Is Landscape...? Essays on the Identity of Landscape Edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles WaldheimChapter 8: Is landscape infrastructure? Pierre Bélanger ‘A narrow and pedantic taxonomy has persuaded us that there is little or nothing in common between what used to be called civil engineering and landscape architecture, but in fact from an historical perspective their more successful accomplishments are identical in result. The two professions may work for different patrons, but they both reorganize space for human needs, both produce works of art in the truest sense of the term. In the contemporary world it is by recognizing this similarity of purpose that we will eventually formulate a new definition of landscape: a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence; and if background seems inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern use of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence, but also our history. (ohn Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Word Itself,” 1976-1984) ‘The outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the dominance of pathways over settlements ... The pathways of modern life are also corridors of power, with power being understood in both its technological and political senses. By channeling the circulation of people, goods, and messages, they have transformed spatial relations by establishing lines of force that are privileged over the places and people left outside those lines...the concept of connective systems and pathways is primarily phenomenological rather than sociological These constructions are tangible structures existing in geographical space, and their components are related primarily in physical rather than in social terms. When engineering involves the creation of such structures, it looks more like a “mirror twin” of landscape architecture than of science Rosalind Williams, “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological Systems,” 1993) Infrastructure has grown in complexity vis-a-vis the urbanization of the world. As “one of the most impressive facts of modern times,”! infrastructure is both force and effect, a fixture to the horizontal patterns of urbanization that characterize the majority of the planet. Often buried or overlooked as background to development, infrastructure is the unseen interface—urbanism’s ghost—by which we influence and interact with the material, biological, and technological world. If all aspects of contemporary urban life are mediated by large technological systems as historians Rosalind Williams and J. B. Jackson propose, then the preconception of infrastructure as closed, mechanical, engineered system needs to be radically rethought ecologically, as open system of live media operating across different geographical, politic, and temporal scales. LIVE MODELS, OPEN SYSTEMS With the agency of ecology coming into focus as fin de siécle system and strategy, the contemporary reconsideration of urban infrastructure and large scaletechnological systems is further magnified by massive transitions from industrialization to urbanization occurring globally: the rise of environmental concerns since the 1970s, the crisis of public works planning in the 1980s, and the erosion of post-war engineered structures from the 1990s onwards, whose legacy total more than 2.2 trillion dollars in urgently needed reinvestment according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.” Today, the vertical, linear, centralized systems of urban economies—Fordist infrastructure—puts into question the very nature of urbanization, where patterns of remote consumption are further and further removed from the means and processes of production. Spatially, the complexity and inflexibility of these highly engineered environments—below and above ground—have not only displaced or disrupted the distribution of biophysical resources and dynamics of biophysical processes across vast territories, the infrastructures of extraction and cultivation are obscured by more mute, middle systems of logistical distribution, subsurface conveyance, internalized processing, and distributed storage required to service growing populations. When infrastructure is considered politically and ethnographically, this “infrastructural fixing and fragmentation” of seemingly ecological processes naturally contributes to “frictions” and “resistances” that will only continue to grow. Anthropologist Anna Tsing,’ historian Jo Guldi, and geographer David Harvey’ have been at the forefront of explaining how “flexibilities” are straight jacketed of centralized bureaucracies, lopsided land development policies, and standardized, end-of-pipe engineering whose ideological origins are rooted in colonial and military histories (Figure 8.1). “Infrastructure pits region against region, experts against the people, and class against class. It produces and informs the identities and divisions that characterize politics in the modem era.”