, could incorporate LED alert information. These are ideas at the scale of a WPA 3.0 and are much needed to leapfrog America out of its twentieth-century infrastructure rut. The pandemic revealed an astonishing lack of resilience due, in part, to a reliance on overseas manufacturing, limited supply chains, and inadequate reserves. Moving people for leisure and business is a fraction of the potential of high-speed ground travel compared to freight. VHO’s largest investor is the global freight company DP World, which employs 36,000 workers at seventy-eight marine and inland terminals in forty countries. Hyperloop’s best use for freight would be to take over the high-value, lighter, fragile, or highly perishable goods now flown from place to place at huge environmental and economic costs. These goods include delicate technology, highly customized light manufacturing, culinary specialties, and even human organs for transplant. In terms of traditional truck distribution and land use, a widely interconnected highspeed network could shift logistics away from massive storage and distribution centers to on-demand micro-manufacturing and delivery. In the spring of 2020, Washington University students, like hundreds of other architecture and design students around the world, 3D-printed PPE components in St. Louis.6 With high-speed ground travel, critical parts manufactured in excess fabrication lab space at one location could be assembled in another city and delivered for use in a third as needed. Manufacturing could follow expertise and availability of resources; rapid deployment could more nimbly follow need. Robotics and other smart tech could instantly communicate with medical researchers or front-line physicians, and industrial designers could tweak and re-send components for test assemblies, leveraging armies of innovators in real time, across vastly distributed space. In instances where more time is not just convenient, but lifesaving,

the entire country becomes an interconnected innovation landscape within a few hours’ range with virtually no greenhouse gas implications. The speed at which people and objects move was particularly critical in addressing shortages of hospital beds, medical personnel, and personal protective gear during the coronavirus pandemic. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation tracked resource use and needs across the country. On April 15, 2020, the date of nationwide peak resource use anticipated in March (now clearly wrong), the organization projected a need of 87,674 beds total, including 19,863 in intensive care units. New York City, at four days past that anticipated peak, had a bed shortage of 4,336, while Missouri, at its expected peak, had an excess of nearly 8,000 beds. California had 26,650 extra beds, while Connecticut had a 2,148-bed shortage. Across the country, the disparity of medical resources was extreme, pitting one state against another and even hospitals in the same city against each other in competition for limited space and equipment. Rapid and adaptable logistics systems could reduce this pressure. As cases surged in December 2020, and ICU beds were even in shorter supply, the need for a more flexible and resilient system was painfully apparent. Futuristic? Perhaps, but the commitment and optimism of an uber-pragmatic agency like MoDOT championing an idea as radical as hyperloop, and the governor of such a deeply conservative state signing on to a blue-ribbon panel studying the concept, are paradigm shifts in themselves. Though their objectives may be rooted in the fiscal promise of being the center of a new nationwide system (perhaps righting the wrong of the railroad bypass of the nineteenth century, but extending the promise of the original interstate segment), the environmental and social advantages, if extrapolated nationally, could make for a solidly green arrow, next gen solution. Hyperloop may seem unrealistic to many, and it does, indeed, require an entirely new and extremely

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HYPERLINK (top) Tyler Bassett / Christina Batroni The HypERlink plans to utilize the high speeds and contained environment of hyperloop technology to create a resilient infrastructure that provides both vital transit and emergency relief from inevitable natural and human-made disasters. By connecting areas of high population and high-risk cities, and by retrofitting standard pods to serve as mobile hospitals and resource delivery units, the HypERlink system can support and resupply resources to first responders at times of crisis. The versatility of pods can also speed up the rebuilding and

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recovery processes of disaster-stricken areas as well as provide rapid relocation to those most affected by disaster events. Emergency run-off tracks will supply fully stocked shelter-inplace sites along the route in the event that the infrastructure is compromised and service must cease. As an added feature, HypERlink tubes and pods incorporate future light technology that allows them to serve as beacons, should visibility be obscured by airborne disaster.

HYPER-CARE (bottom) Tyler Bassett / Taylor Clune The Hyper-Care system uses Hyperloop infrastructure as an opportunity to provide a sustainable system connecting food sources, medical resources, and interregional transit. This symbiotic relationship creates disaster resiliency when needed but also spreads access to medical expertise and facilities more widely by connecting underserved rural residents with hospitals, specialists, and equipment not available in their direct communities. Working at the macro scale of the megaregion and the micro scale of customized pods simultaneously, Hyper-

Care provides the expanded access necessary to respond to a broad range of community care and disaster scenarios through an interconnected network of efficient, high-speed sharing.

Boards from Infrastructural Opportunism // Infrastructural Futurism: Architecture Options Studio in Collaboration with Virgin Hyperloop One, Spring 2019

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expensive framework, but Musk’s call for our investments in mobility to be “safer, faster, lower cost, more convenient, immune to weather, sustainably self-powering, resistant to earthquakes, and not disruptive to those along the route” are well-aligned with next gen thinking, whether the result is hyperloop or some other rapid, fossil-free solution.7 Meeting even a fraction of those objectives would be aiming higher than we have in generations of transportation evolution. There are certainly risks to a ground-up new system, including simply amplifying existing overconsumption habits, creating an elite mobility system, further damaging sensitive landscapes, and bypassing rural populations, but planning for these risks – in all the ways previously discussed – rather than ignoring them provides opportunities to transform risks into advantages. In the same mold as other examples presented in this book, studio work is included here from a 2019 architecture options studio taught in collaboration with Virgin Hyperloop One, the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, and representatives from MoDOT. Students incorporated the next generation criteria and imagined multiple ways of redistributing benefits with access to high-speed, low-energy ground transportation. What can we learn from Musk’s self-funded extravagant risks and literal moonshot-level thinking? Are expanded public-private partnerships, like the one between SpaceX and NASA, the way leaps to the future will finally happen? Or are they old-fashioned risks that privatize resources and energize profiteering over collective good? Do we abdicate big dreaming to the marketplace at our peril? Or are there ways to dream big in the public realm while elevating access to those dreams to a much wider slice of the population? As we consider postCOVID-19 urbanism, resilience for the twenty-first century must be defined not just as bouncing back, but as bouncing forward, utilizing moments of infrastructural opportunism to skip over pending mistakes and help rectify past ones, particularly inequities. In this unprecedented time, we must think both very big, and very small.

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CITY AND METRO: Rethink Multi-modality, Value the Commons, Make All Infrastructure Next Gen Infrastructure With millions of people experiencing stay-athome orders, working remotely (perhaps for good), furloughed, or unemployed, the future of work and our previous subjugation to commuting is up for grabs. A population, both newly immobilized and untethered, means our transportation and communication needs have rapidly changed; highway congestion has plummeted in even the most stubbornly high-traffic cities, while demand for walking and biking at safe distances means sidewalks and parks are at or over newly spaced capacity.8 Fear of coronavirus transmission has made public transit even less appealing and leaves those with no other options – often already vulnerable front-line workers – at increased risk of exposure. Depending on the length of this reset and the restructuring of work at large, long-advanced arguments for increasing road capacity for cars may finally be moot, and the chance to reconsider not just road space, but a whole system of interconnected, symbiotic infrastructures at the city and metro scale, may emerge. Any reboot should consider not just vehicle miles traveled or transit routes, but how the way we move supports quality of life beyond its singular function. Whatever the next steps are, now is a time to start with rapid, low-stakes experimentation; identify opportunity areas for increased flexibility and adaptability; and plan for the next round of investment to decrease environmental impacts, increase resiliency, and improve access and connectivity for everyone. Today’s half-empty roads are great for testing ideas that would normally be resisted due to traffic or safety concerns. Cities all over the globe are renegotiating road space in the immediate term. Reminiscent of the pedestrian plazas and bike lane pop-ups Janette Sadik-Khan popularized during her time as transportation commissioner of New York City, major urban thoroughfares have been transformed into bike-

and ped-only routes to allow for safe distancing. New Zealand’s transport minister, Julie Anne Genter, is offering immediate funding for quick redesigns of road and sidewalk space – a small, proactive response that is both practical and symbolic. As restaurants cautiously reopen, parklets are expanding from single parking spaces to full lanes and, in some cases, to full streets. Ideally, the best of these experiments will stick, reserving space that persists through the transition. Some cities are already making street closures permanent. But right now, blocked off roads for walkers and bikers are more about recreation than democratization. Care must be taken that wealthy neighborhoods, those that often already have more public space, are not the disproportionate benefactors, and that real community empowerment is not bypassed in a rush to get easier things done. This more uncertain future must prioritize accessibility and connectivity for the most vulnerable. Reports are already highlighting the hypocrisy of agencies that have made some neighborhoods wait years for new parks or basic infrastructure repairs, with delays blamed on lack of resources, paperwork backlogs, or other protracted processes, just to allow new amenities to emerge seemingly overnight for their wealthier neighbors. Agency agility must be better distributed, and it should serve long-term needs before immediate desires. Though bike lanes, bike share, and light rail increase multimodal options at large, they are often most used by white, wealthier patrons and may signal, or even exacerbate, gentrification and displacement. For cities without the luxury of universally accessible, affordable light rail or subway, a good bus system serves a broader and deeper portion of the population, particularly essential workers. But it is often second-class. Lessons can be learned from cities and countries with successful bus operations. Now is the time, while congestion is down, to save dedicated lanes for transit as reopening slowly phases in