> The largely uncoordinated practice of planning today has now become ironically reactionary, and civil engineering—its palliative sister. Finally, in the foreground of an exhausted environmentalism, the overexertion of mechanical technology and overregulation of property have fueled a growing divide between political platforms of environment and economy, while remaining largely impotent vis-d- vis the space and pace of urban change (Figure 8.2).MORAL WAP of HORTH AMERIOR (aga, Fhe Sart tats se volourad Bel The: Meghies tbeancr of Steere son doy ha pts hy stl wth a Faves spor wn tbe ee omer Rese Sau ee nha | saa Figure 8.1 Race space: the central role of the Mississippi river as sociopolitical division and boundary infrastructure between free states, slave states and aboriginal territories in John Bishop Estlin’s ‘Moral Map of North America, 1854.” Courtesy of Yale Digital Humanities—Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal.URBAN POPULATION = NOWRXCEEDSRURAL «=. QUR..CITIES NATIONAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE JUNE 7 More Than 51 Por Cent. Live in Cities and Towns, the Census» Bureau Announces. URBAN FIQURES 64,318,032 | 82.7 Per Cent. of the Pople of New ‘York Stato Live In Places of More Than 2,500, lavaay ‘WABHINGTON, Jan. i8.—For the fret time fn the country’s history more than half of the population of continental ‘United States I living im urban terri- tary, Persona living tn cities and towns lying in rural territory numbered 81,300.73, Figure 8.2 Urban agency: the first report of the US Federal Urbanism Committee in 1937 identifying major challenges of metropolitan concentration, following the great population explosion marked in 1921 Copyright © 1921 New York Times, courtesy of US Government Printing Office & US House Committee on Natural Resources. So, is the reclamation of infrastructure purely a technical, technological, or a fiscal question in light of massive tax cuts and public service drawdowns that spread nationally since the Reagan and Thatcher era of the 1980s? Or, does infrastructure’s decay represent a deeper political conundrum of the State?° “What is, after all, a beautiful city with bad drains, or a fine concrete highway in a barren landscape?”” L’esprit nouveau of ecology is both a turn-of-the-century reaction, as well as a forward-looking projection towards this infrastructural obscurity and environmental apartheid. This spirit is a strategic rappel-d-l’ordre through the recapitulation of spatial and temporal scales of urban life that propose new geographies of relation across infrastructures of consumption, distribution, processes and extraction. As live, lived, living model, this new ecological order is shaped (not constrained) by oppositions. By reformulating the fundamental “problematization” of urbanization, the friction of political climates and anthropogenic flows (population, technology, consumption, capital) as well as thecollision of changing climates and environmental pressures (sea level rise, atmospheric emissions, hydrologic effluents, tropical storms, seasonal droughts) establish new, negotiated ground for alternative models and synergistic precedents for an era of unprecedented transformation (Figure 8.3). Using the format of a retroactive narrative, this fundamental millennial conundrum is explored here with two reciprocal questions: Is landscape infrastructure? That is, can we consider the “non-mechanical,” “non-linear” and “non-stable” media of living systems as infrastructure? And conversely, is infrastructure land scape? That is, can we consider the non-biologic, non- dynamic, and non-adaptive material of infrastructure as a constructed landscape and lived experience (Figure 8.4)? By chronicling milestone events and canonical thinkers from the past two centuries, this ontological recall looks back at series of transitions and revolutions in thought occurring across fields ranging from engineering and economics, to anthropology and geography, in order to question distances between ecology and infrastructure and the division between landscape architecture and civil engineering. By unearthing hidden power structures behind the “instrumentality of reason” that underpins infrastructural form, the conjecture of landscape as infrastructure (and its pragmatic inflexion, infrastructure as landscape) can thus reveal and loosen gridlocked ideologies to propose new strategies of design and patterns of practice vis-a-vis dominant challenges of our time. In light of the massive infrastructural transformation occurring worldwide, this shared cultural project demands alternative “infrastructural inversions” and “ecological foregrounding.”® Since this proposal puts into question the conventions and capacities of any single discipline to address the magnitude of urban and environmental complexities today, what is proposed here is the compound, comingled, and collaborative formulation of landscape as infrastructural field of practice that addresses the entangled and unpredictable flows of global capital and population migration, in relation to evolving, telescopic dynamics of planetary ecologies.S55 — “s et SS Figure 8,3 American monument: 1929 benchmark of the US Geological Survey, the year that the 1929 National Geodetic Vertical Datum was established to measure elevation (altitude) above, and depression (depth) below, mean sea level (MSL). Courtesy of NOAA—Vertical Datums Project: Figure 8.4 Sensing through sections: cross-sectional analyses of urban terrain of New York streets by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and civil/topographical engineer James Croes. Source:New York City Board of the Department of Public Parks, Document No. 72, 1876. ECOLOGY AS REVERSE ENGINEERING The historic lack of engagement of infrastructure, as territory of design, surprisingly stems from the banality that ironically masks its technological complexity. While urban design concentrated on “the part of planning concerned with the physical form of the city” when it emerged as a discipline in the late 1950s,” its focus mainly involving the design of streets, blocks, and buildings as generators of growth and urban development—overlooked the potential of infrastructure as the great enabler and glue of urbanization at the precise moment it was on the rise. Alternatively, “the engineer has often been nearer to future developments than the town planner,” as Siegfried Giedion remarked during the interwar explosion of planning and the increasing distance between engineer and architect, “who has too frequently been concerned exclusively with the reorganization of the body of the city itself” (Figure 8.5).!° 7 MAN-MADE AStER OCA {ase at Figure 8.5 Chaos and complexity: academic disciplines struggle with the liberating yet form-defying mega- infrastructures of mobility, speed, and seamlessness. Sert, 1942: Courtesy of The President and Fellows of Harvard College; Giedion, 1941: courtesy of Harvard University Press; Tunnard, 1964; Copyright © 1964 Yale University Press. However neutral it appears, the constellation of infrastructural equipment— from sewers and sidewalks to airports and power plants—forms a technological apparatus—natural hardware—that compose the urban world. Buried in its banal repetition, infrastructure is instrumental as a “tool and technique of power” as Michel Foucault references, deployed as “lines of control” and “equipment of power” by institutions across vast territories from the City to the State.!! Behind this stacked system of sites and spaces, lies an infrastructural background: an operating systems of data collection, standards, specifications, feedbacks, protocols and practices that is continually reengineered and replanned. In the continuous operating and rebuilding of large scale technological systems, lies the silent circulation and unspoken transmission of class-based, political biasesand race-based, spatial ideologies. Ethnographically, several key dimensions of infrastructure’s pervasive diffusion stand out: “environmental embeddedness,” “operational transparency,” “spatial reach,” “temporal scope,” “culturally learned,” “linked through conventions of practice,” “embodied by standards,” “built on installed bases,” “visible on break down,” and “modular or incremental.”2 While we may argue on where infrastructure starts and ends, or how it actually works—sometimes almost too well, its perverse influence has exerted itself most often to the point of near- invisibility lending an appearance of irreversibility. As media, infrastructure completely works us over. Often obscuring connections with the “software” of social environments and biophysical resources, the remote spaces of production (where food is grown and resources mined) and consumption (where people live and work) are often far removed, geographically and materially, from sites of extraction and distribution (Figure 8.6). Except for the odd roadside or airside glimpse, rarely do we see the entirety of these systems until they fail. Largely out of sight is the river reservoir that supplies drinking water, or the subsurface soils and spoils that support highways, the landfill that swallows the city’s garbage, or the coal mine that feeds the region’s power plant ... notwithstanding the invisibility of its workforce and sweat equity—la main d’oeuvre—that is continually running and repairing this remote substructure. Mostly perceived as smooth, seamless and permanent, the invisible human power underlying urban infrastructure is nevertheless like the large scale technological networks themselves: extremely fragile and short-lived, fundamentally indivisible.Figure 86 Valleys of production and streams of consumption: longitudinal profile of urbanization with Tan McHarg's River Profile and Patrick Geddes’s Valley Section of Civilization. McHarg, Design with Nature, 1969: courtesy of American Museum of Natural History, Geddes, 1909: National Library of Scotland OF.1314.6.20 As the prominent city building professions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the