and to improve the quality and efficacy of the bus experience, from waiting to ticketing to boarding. Real-time information, cross-modality payment options, and bundled multifunctionality are base amenities in some countries. Mobility hubs that co-locate bus stops with more expansive support programming, like education, day care, or health facilities, elevate bus convenience and integrate transit into whole life needs. This is not the same as traditional transit-oriented development (TOD), which is often a development tool that can be generic and gentrifying. An ironic side effect of this stay-at-home moment is the potential fast-tracking of projects normally disruptive to the right-of-way. In Los Angeles, the drop in tourist activity and shuttering of businesses in the Miracle Mile neighborhood resulted in a recension by the city of Beverly Hills of the highly restrictive construction parameters on the Metro Purple Line expansion. Expedited construction now could shave three months, millions of dollars, and hours of future traffic frustration off the timeline. How might that money equalize mobility access and capture environmental opportunities right now? Could a high-end dedicated bus rapid transit lane on Wilshire Boulevard elevate the profile of busing in LA? During the COVID crisis, Los Angeles’s director of transportation, Seleta Reynolds, is operating on a simple, humane principle: do no harm, and address the harm you’ve inherited. LA buses are providing free access to all riders and only back doors are opening for entry and exit to protect drivers. Where public transit is not filling the gap, the city has stepped in by developing electric vehicle car share for low-income neighborhoods. The flexibility of the individual automobile in cities without pervasive transit is an access-providing luxury (in places like LA, a job hunter can reach twelve times as many opportunities by car than transit in equal time9). Until more options are available, decoupling opportunity from auto ownership – like decoupling good schools from home ownership – helps equalize access.

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One opportunity of the shutdown is the muchneeded renegotiation of micromobility and rides-on-demand. Transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft are being hit by both the drop in ridership due to stay-at-home orders and the increased risk of exposure to potentially infected strangers. Uber is reporting an 80 percent drop in ride volume compared to April 2019 and let go over one thousand employees since the fall of that year. But TNCs were problematic before the pandemic. Drivers were already disgruntled with their poor pay and benefits as contract laborers; cities were suffering from the added congestion of these new taxi fleets, their draw of riders away from transit, and the increased inequity of a modality as costly, if not more so per mile, than individual car ownership. The continued proliferation of more cars is clearly not solving the problem of auto dependency, and the current plummeting of oil prices won’t help. How TNCs are regulated to keep their contribution to flexibility and lastmile solutions but reduce their negative effects on congestion and greenhouse gases should be part of the new negotiation. Real ride share, in its original form – when empty passenger seats already traveling from A to B would be filled with others headed in the same direction – was a brilliant attempt to parlay excess capacity into more efficient use of car space and fuel; TNCs circling like taxis and waiting for surge pricing, as they do in high-demand cities like LA, are not at all the same thing. All sharing platform companies – Airbnb, for example – could use a reboot, via regulation and a realigned moral compass, to get back to the core idea of one person’s excess capacity filling another person’s need, symbiotically, with a truly fair price beneficial to both parties – and in alignment of the needs and capacity of their context. What isn’t working is monopolizing capacity and exacerbating shortages or appropriating more than a fair share of the public realm for private profits. Micromobility initiatives – scooters, e-bikes, bike share – were unplanned kinks in an old system when they began appearing widely in the US

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Bike-share litter on Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, 2019 Image: Linda C. Samuels

in the 2010s. In some cities they have come and gone already, with many of the prominent companies, like Bird, suffering large layoffs and losses even before the pandemic. In other, more dense cities with typically higher transit ridership, micromobility has persisted during the coronavirus pandemic as an option to avoid the bus and subway in times of social distancing and stubborn germs. Though the addition of shared micromobility to the transportation landscape deepens the modality options, their integration into public space and their cooperation with public agencies has been rocky at best, illegal and discriminatory at worst. Both micromobility and TNCs load the public realm with monetized demands for supposedly shared space whose profits feed private industry and their investors. Though technically not allowed on sidewalks, scooters and e-bikes are stored,

often in haphazard piles, in sidewalk space, ignoring ADA requirements and public space boundaries. This forced pause of mobility is a good chance to redesign and renegotiate the right to public benefits by private corporations and the responsibility to balance convenience with the value of the commons. NEIGHBORHOOD, BLOCK, AND LOT: Protect Density, Celebrate Cohesion, Support Local Micro-economies and ClosedLoop Living With the introduction of social distancing measures as a protection against coronavirus transmission, urban density, transit, and real public space are suffering the consequences of renewed fears of “urban contagion.” New York City is already seeing an exodus as those who can afford more distant, spacious accommodations leave the city. But many of these fears are unfounded (as coronavirus cases in lower-density areas now match and exceed those in high-density cities) and perpetuate negative stereotypes of cities grounded in racism and segregation. There is expansive value in human adjacency. Dense cities are far more environmentally efficient in terms of resource use than suburban and rural living. Occupants use less energy per capita overall in addition to driving less, walking more, and weighing less; infrastructure is distributed more efficiently to higher numbers of people in closer proximity. Economic and intellectual agglomerations support the growth of innovation and the expansion of creative and critical thinking.10 Areas with twice as much density, all other factors being equal, see an additional bump in patents per capita of 20 percent or more, an effect known as “knowledge spillover” that can positively influence intellectual life at large.11 Cultural resources like museums, restaurants, access to theater and musical performances, significant parks, and architecture support a creative vitality difficult to match in smaller places. For centuries, cities have been sites of opportunity.

We also know that all density is not equal, and the pandemic provides an opportunity to spotlight this other divide. Space and privacy have always been a luxury (see the example of David Geffen, lambasted for tweeting about sheltering in place on his yacht).12 Placemaker and author Jay Pitter differentiates between dominant density “designed by and for predominately white, middle-class urban dwellers living in high-priced condominiums within or adjacent to the city’s downtown core” and what she calls the forgotten density of “favelas, shanty towns, factory dormitories, seniors’ homes, tent cities, Indigenous reserves, prisons, mobile home parks, shelters and public housing.”13 Add to that list the thousands of simply overburdened apartments in cities with a dire lack of affordable housing. Some of those units are either so substandard or so crowded that following current basic safety suggestions is impossible. Low-wage workers, many engaging with crowds in grocery stores or hospitals, driving buses, and doing construction, often return home to doubled-up bedrooms and shared bathrooms or visit laundromats or convenience stores in close proximity to others – sites avoidable by those with grocery delivery and well-appointed homes. Density per se is not the problem, but the mix of poor-quality housing conditions and inequality combined can make other problems worse.14 Dense neighborhoods, where difference thrives and social messiness is prized, have been seen as the bad guy before. The concept of “inner city” may be loosely geographical, but the connotations of the term, since its use by Protestant reformers in the 1950s, have been negative; the “inner city” has historically implied the location of “cultural pathologies,” the epicenter of drugs, crime, and homelessness – and a barely veiled racist euphemism for low-income urban communities of color.15 The story of urban renewal is well-known, and the displacement of over a million Black residents from hundreds of thriving Black neighborhoods sacrificed across the country for highways, civic centers, and

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shopping malls in the name of development is certainly the largest case of “root shock” – the tearing up of critical, often multigenerational social networks – in America’s modern history.16 Given roads out, the wealthy and white fled in droves to the government-subsidized suburbs and left the once socially and culturally rich minority neighborhoods decimated, defunded, and spatially divided by urban renewal. Many of the origins of modern spatial racism in this country’s current housing patterns, such as redlining and restrictive covenants (the strict exclusion of certain groups because of race or religion), emerged in this era in full force, further dividing once-diverse places into homogeneous enclaves. Condemning density as a pathogenic source runs the risk of prompting another wave of disinvestment and divide, one already wellaligned with a conservative political agenda. Far-right politicians and pundits have aggressively resisted Agenda 21, a non-binding United Nations agreement in support of initiatives to reduce resource use, combat poverty, and more effectively manage assets – including reducing human environmental footprints through shared transportation and increased density. Though over 500 US cities originally signed on, anti–Agenda 21 activists have threatened politicians and lobbied against everything from housing diversity to bike lanes to transit investment as “pack ’em and stack ’em,” strategies that supposedly threaten the American way of life, take away civil liberties, and decree complete totalitarianism.17 On April 26, 2020, Glenn Beck presented a video headlined “AGENDA 21: The Socialist Plan to Use Coronavirus Pandemic for GLOBAL CONTROL” (caps in the original).18 The Green New Deal is often targeted in the same way. The colliding of the coronavirus and its fears of spatial proximity with the social unrest following George Floyd’s killing, at least partially instigated by generations of forced separation and erasure, is too important to overlook. There is a core par-

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adox in this country where the call to be collective, a root ethic of democracy, is fundamentally in conflict with the defining American dream, made up of objects that increase our privacy and separation – a single-family house, a discrete (picket-) fenced plot of land, and a private automobile (or several). If human proximity is critical for collectivity and creates the culture, vitality, and vibrancy of public life, as urbanists strongly believe, then generations of erasure, removal, and disinvestment for some segments of the population is a form of violence and denial. Removing oneself from civic engagement – or being removed through exclusionary, oppressive, or intimidating tactics – and occupying only the private realm, is a form of deprivation, as Arendt says, an abdication of civic responsibility and a surrender of one’s seat at the decision-making table.19 There is a dark scar when both collective and individual dreams are denied to a segment of our population based on skin color. As those with wealth flee cities generation after generation, often from a perception of danger (fear of crime, of drugs, of difference, of disease), their disinvestment has a ripple effect, and that ripple effect has dire consequences for those left behind. Committing to and believing in our cities is committing to and believing in diversity, density, democracy, and equity. A priority for the next generation of public space is not to better accommodate social distancing – exactly the opposite – but to create green and blue systems that link divergent parts of our cities and encourage co-occupation by residents representing a range of economic strata and ethnic backgrounds, participating in formal and informal activities and actions. Public space must be dedicated to social and environmental interconnectivity and productivity – truly public infrastructure – that engage not just systems of water, energy, and waste but also politics, economy, power, education, and food justice. Publicness, the opportunity to be seen and heard in space, should be a right, not an amenity. This moment is a prime opportunity for designers to showcase the interdisciplinarity necessary for such spatial justice proposals.

resilience is the durability of those relationships under challenge. How and if social cohesion is manifest through physical design is a topic of ongoing interest, particularly in light of this unique moment when face-to-face interaction is stifled.