reconsideration of the historic roles of civil engineering and urban planning is central to the understudied influence of contemporary infrastructure. Through the instrumentality of reason,'? basic models of control and efficiency ideologically shaped cities during the past two centuries. Unquestioned by the authority of engineers and planners, the uncontestable notions of speed and seamlessness often carry political undertones that cloak critical ontologies of power. As mechanization took command and reason swept cities clean, specialized practices became more and more atomized, reason and “logic” reached their own limits requiring “a method of linking rationality with the organic.” Seeing beyond the fog of disciplinary specialization and illusion of quantitative reason, what is required in the rethinking of reason in the conditioning of spatial infrastructures and large scale technology systems is a three-point, ecological turn —a process of reverse engineering—to recalibrate the hegemony of three predominant assumptions: planning’s city-centrism, engineering’s supremacy, and technology's permanence (Figure 8.7).Figure 8.7 Destruction as design: the demolition of the GM automotive plant in Flint, Michigan. Photo: Leonard Thygesen Demolition Videos & Buick Prints, 2013. The first degree shift entails a geographic turn away from core-periphery models of organization. Locating the city centrally as a sociological problem at the turn of the twentieth century has lent the inevitability of infrastructure as state building enterprise. Placed far from peripheries of emergent activity, the centralization of control in cities has instrumentalized land and systematized Euclidean zoning, Calvinist conservation and Taylorist categorizations that privilege “use,” over “effect.” Ironically, the infrastructural “fixing” of ecological flux and fragmentation of systemic flow has been framed by territorial boundaries most often drawn centuries ago during periods of war or conflict by revolving state institutions. From the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes, the legibility of rivers, coastlines and other hydrological regions and water bodies naturally served as political divisions and borders across North America. Through damming and channelization, the fragmentation of hydrologic systems of water rendered resource habitats into nearly invisible patches formerly reliant on systemic interconnectivity. Singular functions of navigation or power production reduced regional water bodies into state backwaters. Epitomized by the military motto “Building Strong” of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the unshakable adherence to instrumental reason and fortified perma nence has drastically confined once diverse, dynamic and productive hydrological systems within fixed grids of political borderlines. Framed by state-bound foci, sustainability agendas now stand in sharp contrast and contradiction to unpredictable changes in climates, population streams and consumption patterns (Figure 8.8).AMERICA IN RUINS ‘The Devaying Infrastructure Pst Chante Rethinking Homeownership Figure 8.8 State failure, architect’s demise: from public divestments in the mid-1980s to the mortgage crisis of 2008, the baby boom generation has witnessed a revolution in real estate and public works Source: Duke University Press, 1983, Copyright © 2013 TIME. Risk and reason At a second degree, and in correspondence with the hidden and buried systems of urbanization, the reprofiling of prevailing city models!> steeped in state power must reconsider the scientific disciplines of planning and engineering themselves. Based on Fordist models of production, the linearity of closed infrastructural systems has required systems of separation that isolated or marginalized other forms and fashions of life: from flora and fauna, region and religion, race and gender, to family and ethnicity. Infrastructure’s technological performance effectively neutered ecological complexity and reduced it to functional utility and operational efficiency. In contrast to the unifying and democratic promises of public infrastructure, diversity was simply suppressed or externalized as constraint, often leading to social disengagement.® Since infrastructure is biased, it divides as much as it connects. “In the era of the infrastructure state, conflict is inevitable because building, although expensive, is necessary. Without state building, economies never expand to a national scale, peripheries are left behind, and the poor cannot afford to participate in the market.”!” If the disciplines of urban planning and civil engineering respectively form the impervious architecture and fixed framework of cities of Western industrial society today, then planners and engineers are the foot soldiers in themaintenance and management of the myth of instrumental reason. Perpetuated by State-driven policy, the over-emphasis on “legibility” in strategies of abstraction (land use keys) and data aggregation (demographics) have simplified complex information, and where “predictions have often been wildly wrong.” 8 The risk of reason is personified in the positivist role of technocratic engineer “the best exemplar of the power of expertise...reinforcing directly and indirectly the rule of instrumentalism and unending economic growth.”!9 Over time, the implementation of legal limits, and categories of accountability— institutionalized through standardization and systematization, have gradually contributed to the rigid and segregated space of cities today. “The modern engineering enterprise is primarily a colonizing project,” both self-aggrandizing and totalizing.?° Removed more and more from regional resources and dynamic biophysical processes, the neutralization and normalization of process is heightened by the security found in quantitative logic and numerical precision. Anthropocentric economies of expediency and exactitude simply externalized ecologies of race, class, and gender. The assumed neutrality of infrastructure is perhaps its most dangerous weapon. From engineering to design Through the relentless reliance on efficiency as spatial economy then, civil engineers have become central figures of urban environments, “trustees of public aspiration,” whose contributions are concretized by landmarks and great public works of American technological might?! Compared to the over-theorized architect or sociologist of today, 72 the commanding respect of the common engineer in Western industrial society since the eighteenth century is astonishing: “Americans respected engineers [not farmers or architects], wherever they worked but settlers in the backlands especially honored them. Without their expertise— professional or common—the settlers well knew, canals and railroads existed only as pipe dreams.”*> In the absence of substantive critical reflection, superlative landmarks and technological bigness are now the basis for communicating societal performance across the high risk technological landscape of the twenty-first century. At less than 1 percent of project life-cycle costs, the cost-benefit of engineering services and civic preeminence today are practically uncontestable. Its image is communicated as investment.”* Informed mainly by the recursive and forensic study of failure—from the prosaic to the epic,”> the bureaucratic bedrock of the engineer's technical prowess and precision rests on the exclusion of often less quantifiable sociopolitical processes.”6 If “engineers introduced not only massiveness and great scale to American building, they introduced standardization too,” then they also managed in their paths, a great and thorough cleaning of complexity.” The internal specter of scientific reason thus raises the external question of the spatial context in whichmaintenance and management of the myth of instrumental reason. Perpetuated by State-driven policy, the over-emphasis on “legibility” in strategies of abstraction (land use keys) and data aggregation (demographics) have simplified complex information, and where “predictions have often been wildly wrong.”*® The risk of reason is personified in the positivist role of technocratic engineer “the best exemplar of the power of expertise...reinforcing directly and indirectly the rule of m9 instrumentalism and unending economic growth. Over time, the implementation of legal limits, and categories of accountability— institutionalized through standardization and systematization, have gradually contributed to the rigid and segregated space of cities today. “The modern engineering enterprise is primarily a colonizing project,” both self-aggrandizing and totalizing.°° Removed more and more from regional resources and dynamic biophysical processes, the neutralization and normalization of process is heightened by the security found in quantitative logic and numerical precision. Anthropocentric economies of expediency and exactitude simply externalized ecologies of race, class, and gender. The assumed neutrality of infrastructure is perhaps its most dangerous weapon. From engineering to design Through the relentless reliance on efficiency as spatial economy then, civil engineers have become central figures of urban environments, “trustees of public aspiration,” whose contributions are concretized by landmarks and great public works of American technological might.2! Compared to the over-theorized architect or sociologist of today, 2” the commanding respect of the common engineer in Western industrial society since the eighteenth century is astonishing: “Americans respected engineers [not farmers or architects], wherever they worked but settlers in the backlands especially honored them. Without their expertise— professional or common—the settlers well knew, canals and railroads existed only as pipe dreams.”?