Pop-up neighborhood food pantry, The Ville, North City, St. Louis, 2021. Image: Linda C. Samuels

Medium density, inner-ring “urban suburbs” would seem to be winning in this current crisis with their balance of diversity, private space, and public amenities. Areas with a mix of housing types – duplexes, quads, small lot single-family, mixed in with mid- to low-rise apartments – maintain the spatial adjacencies that encourage social cohesion with enough room for localized infrastructure and live/work adaptation. Social cohesion is determined by the relationships present among neighbors, the sense of a reliable support network that can be activated in times of trauma, be that for individual needs (like finding a job) or collective needs (like flood response). Rootedness – the longevity and spatial specificity of those relationships – often contributes to social cohesion, but it also can be bolstered by proactive neighboring, tradition, and local leadership. Social

Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a surge of bottom-up efforts, at both individual and collective scales – grassroots industries, homesteading, gifting and bartering, local currencies, restaurants turned provisions stores, neighborhood-level support for the unemployed through creative proto-financing. New households are investing in urban agriculture, micro-grids, water harvesting, and composting, reducing their ecological footprints perhaps for the first time. This is creating opportunities for experiments in closed-loop living, where waste is reduced by returning it to the system as reusable – and high quality – raw materials. Languishing sewing machines are getting new lives, many in the service of creative capitalism – buy one hand-sewn mask, gift one to a healthcare professional – the low-tech version of the aforementioned 3D-printed PPE made in empty campus labs and maker spaces. Some of these new efforts are happening over social media, where neighborhood pages and citywide support networks are booming, but they are also being discovered during the slow pace of an urban existence grounded in walking: poster-board signs, neighborhood “zoos” of real and stuffed animals, sidewalk math lessons, actual window shopping for call-in orders. Small gestures, perhaps, to keep neighborhood businesses afloat and residents occupied, but the cooperation and codependence produce a network that potentially contributes to the longer-term resilience of place when the next challenge arises. Durable social infrastructures have been proven to increase mental health and, in examples like the Chicago heat wave of 1995, save lives when neighbors feel more committed to checking in on neighbors. This is particularly true for the mental health of the at-risk and elderly and can decrease health inequality and the decline of social capital often experienced with aging.

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Data is emerging that shows the drastic unevenness of infection and death due to COVID-19, including a disproportionate impact on poor, Black, and brown communities. In St. Louis, the first twelve people who died of COVID were all African Americans; at the end of April, 70 percent of people diagnosed in St. Louis were African Americans, though Black residents make up 46 percent of the city’s population. 20 The disproportional impacts are staggering, but not unexpected, due to the long-term inequities in healthcare, disease rates, and uneven exposure to high-risk environments. Will the response after COVID be any different than after Hurricane Katrina, another disaster, exactly fifteen years ago this week, that shocked the globe when it exposed the vast inequities embedded in an American dream with divergent origin stories and outcomes? Some cities have put into place renter and homeowner protections that point to the fragility of the stack of turtles that is the real estate market and the shell game that is our healthcare system. There are obviously muchneeded demands for universal healthcare, paid sick leave, and the immediate halting of evictions, utility shutoffs, and repossessions. One disparity the government relief package passed in March 2020 highlighted is the gap between a typical wage and a living wage. Unemployment pay in Missouri is typically $320 per week; the federal addition of $600 extra per week meant that many low-paid employees were, for the first time, making close to $15 an hour. Not surprisingly, senator and recent presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is also calling for student-loan forgiveness in addition to more affordable housing and freezes on evictions and shutoffs. Four years ago, ideas like these were shocking; twelve months ago, they were controversial; now maybe their time has come. Certainly, there are lessons to be learned about infrastructure in this extraordinary moment. In the immediate term, certain action items rise to the top. Cities should: – fast-track the best spatially connective, resident-supported, public infrastructure projects,

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in particular those that support active, healthy lifestyles; connect across socioeconomic differences; increase access for marginalized communities; produce zero emissions; and build collective optimism. – preserve density, support neighborhood cohesion, and dismantle financial structures that reinforce discriminatory housing practices. Expand greenlining and other bank support programs that help rectify imbalances in home ownership and keep existing residents rooted in their houses and neighborhoods for as long as they desire. Recognize the value of social cohesion and social resilience as contributors to social infrastructure and part of measuring what matters. Increase renter protections to keep rental residents in place. In the long term, cities must revisit root causes to eviction, utility cutoffs, and unwanted displacement. – rethink tax increment financing (TIFs) and other tax incentive allocations on a big scale, prioritizing neighborhoods in need and investment in the public commons; demand Community Benefits Agreements that support community-recommended common infrastructure as part of private development. – invest massively in public health, particularly infrastructures that combat obesity, heart disease, gun violence, and addiction. Focus efforts on clean air, water, and soil, and access to healthy food and nutrition. Enhance opportunities for outdoor activities and access to multifunctional, productive, well-designed and well-maintained green space. – leapfrog bad ideas in transportation design and go directly to good ones. Consider experimental, justice-oriented, and resident-first alternatives for planned mobility expansions. Recognize that the road is a public space and be cautious and thoughtful when divvying it up, particularly for private interest. Recognize the cost of giving away the commons.

– create metrics for prioritizing infrastructure based on measuring what matters, focusing on projects that improve overall well-being and quality of life for the least enfranchised. – increase support for alternative housing types and sizes in support of diverse family structures and a range of affordability, including multigenerational, co-living, multifamily, and accessory dwelling units; incentivize preservation of existing (or increased) density and existing fabric where possible. – support local businesses, urban agriculture, and other cooperative neighborhood assets; encourage experimentation with informal economies by providing space and systems of support; recognize the flexibility, adaptability, and specificity of such uniquely grounded production. – prioritize access to information and communication, beginning with universal free internet. Use this upgrade to simultaneously upgrade other utilities that are obsolete, inefficient, or derelict. Find cooperative relationships to build symbiotic systems by partnering with industry, entrepreneurs, researchers, and agencies (without handing over control or profits). – capitalize on the momentum for cooperation across agencies and jurisdictions. Possibly one of the biggest advantages in this moment of opportunism, emergency planning has demanded the eroding of silos and building of new relationships that can now project more speculative futures together. – invest in micro-infrastructure; not only is it flexible and adaptable where macro systems might not be, it puts power in the hands of people rather than agencies, and creates systems of redundancy that increase resilience in times of crisis. – support closed-loop living opportunities; provide education and resources for neighborhoods and individuals to build capacity and agency for

resilience and self-reliance. – rebuild commitment to civic responsibility, democracy, and the commons. – dream big, have high expectations, and build a narrative of optimism. All others rely on the last two. As Eisenhower implied, we are weaker as competitive entities merely adjacent and stronger as a united, integrated set of cooperative states. It is in the very name of our country – the United States of America – to work together. As we pass the one year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic – and our fifth century of the oppression of people of color – we can either find the infrastructural optimism or follow a narrative of cynicism, dread, and uncertainty. The former requires vision and effort, resistance, and cooperation, but can be accomplished in a combination of small steps and giant leaps. Centuries of optimism inform this moment and the depth and severity of the challenge makes it ideal for shifting paradigms. How can the creative thinking of design professionals respond to this moment to assure that when the post-pandemic gates reopen, the world we move into is better for this sacrifice rather than worse for it? What kinds of design tests and spatial experiments lead us there? How do we capitalize on the crisis momentum for design opportunism rather than status quo outcomes, both economic and spatial? Stubborn optimism. The essay by Kevin Rozario that inspired the title of this book, “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America,” is not about things turning out well, it’s about the belief in things turning out well and the animating story that makes that collective rallying possible. Bringing the trajectory full circle, from the first set of colliding disasters to this current one, is the work of Tom Rivett-Car-

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nac, formerly a senior advisor to the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where he was instrumental in assembling the 2015 Paris Agreement – the very one of Al Gore fame and Trump animus – and who was fortuitously featured recently on TED Radio Hour. The lesson Rivett-Carnac takes from the current global pandemic is big-picture and, like Naomi Klein and her latest essays on “COVID capitalism,” he uses the experience of this current crisis to argue for a strategy for the even larger more permanent one, climate change. The pandemic, he says, has reminded us that a collective sense of meaning and mobilization does not rely on certainty of results. Doctors and nurses have shown up, risking their lives every day to respond to a virus they cannot cure or control. Hearkening back to stories of Britons being called to service by Winston Churchill in World War II, regardless of a clear trajectory to victory or expectations of incoming allies, Rivett-Carnac argues, “As long as you feel like what you’re doing has meaning and purpose, you’ll take action even if you can’t control the outcome.” Rivett-Carnac continues expanding the logic from pandemic to climate change: What’s needed is an animating story that we can get behind and that provides meaning for us. . . . What I’m saying is we can choose what story that is, and we can actually choose to have a more animating narrative that moves us towards action. I mean, if you look at the components of this crisis – right? – it is overwhelming odds. It is clock ticking down. It is great peril if we fail. It’s all the ingredients of a great adventure story. We’re either going to do this or we’re not, but no one else is going to do it. And if anyone’s going to do it, it’s going to be us, right? And to me, that’s kind of the beginning of a really inspiring narrative. I want to do that. I want to be part of a generation