> In the absence of substantive critical reflection, superlative landmarks and technological bigness are now the basis for communicating societal performance across the high risk technological landscape of the twenty-first century. At less than 1 percent of project life-cycle costs, the cost-benefit of engineering services and civic preeminence today are practically uncontestable. Its image is communicated as investment.24 Informed mainly by the recursive and forensic study of failure—from the prosaic to the epic,”® the bureaucratic bedrock of the engineer's technical prowess and precision rests on the exclusion of often less quantifiable sociopolitical processes.” If “engineers introduced not only massiveness and great scale to American building, they introduced standardization too,” then they also managed in their paths, a great and thorough cleaning of complexity.” The internal specter of scientific reason thus raises the external question of the spatial context in whichlarge scale technologies are employed, and how knowledge is organized by dominant disciplines.”* While civil engineering emerged, for example, from the glut of military engineers at West Point during a prolonged period of peace at the end of the nineteenth century? defense imperatives literally put structures in the stream making clear divisions between “dry” and “wet” land, “high” and “low” ground, “above” and “below” water. As metropolitan demands grew larger and larger, so did demands for hydraulic engineering and topographic earthworks. Applied to the North American context, French military engineers neatly transferred wartime techniques of fortification and planning ideologies to civilian applications, across the Atlantic Ocean, one coast after another. Predictability and post-Taylorism Together, the criticism of planning and engineering argues for a third, temporal tum that puts in question the “certainty” and “stability” upon which the undisputed utopias of “security” and “safety” are predicated. Through the illusion of insurance and Newtonian predictability, mono-functional land uses and standardized infrastructures have reduced flexible alternatives and often expose large populations to mass vulnerabilities and high risks.2° Exemplified by planning’s reactionary behavior to hazards, accidents and disasters, the unpredictable contexts and side effects of engineering structures prompt a critical reconsideration of the perceived permanence and persistent recycling of infrastructure itself. Stemming from the magnitude of technological systems, infrastructural amnesia has generated a sense of technological determinism and state naturalism from one generation to another. Founded in eighteenth-century institutions of colonial control and modernized by nineteenth- century principles of scientific management from mechanical engineer and systems theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor, the centralization of management (read planning) was required to control production and stabilize inventories. Not only did these Taylorist principles of planning and predictability influence the development of factories during the rise of mechanization and Fordist modes of mass-production, they shaped the management of industrial environments and metropolitan territories. However, the short-term economic gains of the Taylorist model excluded factors that did not “fit” within the closed system of industrial production in the long term. Instead, any externalities literally and figuratively went downstream, underground, abroad, or amok: emissions, effluents, resource depletion, worker rights, race relations, international policies, family structures, gender differences, cultural ingenuity.>! After a century of trial and error, the rational Taylorist model was polluted by growing externalities, no longer able to demonstrate improvements in labor productivity through rationalization of work flows or by standardization of production lines alone. The contours of fluctuating environmental pressures and urban risks simply did not correspond with the boundaries of political jurisdictions, professional competencies, or information data. Compounded by dwindling state budgets, growing environmental hazardsmake visible the inflexibility of this predominantly industrial structure. Events such as the displacement of hundreds of thousands during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the destruction of estuarine economies after the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and the financial damage of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, have become vivid images—not unlike revolutionary events of the late 1960s—of the limits of disciplinary models based on the perceived predictability and assumed certainty of forecast planning (Figure 8.9). As the basis of civil engineering and planning, precision has become a handicap. Whether it was the shoreline engineering of the eighteenth century, sanitary engineering in the nineteenth century, or transportation planning in the twentieth century, we now find ourselves at a crossroads pushing beyond the logic of the City Scientific, the City Rational or the City Efficient models. Both process and product