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that faced this challenge, decided it wasn’t too much for us. And then we’ll always be the generation that was able to do this. That’s still a chance for us, right? “Yeah, but what do we need to be that generation?” asked the show’s host, Manoush Zomorodi. “How do we even start motivating ourselves to do this?” Rivett-Carnac’s response: Optimism – Gritty, determined, stubborn optimism. I realize they don’t seem like they go together, being stubborn and being optimistic, but if you want to change a system, how you show up in that system matters. If you show up feeling like it’s impossible, feeling like you can’t make progress, really focused on the challenges, then that will be your reality. Really great breakthroughs, they don’t lead to optimism; they are created by optimism.21 Both optimism and democracy are necessary for the proliferation of Infrastructural Urbanism. Democracy underpins the collective nature of our shared resources and our civic responsibility to steward the commons for the good of all. In theory, it guarantees a voice in the decisionmaking process regardless of race, gender, income, or sexual orientation. That voice contributes to agency, the ability to make the decisions that direct a shared trajectory and the belief in the power to shape a shared future. That combination, along with a vision worth supporting, buoys optimism. As I craft this final revision, newly-elected President Biden is shaping a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that not only aims to patch the degradation of our existing systems, but also to fill the gaps in the infrastructural discrepancies that communities of color have suffered for decades. With a focus on home and community care, education, affordable housing, workforce training, and high-speed broadband plus a suite of environmental initiatives from electric vehicles to renewable energy, the scope may

just swing the pendulum away from Choate and Walters’ persistent ruins to a form of repair. In light of the current colliding crises, another next generation criterion is gravely needed. In addition to being multifunctional; public; visible; socially productive; locally specific, flexible, and adaptable; sensitive to the eco-economy; a model of quality design; symbiotic; technologically smart; developed collaboratively across disciplines and across agencies; and operative at both micro and micro scales, next gen infrastructure must also repair the damage done and the violence caused to populations, human and nonhuman, and communities that have been oppressed, abused, or erased from lands where we plan to build. New criterion number twelve is reparations; reparations means recognizing and taking into account that damage, but also incorporating steps to somehow make amends. Beyond being socially productive, reparations must reprioritize resources, add agency, and create optimism for those who have been most affected by institutionalized structures of racism. On that same fortuitous TED Radio Hour, titled “Lessons from the Summer,” a question came up in a discussion of the current public health crisis: “Which comes first? The rights of the individual or the collective safety of society? Which is the greater good?” The social contract of “we the people” from the Declaration of Independence, says philosopher and Harvard professor Danielle Allen, includes all the people, not just the ones who look most like us, act most like us, or talk most like us. “Our decision-making should always start from the premise that we do not abandon any subset of our population in a time of crisis”; it is not “a question of compliance,” but of “civic responsibility.” Yet, she continues, “We’re not actually committed to protecting our whole population. And we do have to address that and face it squarely. If we can’t recover that basic idea, then what we’re doing isn’t really democracy anyway. . . . That’s pretty fundamental.”22

If a tangible lesson emerges from the pandemic it might be the taste of empathy forced upon us all by circumstances beyond our control compromising expectations for a planned future. It might be the recognition that we are all – all of our country, and all of the globe – in this together, uniquely in the memories of most of us, and that generations of Black and brown people have known this feeling of a failing system for generations. Reparations is not a noun, but a verb – committed acts of anti-racism, concerted efforts to restructure power arrangements and dismantle biased systems, and dedication to the long road of discussion, education, compassion, and action that must ultimately erase the idea that some are less valuable than others. Next generation infrastructure must serve the excluded and oppressed, at all speeds and scales, better than the last, and contribute disproportionately to those families, cultures, and places damaged by one vision of a city in service of profit and power for the few. When we measure what matters this time around, the collective life of society – of all the society – must rise to the top, and the narrative of optimism should be written by the many hands in the many colors of the people who now must sit at the decision-making table. Radical moments demand radical optimism.

Yes. Yes, it is.

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NEXT GENERATION INFRASTRUCTURE IS: 1. MULTIFUNCTIONAL It capitalizes on overlapping spatial and economic investment to accomplish many things at once; it is a hybrid of multiple activities or uses and recognizes the inefficiencies in monofunctional, isolated systems.

2. PUBLIC It is the new public realm, where public life happens, not just where public tax dollars are spent. Next generation infrastructure supports inclusivity, engagement, and difference.

3. VISIBLE In next gen infrastructure, resource consumption and infrastructural processes are made visible to promote accountability and acknowledge responsibility for personal consumption and collective needs.

4. SOCIALLY PRODUCTIVE Next gen infrastructure increases rather than decreases equity by providing amenities, opportunities, and environmental enhancements across economic and social strata while more equitably distributing negative externalities. Socially productive processes also distribute power to existing residents for grassroots decision-making.

5. LOCALLY SPECIFIC, FLEXIBLE, AND ADAPTABLE Next gen infrastructure recognizes the need to change over time and place, to adapt to people and technology, and to do so with community- and site-specificity in mind. It is particularly sensitive to rising threats of climate change and the need to increase community resiliency.

6. SENSITIVE TO THE ECO-ECONOMY Next gen infrastructure is environmentally as well as economically conscientious. It prioritizes strategies of reuse, recycling, revitalization, or reinvention to expand the life of latent investment and preserve historical value.

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7. DRIVEN BY DESIGN It recognizes infrastructure as space shaped for human occupation with consideration of scale, materiality, phenomenology, program, tectonics, and aesthetics; Projects may serve as design tests, experiments, prototypes, or demonstrations for longer-term or various site-specific adaptation.

8. SYMBIOTIC It capitalizes on relationships between infrastructural components to make the most of inputs and outputs by finding positive interdependencies that turn one system’s by-products into another system’s fuel, therefore reducing resource use and waste. Symbiosis incorporates both synthetic and natural systems, recognizing the cooperative benefits and redistributing pressure on existing systems.

9. TECHNOLOGICALLY SMART It uses the best and newest technology to improve system functionality, performance, safety, and access by using data to increase intelligence and operability, particularly in service of the other next gen criteria.

10. DEVELOPED COLLABORATIVELY ACROSS DISCIPLINES AND AGENCIES Next gen infrastructure works across silos to locate new opportunities for more creative solutions. It incorporates interdisciplinary thinking that capitalizes on multiple skillsets, methods, and paradigms to create solutions that find what’s possible rather than what’s probable.

11. OPERATIONAL AT BOTH MICRO AND MACRO SCALES SIMULTANEOUSLY Its systems are unrestricted by history and expectation in terms of scale; they exist at a multitude of scales simultaneously, accommodating an array of contingencies, increasing resilience and adaptability, and providing opportunities for symbiosis at numerous levels.

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12. REPARATIVE Next gen infrastructure must also repair the damage done and the violence caused to populations, human and nonhuman, and communities that have been oppressed, abused, or erased from lands where we plan to build. Criterion number 12 is reparations; reparations means taking into account that damage, but also incorporating steps to somehow make amends. Beyond being socially productive, reparations must reprioritize resources, add agency, and create optimism for those who have been most impacted by institutionalized structures of racism, erasure, and exclusion.

(Opposite) Yu Tang, Beloved Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, St. Louis, Master of Urban Design studio fall 2020: The Land on Which We Stand / The Stand on Which We Land

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NOTES

On November 15, 2020, as I reread this epilogue, there are now over 54 million confirmed cases and 1.3 million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide. In the United States, there are now 146,000 cases per day – an unbelievable increase of 100,000 cases per day compared with August. Deaths in the US just passed 245,000, with projections as high as half a million before a vaccine might be approved and widely distributed. Medical professionals are begging for resistant governors to put mask mandates in place to keep new peaks from overwhelming hospital capacity, particularly here in the Midwest, where cases are out of control owing in part to conservative politicians who have enflamed their followers to reject mask-wearing. All data from the New York Times: “Covid in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” accessed August 20, 2020, and November 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html. 2 Maurie Backman, “How Bad Did Unemployment Get During the Great Recession?,” The Motley Fool, August 10, 2020, https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/08/10/how-bad-did-unemployment-getduring-the-great-rece.aspx. 3 Since this chapter was drafted, the hiring at Amazon has continued to explode. Amazon now has 50 percent more employees than it did a year ago – not including temporary holiday workers and drivers – making their global workforce 1.2 million people. This equals about 2,800 hires per day, representing a massive shift in labor allocation during an unemployment crisis. Karen Weise, “Pushed by Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal,” New York Times, November 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/ pushed-by-pandemic-amazon-goes-on-a-hiringspree-without-equal.html. 4 Elon Musk, “Hyperloop Alpha,” white paper available on Tesla website, accessed November 28, 2020, https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf. 5 The work shown here is from the Spring 2019 Architecture Options studio I taught at Washington University focused on hyperloop and was a collaboration primarily with members of the Virgin Hyperloop One team in Los Angeles and Andrew Smith, who represented first the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce and then First Rule, a group working with the governor of 1

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Missouri and the hyperloop blue-ribbon panel. Additional participants included Thomas Blair at MoDOT, who was the original instigator for Missouri’s inclusion on the VHO list, and Drew Thompson at Black & Veatch, the firm responsible for the pro bono feasibility study that saved Missouri’s ranking in the VHO competition. We were able to visit both the headquarters and the test track in Las Vegas in addition to meeting designers, engineers, project managers, and the marketing team. In addition to providing tours and sharing expertise, VHO participated in two design reviews with students. 6 For one example, see the production of PPE at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte: “At its peak capacity, the team was capable of fabricating, assembling, packaging, and shipping over 10,000 parts per day. In approximately one month—from March 30 to May 1—over 100,000 face shields were delivered in North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona, California, New Jersey, Michigan, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nevada, Colorado, Louisiana, New York, and Washington D.C. . . . At each step, teams work directly with doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators to ensure that prototypes meet the needs of healthcare providers and that the products qualify for clinical uses. This direct engagement with both ‘end users’ (i.e. medical professionals) and manufacturers through the design process was a major factor in the overall success of this initiative. Those relationships created a robust interdisciplinary culture that was built upon local knowledge and skilled workers. At the time of this writing, feedback from users suggested that our products have been superior in quality relative to what has been locally available. In some cases, our products were the only accessible face shield to be found in the area.” Alex Cabral, Heather Freeman, Robby Sachs, Tom Schmidt, and José Gamez, “DIY in Pandemic Times: Design Leadership during COVID-19,” Technology|Architecture + Design 4, no. 2 (October 26, 2020): 140–143, https://doi.org/10.1080/24 751448.2020.1804753. 7 Musk, 2. Note that the Green New Deal explicitly lists high-speed rail as a sustainable and equitable solution for the future of high-speed travel in the US. Either will require substantial investment along with a radical shift in political will and public support. 8 StreetLight VMT Monitor, StreetLight Data, accessed May 21, 2020, https://www.streetlightdata.com/ VMT-monitor-by-county/#emergency-map-response.

9 Seleta Reynolds, the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, cited this figure during a presentation at the Urbanism Next 2020 Virtual Forum, May 14, 2020. 10 See, for example, Edward Glaeser’s book Triumph of the City, an expansive narrative on the city as a machine of innovation (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 11 Gerald A. Carlino, Satyajit Chatterjee, and Robert M. Hunt, “Urban Density and the Rate of Invention,” Journal of Urban Economics 61, no. 3 (May 2007): 389–419, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2006.08.003. 12 See also, for example, Jason DeParle, “The Coronavirus Class Divide: Space and Privacy,” New York Times, April 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/04/12/us/politics/coronavirus-poverty-privacy.html. 13 Jay Pitter, “Urban Density: Confronting the Distance Between Desire and Disparity,” Azure, April 17, 2020, https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/ urban-density-confronting-the-distance-between-desire-and-disparity/. 14 See, for example, Liam Dillon, “Building Dense Cities Was California’s Cure for the Housing Crisis. Then Came Coronavirus,” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/ story/2020-04-26/coronavirus-density-cities-urbanization-housing-climate-change. It’s important to note that density is not the same as overcrowding. Overcrowding has more to do with people per unit than number of units per acre. More people per unit typically equates to less space per person and more potential, in this case, for transmission of airborne infectious disease. Quality of housing and conscientiousness of landlords are also relevant factors for larger questions of public health. This article highlights a debate that is appearing frequently right now, equating density with danger, regardless of the quality of the density itself. 15 See Bench Ansfield, “Unsettling ‘Inner City’: Liberal Protestantism and the Postwar Origins of a Keyword in Urban Studies,” Antipode 50, no. 5 (November 2018): 1–20. 16 See Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, 2nd ed. (New York: New Village Press, 2016). 17 The phrase “pack ’em and stack ’em” is attributed to Tom DeWeese, the head of an organization called

the American Policy Center, in “Agenda 21: The UN, Sustainability and Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory,” Southern Poverty Law Center, April 1, 2014, https:// www.splcenter.org/20140331/agenda-21-un-sustainability-and-right-wing-conspiracy-theory. 18 “AGENDA 21: The Socialist Plan to Use Coronavirus Pandemic for GLOBAL CONTROL,” The Blaze, April 26, 2020, https://www.theblaze.com/glenn-tv/ agenda-21-pandemic. 19 Hannah Arendt, “The Public and the Private Realm,” in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Note that for Arendt, the deprived population originally included the women and slaves not allowed in the Roman agora or the Greek polis, non–property holders, and noncitizens of early colonies, as well as the wives bound to the home to cook, clean, and raise children, who were informally kept from the public realm by the norms and practices of the time. 20 Rachel Rice, “As Virus Takes Its Toll, Black Leaders in St. Louis Seek More Equitable Health Measures,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 26, 2020, https://www. stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/coronavirus/asvirus-takes-its-toll-black-leaders-in-st-louis-seek-moreequitable-health-measures/article_93ec5436-aad2561b-bc74-60443b51ff39.html. 21 Tom Rivett-Carnac in “Lessons from the Summer,” TED Radio Hour, National Public Radio, August 21, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/08/20/904299340/ lessons-from-the-summer. For a partial transcript, see https://www.npr.org/transcripts/904359649. 22 Danielle Allen in “Lessons from the Summer.” For a transcript, see https://www.krcu.org/post/danielleallen-how-can-democratic-values-guide-us-when-facing-global-crisis-0#stream/0.

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Credits 88

PORT, Carbon T.A.P. WPA 2.0 proposal, phase 2: perspective renderings showing algae pontoons (top) and pivot-arm public space and connector across the East River (bottom). Still from video animation of carbon emission reduction goals. Video: Richie Gelles

89

PORT, Carbon T.A.P. next generation infrastructure diagram

90

Lateral Office / InfraNet Lab, Coupling Infrastructures: Water Economies / Ecologies WPA 2.0 proposal: site diagram. Industry, remediation, and recreation coupled as productive ecologies and new economies at the Salton Sea.

97

aershop, Hydrogenic City WPA 2.0 proposal: rendering of water node with mist platform and light rail station

96–97

aershop + IO diagramming team, Hydrogenic City next generation infrastructure diagram

98–99

Nicholas de Monchaux + IO diagramming team, Local Code next generation infrastructure diagram

127

Traffic Calculations and Projections ARIZONA TRAFFIC PROJECTIONS http://www.azdot.gov/planning/ DataandAnalysis/average-annual-daily-traffic NEVADA TRAFFIC PROJECTIONS http://i11study.com/wp/wp-content/ uploads/2012/09/I11_CJR_08_21_13_ FINAL.pdf Sources: HDR analysis of ADOT 2012k and NDOT 2012f

90–91

Lateral Office / InfraNet Lab, Coupling Infrastructures next generation infrastructure diagram

92–93

Rael San Fratello Architects + IO diagramming team (Bomin Kim, Tom Klein, Linda C. Samuels), Borderwall as Infrastructure next generation infrastructure diagram

ARIZONA POPULATION PROJECTIONS https://population.az.gov/populationprojections

94

UrbanLab, Free Water District WPA 2.0 proposal, phase 2: selections including district rules and systems diagram

Interstate 11 Documents - Arizona Department of Transportation http://i11study.com/wp/

94–95

UrbanLab + IO diagramming team, Free Water District next generation infrastructure diagram

96

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aershop, Hydrogenic City WPA 2.0 proposal: water infrastructure-based public landscapes, (top) forest and (bottom) urban beach at night.

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129

Existing Energy Infrastructure ENERGY DATA ArcGIS. Geothermal maps. http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id= 6ebdea20c4f5471c948f8f50256a82e8 Bureau of Land Management. www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/energy/

geothermal/geothermal_nationwide/ Documents/GIS_Data.html Bureau of Land Management. Solar maps. http://blmsolar.anl.gov/maps/shapefiles/ National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Atlas. http://maps.nrel.gov/re_atlas Transmission lines. http://ag.arizona.edu/SRER/data.html 131

Existing Water Systems UNDERLAY INFORMATION Roads, state boundaries, major interstates, waterways, dams, streams: http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/nhd. html?p=nhd For data, visit http://www.landsat.com/ arizona-free-gis-data.html

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Parks, Forest, and Sensitive Habitats ENVIRONMENT DATA Bureau of Land Management: http://www.blm.gov/az/st/en/prog/maps/ gis_files.html Habimap: http://habimap.org/habimap/

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Red Arrow / Green Arrow diagram, Bernardo Terán

142–143 Nogales, Arizona Image: Linda C. Samuels 148–149 I-10 exit to downtown Tucson, Arizona Image: Katie Laughlin EXISTING CONDITIONS – TUCSON

Population Statistics https://population.az.gov http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04/ 0477000.html Economic Statistics http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04/ 0477000.html 158–159 Marana, Arizona Image: Linda C. Samuels EXISTING CONDITIONS – MARANA Population Statistics https://population.az.gov http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/ 04/0444270.html Economic Statistics http://htaindex.cnt.org Major Employers http://www.marana.com/950/MajorEmployers Traffic Statistics http://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/cdm/ref/ collection/statepubs/id/24460 http://www.azmag.gov/Projects/Project. asp?CMSID2=1126&MID=Transportation 166–167 Casa Grande, Arizona Image: Linda C. Samuels EXISTING CONDITIONS – CASA GRANDE Population Data https://population.az.gov http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04/ 0410530.html

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Economic Data http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04/ 0410530.html Transportation Statistics http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04/ 0410530.html 172–173 I-10 (future I-11) roadside and (future) wildlife crossing Image: Linda C. Samuels with Amanda Gann 176–177 I-10 (future I-11) roadside Image: Amanda Gann 278–279 152 Borderwall as Infrastructure: teeter-totter wall in action connecting Mexico and the US Photo © Rael San Fratello Project Credit: Rael San Fratello (Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello) with Colectivo Chopeke

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IMAGE INDEX

279

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CREDITS

281

INDEX Aaron, Robbie 127, 129, 166 Abbott, Greg 115 academic-based community design centers (CDCs) 61 accessory dwelling units (ADUs) 23 activism 18, 30; awareness and 59; environmental 16; new forms of 61–62 adaptive ecological design 30 ADOT see Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) ADUs see accessory dwelling units (ADUs) “advocacy loops” 223 aershop 96, 231 Afrofuturism xv AFH see Architecture for Humanity (AFH) Airbnb 262 air pollution 7, 32, 128 Allen, Danielle 269 Allen, Julie 104n49 Allen, Stan 26, 38–41, 51n48 alternative urbanisms 20, 67 America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure (Choate and Walter) 56, 57 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (ASHTO) 64, 111 American exceptionalism 9 American postwar identity 106 American Public Works Association (APWA) 73, 238 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) 3, 7, 60, 61, 238 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 3, 55 Andrews, Stratton 159 Ant Farm 36 Anthropocene 109, 229 anti-establishment design collectives 35 APWA see American Public Works Association (APWA) Aquaculture Canal_New Orleans 100 Arbery, Ahmaud 8 Archigram 36, 37 Architecture Association (AA) 22

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Architecture for Humanity (AFH) 61, 62 Architecture Lobby 242 Arendt, Hannah 20, 23, 264, 275n19 Arias, Bryan 193, 196, 197, 212 Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) 112, 124, 128, 130, 136, 138, 182–183, 226n12 Arizona State Rail Plan 128 Arizona Sun Corridor 226n3 Arizona Wildlife Linkage Workgroup 172 Aros, Daniel 159 ARRA see American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Artists of Color 222 ASCE see American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Ashe, Arthur 212, 221 ATOPIA_Research 74–77 Automerica 36 average annual daily traffic (AADT) 138 Banham, Reyner: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies 35; Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles 35 Beck, Glenn 264 Bélanger, Pierre 23, 41, 72 Bel Geddes, Norman 36 Bell, Bryan: Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism 62; Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service through Architecture 62 Belmont Future project 183 Belmont Properties 182 Bennett, Oliver 4, 5, 9, 16 Berman, Marshall 35 Berry, Chuck 212, 221 Bezos, Jeff 243, 249, 250 Biden, Joe 61, 268 biodiverse ecosystem practices 112 bio-industries 41 Biomanufacturing Project House 81 Black Lives Matter movement 8, 221, 249 BlackRock group 115, 116

Blair, Robin 224 Blair, Thomas 274n5 BLM see Bureau of Land Management (BLM) BoE see Bureau of Engineering (BoE) Borderwall as Architecture 230 Borderwall as Infrastructure 92, 93, 235 Boring Company 244, 245 Bosnian refugees 214 bottom-up movements/strategies/tactics 23, 24, 64 Bowser, Muriel 12n17 Brickline Greenway see Chouteau Greenway broadening the process 109–110, 117, 120, 220, 223 Brown, Denise Scott 35 Brown, Hillary 72, 112, 113 Brown, Michael 227n22 Brundtland Commission 107; Brundtland Report 58, 79, 108, 114 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 59, 107 Bugg, Bruce 115 Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) 59 bundling 69, 88, 112, 114, 125, 126, 130, 136, 166 Burch, Rachel 198, 201 Bureau of Engineering (BoE) 83 Bureau of Land Management (BLM) 110, 130 “business-friendly” policies 58 Busquets, Joan 42 bus rapid transit (BRT) route 192, 221 Bus Riders Union 55 CAC see Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) Cadillac Ranch 36 Campbell, Scott 107, 108, 108, 114, 118n2, 118n3, 223 CAP canal see Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal capitalist system 20, 235 Carbon T.A.P/Tunnel Algae Park. 69, 88–89 car-centric 35, 81, 111 CARES Act see Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act

Carnate, Emylanie 172 Carrión, Adolfo 73 Casa Grande 126, 138, 140, 166–171 “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” 56 CCPs see collaborative community projects (CCPs) Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal 132 Chen, Yuxuan 198, 200 Cheonggyecheon restoration 27 Chester, Mikhail 226n10 Choate, Pat 60, 269; America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure 56, 57 Chouteau Greenway 221–224 Churchill, Winston 268 Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) 221, 222 cityLAB 3, 7, 54, 68, 72, 73, 103n27, 246n5 Climate Change and Infrastructure, Urban Systems, and Vulnerabilities 59 climate change 30, 115, 116, 176, 228, 242, 243, 252; challenges of 3; sprawl and 32; popularization of 58; antagonism of 60; and social inequity 61; threats of 244; pandemic to 268; impacts of 10, 21, 54, 59, 96, 112, 113, 126, 229 closed loop 113, 263, 265, 267 collaborative community projects (CCPs) 186 Coleman, Briana 199, 202 Collapse (Diamond) 9, 12n20 combined sewer overflow (CSO) 208 Community Benefits Agreements 117, 266 Community Design Apprenticeship Program (Creative Reaction Lab) 185 Conduit Urbanism 42–43, 52n57 congestion relief/traffic congestion 24, 62, 112, 122, 126, 128 contemporary urban pessimism 16 Cook, Peter 37 Corner, James 23, 26, 28–29, 40, 51n48, 190; Recovering Landscape 22 see also Field Operations Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act 3 corporate capitalism 16

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corporate economic model 23 corporate elites 19 corporatization 19 Coupling (InfraNet Lab/Lateral Office) 46, 52n60, 230, 234 Coupling Infrastructures: Water Economies/ Ecologies 69, 86, 90, 91 “COVID capitalism” 268 Cox, Maurice 73 Crew Dragon Demo-2 248 Critical Infrastructure Protection approaches 60 Cuff, Dana 3, 52n54, 68, 103n27, 103n28, 246n5; Fast-Forward Urbanism 42 “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (Jameson) 18 “cultural pathologies” 263 cultural pessimism 16 Daley, Richard M. 231 Davis, Julia 212 Davis, Mike 56 “death of public space” 16 de Certeau, Michel 23 deconstructivism 38 Deem, Jason 193 Delmar Boulevard 192 “democratic socialists” 242 de Monchaux, Nicholas 69, 98, 230, 234 demonstration projects 62–65 deprivation 20, 21, 264 Design Aesthetics Advisory Committee 83 Design Like You Give a Damn (Sinclair and Stohr) 62 Design Oversight Committee 221 Desmond, Matthew: Evicted 228 Diamond, Jared: Collapse 9 Diaz, Andres 176 Diekmeier, Jonell 126, 127, 180 Doherty, Christine 192, 194 Downsview Park 24, 26, 38, 41 Dowdy, Ian 182

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Downtown Links project 118n6 Duany, Andres 23 durable social infrastructures 265 “Eco-boulevards” 231 EcoDistricts 59 eco-industrial park 72, 79, 113 ecological economics 49, 88, 114, 115, 189 ecological treatment systems 94 Ecological Urbanism 27, 30, 32, 109, 231 economic collapse 60–61 economic violence 192 Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (Garreau) 19, 67 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 2, 267 Eisenhower’s interstate 2, 106 Elleardsville 212 “The End(s) of Urban Design” (Sorkin) 14 environmental activism 16 environmental crisis 58–60 Environmental Impact Statements 109 environmental justice 199–205 Environmental Policy Act 229 Environmental Protection Agency 8, 224 environmental resilience 27 environmental, social, and governance (ESG) 115 equitable access and distribution 113, 249–260 ESG see environmental, social, and governance (ESG) Estolano, Cecilia 73 Everyday Urbanism 22–24, 27, 48 Evicted (Desmond) 228 Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (Bell and Wakeford) 62 Fainstein, Susan 5 Fairground Park 223, 224 Falcicchio, John 12n17 “family-friendly” destinations 19 Farr, Doug 220 Fast-Forward Urbanism (Cuff and Sherman) 42

Federal Highway Act of 1956 106, 226n2 Felsen, Martin 94, 245 field-centered urbanism 30 field conditions 38, 40, 51n48, 190 Field Operations 26, 27, 28, 38, 40, 41, 66 Fink, Larry 116 Fleming, Billy 242, 243 Florida, Richard 23 Floyd, George 8, 229, 264 Forest Park 222 “For the Sake of All” 227n22 Foxx, Anthony 56, 72 Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works 57 free market 6, 58, 67 Free Water District 94, 95, 231 Fresh Kills 24, 40 Futurama 36 Futurism 33 Gamboa, Malerie 166 Gann, Amanda 126, 127, 129, 130-133, 135, 172, 180 Garcetti, Eric 8, 9 Garreau, Joel: Edge City: Life on the New Frontier 19, 67 Genter, Julie Anne 261 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) 114, 114, 189 geographic symbiosis 249–260 Gerber, Alix 187 Giang, Steven 149 global warming 7, 242; effects of 4; skeptical of 116; impacts of 229, 244 GND see Green New Deal (GND) Goldberg, Gail 73 Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service through Architecture (Bell) 62 Gore, Al 4, 58, 268 GPI see Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) Graduate School of Design (GSD) 27, 231; Harvard Design Magazine 14, 15

Graham Foundation 22 Great Rivers Greenway (GRG) 221, 227n28 see also Chouteau Greenway “green arrow” solutions 123; I-11 Supercorridor project 136–139; of next generation infrastructure 124; scenario 185 greenhouse gas emissions 4, 106, 138, 242, 252 Green New Deal (GND) 11, 117, 242–243, 264, 274n7 Greenway, William 159 Gregory, Dick 212 “gross domestic transactions” 115 ground-up new system 36, 260 Growing Water 231 growth-for-the-sake-of-growth model 107, 124 Habermas, Jurgen 23 Hadid, Zaha 22 Hafiz, Mohammed 166 Hansen, Lyle 199, 203 Hargreaves Jones Associates 83–85 Harris, Sally 149 Harrison, Jane 75 Heizer, Michael 46 Hernandez, Edlin 143 Hernandez, Mike 56 Herron, Ron 37 Higgins, Tim 3 High Line 27, 28, 64, 66; effect 112, 230 High-tech Industry 166–171 Highway Trust Fund 57 Hines, Alexandria 159 Historic-Cultural monument 83 Holling, C. S. 30 Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 60 Houston, Umeme 187 HTNB engineering 83–84 human-made ecologies 32 Hutton, Sunni 188 Hydrogenic City 2020 96, 97, 231 “hyperbolic pragmatism” 230

IMAGE INDEX

285

Hyper-Care 255 HypERlink 254 Hyperloop Alpha 244, 250, 253, 274n4 Hyperloop One Global Challenge 252 Hyson, Kendra 149 Ibanez, Darrell 166 “infrastructural adolescence” 118n6 infrastructural dystopianism 36 infrastructural ecology 72, 112 infrastructural symbiosis 112, 113 Infrastructural Urbanism 3, 10, 11, 51n45, 109, 230–231, 234, 245; architecture as infrastructure 36–41; comprehensive 107; contemporary urban pessimism 16; discourse of 10; infrastructure as architecture 32–36; infrastructure in the expanded field 46–49; landscape as infrastructure 41–45; Lineage Diagram 44–45; opportunity 81; “postmodern hyperspace” 18; proliferation of 268; public commons 21; spatially-oriented approach 14; strategies of 121, 186, 189, 220, 224; strategy 220; two lineages 30–32; urbanisms 22–30 Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks (Stoll and Lloyd) 42 Infrastructure Bank 60, 238 “The Infrastructure of the City” 42 infrastructures: American 2, 229; as architecture 32–36; architecture as 36–41; borderwall as 92; coupling 90; crisis 54–57; durable social 265; in expanded field 46–49; inequity 55; landscape as 41–45; monofunctional 69; next generation (see next generation infrastructure); predictive 72; sustainabilityfocused 242; waterworks 96 Infrastructure Voluntary Evaluation Sustainability Tool (INVEST) 182 Ingram, Luther 212 “inner city” 263

286

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

institutionalized racism 6, 8, 106, 249 see also racism Insurgent Urbanism 23 Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities (IPSC) 60, 61 interdisciplinarity 30, 41, 42, 190, 264 interdisciplinary urban design studios 11 interdisciplinary urbanism 10 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 7, 59, 116, 229 international civil rights 16 Interstate 11 122, 176, 184 see also I-11 Supercorridor project INVEST see Infrastructure Voluntary Evaluation Sustainability Tool (INVEST) IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) IPSC see Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities (IPSC) I-11 Supercorridor project 121–124, 226n6; Future Corridor Opportunities 182; green arrow solutions/findings 136–139; impacts 182–183; mapping and methods 125–135; studio 124–125, 140–176 I-11 Tier 1 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) 182 Izenour, Steven 35 Jameson, Frederic: “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” 18 Jefferson, Thomas 223 Jencks, Charles 50n5 “jobs-versus-the environment” 107 Jones, Casey 73 Jones, Mike 83 Kalaveshi, Burim 176 Kalundborg Symbiosis 78, 79–81, 113, 113 Karst Urbanism 208–211 Kelbaugh, Douglas 22 Kennedy, Robert 117 Kimball, Mindy 226n10

King, Rodney 18 Kissinger, Bradie 143 Klein, Naomi 242, 268 Klein, Tom 192, 194, 208 “knowledge spillover” 263 Kobal, Eric 199, 203, 216 Koolhaas, Rem 22, 30 see also OMA Krauss, Rosalind 46–48 Krewson, Lyda 184, 193 Krieger, Alex 42 La Città Nuova 33 Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) 217 landscape architecture 4, 10, 22–24, 30, 32, 41, 47, 48, 69, 81, 242 landscape as infrastructure 41–45 landscape ecology 39 landscape infrastructure system 100, 230 Landscape Urbanism 22–27, 30, 32, 40–41, 51n48, 67, 109, 230 Landscape Urbanism Reader (Waldheim) 41 large-scale infrastructure: construction of 3; projects 106 Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab 42, 46-48, 69, 86, 90, 230, 232–233, 234 Latino Urbanism 23 Laughlin, Katherine 149 lead contamination 216 Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) 59, 76, 228 Learning from Las Vegas 23, 35 Le Corbusier 33, 35 LED communication 176 LEED see Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Lefebvre, Henri 6, 23, 50n18 “Legislative Outline for Rebuilding Infrastructure in America” 229 Lerup, Lars: Stim and Dross 30 “Lessons from the Summer” 269

Level of Service (LOS) 111 The Linkage 142–147 Lister, Nina-Marie 27, 30 Liston, Sonny 212 A Little Piece of Home 239 Lloyd, Scott: Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks 42 Lobell, Sam 72 Local Code 98, 99, 230, 234 Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority 224 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Banham) 35 low-income neighborhoods 56, 261 LRA see Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) Lyft 262 Lyster, Clare 23 Malone, Annie 212 Maltzan, Michael 83–85 mapping 126–130, 190, 192, 193, 198 MAP-21 see Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21) Marana 158–165 Masoud, Fadi 100 “material practitioners” 38 Mayer, Matthieu 166 Mayne, Thom 73 McCann, Melissa 183 McKee, Paul 193, 198 mega-infrastructure projects 6 MetroLink line plus 184 MFABA see Mobility For All By All (MFABA) micromobility initiatives 262 Miley, Ian 216 Millar, Peter 101 Miss, Mary 46 Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) 252, 253 Mitchell, Don 50n18

IMAGE INDEX

287

Mobility For All By All (MFABA) 184–189, 227n22; impacts 220–221; megaregion to rail 189–190 mobility hubs 84, 261 Mockbee, Samuel “Sambo” 61 MoDOT see Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program 65 monofunctional infrastructures 69 Moore, Gary Lee 83 moral pessimism 16 Moses, Robert 35 Mostafavi, Mohsen 27, 231 Musk, Elon 243–245, 248, 250, 260, 274n4, 274n7 Nagin, Ray 102n4 National Council on Public Works Improvement (NCPWI) 57 National Wildlife Refuge 229 natural bioremediation processes 94 negative externalities 56 neoliberalism 3, 6, 20, 58 neo-traditional aesthetic 20 Nevarez Martinez, Deyanira 143 “A New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for Los Angeles” 72 New Starts Capital Investment Grant Program 184 New Urbanism 22–24, 67 New Urban Suburbia 158–165 next generation infrastructure 106, 166, 235, 269–272; advantages of 138; creation of 112; criteria 10, 70–71, 81, 83, 136, 182, 186, 270–273; “green arrow” solution of 124; questions 110; solutions 224; WPA 2.0 and 68–72 NL Architects 64–65 Nolan, Hallie 193, 196, 197 nonprofit design organization 75 Northside-Southside (NS-SS) MetroLink: alignment 198; expansion 120, 184–189; light rail line 220; studio projects 206–219

288

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

NS-SS MetroLink see Northside-Southside (NS-SS) MetroLink Obama, Barack 3, 60, 72–73, 121, 238; social policies 5 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria 242 oil rigs 101 Old North/New Refuge 214–215 Olympic Sculpture Park 224 OMA 24 one-size-fits-all 3, 23, 110 Ono, Takuma 231 “opportunity corridor” 192 Opportunity Mapping 114, 189 “oppositional architecture” 36 optimism 9, 249, 268; big 5, 6, 9; case for 4–6; collective 5–7, 11, 243; individual 4; perpetual 8; persistence of 9; personal 11; project-based 5; relentless 4; shared 6; small 4; stubborn 267 optimistic imperative 8–10 Orff, Kate 27; Toward an Urban Ecology 30 Pamphlet Architecture 30 234 paradigmatic disciplinary shifts 46 Parc de la Villette 24, 24, 39 Paris Agreement 4, 268 Park, Arts, River and Connectivity Improvements (PARC) plan 85 parks and poverty 132–134 Pedacito de la Tierra 239 performative urbanism 67 personal protective equipment (PPE) 250 pessimism 16, 20–21 PITCH_AFRICA 74–77 Pitter, Jay 263 political negligence 56 “politics of hope” 5, 8 POPS see privately owned public spaces (POPS) PORT 69, 88, 230

Portman, John 17, 18 “post-avant-garde” objects 22 post-covid urbanism and three scales of opportunity: city and metro 260–263; national and megaregional 249–260; neighborhood, block, and lot 263–269 post-disaster response 23 post-industrial portal towns 101 postmodern: architecture 38; city 16, 18, 67; hyperspace 18; pessimism 42; urbanism 9, 16, 19–20 “Post Urbanism & ReUrbanism” 22 Potter, Jamie 101 PPE see personal protective equipment (PPE) PPPs see public-private partnerships (PPPs) predictive infrastructure 72 privately owned public spaces (POPS) 20, 67 privatization 19 “Programming the Urban Surface” (Wall) 30 Projective Ecologies 27 Proposed New Starts and Small Starts Policy Guidance 184 “Protecting Clean Water with Greater Efficiency” 229 Pruitt-Igoe 9, 16, 50n5, 193, 198, 214, 221 pseudo-public spaces 67 public commons 21, 266 public health innovations 7 public infrastructure 8, 20, 21, 27, 98, 130, 139, 264, 266; investment 139 publicness 264 public-private partnerships (PPPs) 245, 260 public realm 21, 23, 260; adaptive 10; aspirational 242; expansion of 69; health and vitality of 235; instrumental part of 68; investment 3; for private profits 262; public services and 67; reinvention of 54, 65; significance of 20; usership of 62 public space 261, 264; ADA requirements and 263; blend of 212; corporate 20; design-forward 11; distribution of quality 235; as infrastructure 230; infrastructure as 21; integration

into 262; multimodal 111; nature and 142; next generation of 264; occupiable 81; pilot projects on 220; program of 69; publics and 18; and public works 238; road as 23, 266; roadside into 36; sleeping in 67; and slow mobility 230; technological militarization of 19 public works 5, 20, 238–245 Qui, Xiaohan 198, 200 racial segregation 198 racism 269; institutionalized 6, 8, 106, 249, 269; prolonged 235; and segregation 263; spatial 264 Rael San Fratello 69, 92, 230, 235 Ratti, Carlo 62 Reagan, Ronald 16, 65 Recovering Landscape (Corner) 22 REDAs see Renewable Energy Development Areas (REDAs) “Reducing Inefficiencies in Protecting Clean Air” 229 Reed, Chris 23, 27 Reed, Lewis 193 regional agencies 221 Reiter, Wellington 183, 226n6 Renewable Energy Development Areas (REDAs) 130 Report on the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future 58 see also Brundtland Commission Request for Proposals (RFPs) 242, 243 revitalization projects 68 Reyna, Janet 226n10 Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (Banham) 35 Reynolds, Seleta 261, 275n9 “Ribbon of Light” design 83 ridership-based model 184 R_IGNITE 101 Rivett-Carnac, Tom 268

IMAGE INDEX

289

road-based visual culture 35 robotics 253 Roh, Sunyoung 143 Ronald Rael 239 rootedness 114, 189, 265 Rouhani, Ayman 199, 202, 214 Rouse waterfront development 67 Rozario, Kevin 4, 6, 267 Rust Belt 94 Ruth, D. K. 61 RVTR 43 Sadik-Khan, Janette 24, 62, 64, 73, 111, 260 Sanford, Samual 143 Sant’Elia, Antonio 33 Saunders, William S. 42 SCI-Arc see Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” 46 Sennett, Richard 8, 18 Serra, Richard 46 Sewing Futures of Mobility project 185 Sheppard, Lola 234 Sherman, Roger 3, 68, 103n27, 246n5; Fast-Forward Urbanism 42 “shovel-ready” projects 3, 60 Sims, Ron 73 Sinclair, Cameron 61; Design Like You Give a Damn 62 Sixth Street Viaduct project 82–84, 85, 104n49, 225 Slay, Francis 184 SMART see Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel (SMART) Smart Energy City 148–157 “smart growth” development 138 Smart Growth emissions 226n10 smart interconnectivity 250 Smith, Andrew 274n5 Smith, Nick 198, 201 Smithson, Alison 34; Team 10 Primer 33

290

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

Smithson, Peter 34 Smithson, Robert 46 social cohesion 189, 265 social justice 120, 184, 228; framework 108 social resilience 189, 249, 265, 266 Soja, Edward xi, 18–20 Sonoran Institute 109 Sorkin, Michael 14, 16; Urban Design 42; Variations on A Theme Park 18, 21 Souks of Beirut competition 39, 40 Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) 72, 73 SpaceX 32, 244, 248, 248, 260 spatial justice 32, 49, 56, 109, 185, 220 Speck, Jeff 23 SROI analysis see Sustainable Return on Investment (SROI) analysis STAR Communities see Sustainability Tools for Assessing and Rating (STAR) Communities stay-at-home orders 7, 11, 128, 262 stay-at-home moment 261 Stevenson, Bryan 21, 50n19 Stim and Dross (Lerup) 30 Stohr, Kate 61; Design Like You Give a Damn 62 Stoll, Katrina: Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks 42 Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel (SMART) 252 Stoss Landscape Urbanism 223 “streamlining” project 229 Sumner, Charles H. 221 Sun Belt 94 Sun Corridor 109, 122, 126, 128, 130, 226n3 Sustainability Tools for Assessing and Rating (STAR) Communities 59, 228 sustainable development 58, 59, 107, 108, 158 Sustainable Return on Investment (SROI) analysis 182 Swedish Symbiocentrum 81 Symbiosis Center Denmark 80 “Symbiosis way of thinking” 80

symbiotic: infrastructure 69, 260; networks 234; systems 75, 81, 267; thinking 113 synthetic gypsum 80 “Synthetic Surfaces” 41 Systems-Based Urban Design 189 systems-based urban design thinking 190 “systems of advocacy” 223 Tactical Urbanism 23 tax increment financing (TIF) 192, 266 Taylor, Breonna 8 Team 10 Primer (Smithson) 33 telecommunications technology and globalization 19 Ten Across Water Summit 183 Terán, Bernardo 149 Tesla 243–245, 249 Tetris Highway 176–181 Thompson, Drew 274n5 Thorley, Sam 166 Thrive at the Convergence 212–213 Thunberg, Greta 60 Thün, Geoffrey 42, 43 Tier 1 EIS 182 TIF see tax increment financing (TIF) Tiger, Lionel 4 Times Square 19, 62, 63, 73, 111, 112 TNCs see transportation network companies (TNCs) TOD see transit-oriented development (TOD) “Top/Up Urbanism” 24, 64 Toward an Urban Ecology (Orff) 30 Tower Grove Park 223 toxic pollutants 9 traditional urban form 16 transit-oriented development (TOD) 23, 261 transportation network companies (TNCs) 262 Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) 112, 182 “trickle-down economics” 16, 65 Trump, Donald 4, 8, 102n20, 229, 268 TTC see Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) Tucson proposal 125

Turnbull, David 75, 77, 103n42 Turner, Tina 212, 221 Two Rivers 216–219 Uber 262 Ulmer, Kevin 212 UN Climate Action Summit 60 unemployment 7, 101, 132, 249, 266 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 60 United Nations Environmental Program and World Meteorological Organization 59 urban anthropomorphism 36 “urban contagion” 263 Urban Design (Sorkin) 42 urban ecology 30 urban exemplar 18 urbanism 10, 16, 47–48; alternative 20, 67; discourse, changes in 65–67; ecological 27, 30, 32, 109, 231; everyday 22–24, 27, 48; field-centered 30; infrastructural (see infrastructural urbanism); interdisciplinary 10; landscape 22–27, 30, 32, 40–41, 51n48, 67, 109, 230; new 22–24, 67; performative 67; postmodern 9, 16, 19–20; tactical 23 “Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology” concentration 27 UrbanLab 42, 94, 231, 235 urban motorway 33, 34 urban PTSD 18 urban renewal 9, 14, 16, 35, 36, 106, 107, 184, 190, 198, 200, 212, 221, 223, 238, 263, 264 urban revitalization 54, 185 US Constitution 2, 5 US Interstate system 41 see also Eisenhower’s interstate; Interstate “U.S. Livability Initiative” 61 US-Mexico border wall 92 US Secure Fence Act of 2006 92

IMAGE INDEX

291

Van Eyck, Aldo 33 Variations on A Theme Park (Sorkin) 18, 21 Vásquez, Estefania 143 Velikov, Kathy 42 Venturi, Robert 35 VHO see Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO) Vidler, Anthony 35 Villatoro, Sandra 133, 135 violent spatial tactics 20 Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO) 244, 250, 260 Wakeford, Katie: Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism 62 Waldheim, Charles 22–24, 27; Landscape Urbanism Reader 41 Wall, Alex: “Programming the Urban Surface” 30 Walter, Susan M. 60, 269; America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure 56, 57 Walton Sustainable Solutions Initiatives 182, 226n6 warlike urbanism 18 Warren, Elizabeth 266 water-intensive industries 94 water reclamation centers 96 waterworks infrastructure 96 Watts race riots 1965 18 Weiner, Sophie 227n15 Weintraub, Deborah 83, 84, 104n49 Wheeler, Stuart 101 “white infill” 23 Whole Earth Catalog 36 Wilde, Andy 101 Wildlife Crossing 172–175 wireless charging 176 WORKac 65 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 2, 60 World Commission on Environment and Development 107 WPA see Works Progress Administration (WPA) WPA 2.0 (Working Public Architecture) 3, 10, 54, 64, 68–73, 87, 228, 230–238, 245, 246n5;

292

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPTIMISM

Lineage Diagram 240–241 WPA 3.0 11, 243 Wu, Shuailin 208 Yang, Yang 159 Zencey, Eric 115, 118n13, 185–189 zero-emissions logistics 249–260 Zhang, Yuhan 199, 202 Zlateva, Darina 231 Zomorodi, Manoush 268