of urbanization, the inconvenient truth is that the city cannot be contained like a canal or a sewer, nor controlled like a factory or an inventory. Fortunately, in the past few decades “non-technical factors have come to exert an influence that is unprecedented in the history of technology” favoring the environment, or the “field,” in which technologies are applied. The geopolitical rereading of fixed borders—legal, jurisdictional, political, biophysical—in relation to flows—sociocultural, geopolitical, biophysical—helps retrace the contours of instrumental reason and thus provide the basis for reforming current economies in relation to the biophysical systems, cultural plurality, and dynamic processes that program them (Figure 8.10), hs NLCD 1992 Land Cover Classification Legend aw won AAA eM Oper tener m S12 rewra eanow — WHE 21 Low intensity Reser AN 22 gh tonaly Resident ee 2 Commerce tenoporon ceetaon SE Pecsten samctmm (31 Bore Rock/SandiClay aoe ce EP TEE 2 cuericaistip sinentGrare Pits ate MB 22 Tranetoraiearren Sanrant #04 2 wor dhe =e HH 42 Evergreen Forest tecency Se ee ca ca Foret ‘iit Sai see BB st enndiane . HH 61 orchardsvineyards/0ther Ywogercy mm 24 Geasslandetvacoous spat) eee ae voy LiL La one ° amet . oe TH 65 UibaniReacreational Grasses [J 91 wooey wetanaa evatunber —L KB er civerpent Herbaceous WetandsFigure 8.9 Cross-scalar codification systems: the national land use classification systems, relations of adjacency, plant proportions. Courtesy of USGS, 1992; Jacques Bertin, 1963; Piet Oudolf, 2009. wey Figure 8.10 Plant processes as spatial programs: vegetal urbanism and intermediate landscapes for brownfields and blackfields. Copyright © 2009 Michel Desvigne Paysagiste. In this “space of flows,” the projective rescaling of urban economies proposes alternative models of organization—constructed ecologies of systems, services, and scales, whose data is live and form, constantly in flux. “Most interestingly. it is not architecture but landscape, with its weak boundaries, interconnected topographies and ambiguous modes of occupation, which ultimately remains the best agent for this type of territorial change.”>* Climate change thus opens scales and systems of urbanization as processes and patterns, challenging the contours of state power and boundaries of institutions. In this fluid space, non-static “process” usurps fixity of “place.”* ORGANIZATIONAL ECOLOGIES In this shift away from disciplinary dominance, alternative modes of spatial organization are required to develop less-linear and more flexible strategies thatcapitalize on the evolving, less-stable nature of urban economies. With more than 60 percent of the European, and more than 80 percent of the American population living on the periphery of cities, “form-defying”** systems of circulation clearly contribute to processes of decentralization today, as they have for the past century. The population bomb that exploded at the turn of the early twentieth century, with the deruralization that followed, radically transformed the size of cities and countrysides. Seemingly unprecedented in America’s history, US demographers recorded in 1921 “for the first time in the country’s history more than half of the population of continental United States is living in urban territory.”3> Captured by the First Planning Conference in 1909, planning emerged from an infrastructural boom in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, as populations doubled and tripled in size.*° With gangs rampant, slums growing, and motorization swelling, the dramatic rise in city populations during the 1920s marked a legal turning point for newly incorporated cities. ‘The factory system brought more and more people to the urban centers, land values increased, and the century saw ... a tidal wave of “city planning” With these [City Beautiful] movements ._all cities with a population of 10,000 or more were required to establish a Planning Board.” Attempting to alleviate the growing prevalence of crime and congestion, concentrated demands for drinking water, waste management, energy generation, food distribution, and transportation corridors all placed significant pressures upon the services of growing, congested cities. In the early twentieth century, Chicago reversed the Chicago River to divert sewage away from its freshwater source in Lake Michigan. Control of these conditions seemed imperative, leading to the separation of urban services into distinct more manageable categories, thanks in part to the rise of public involvement from 1937 onwards, with the newly formed Urbanism Committee at the national level, and the Planning Boards at the municipal level. Premised on the management of population growth through taxation within municipal growth boundaries, policies and zoning regulations of height restrictions, density limits, and land use constraints naturally formalized the disciplinary centrality of planning. Against the foreground of Old World core-periphery models of development and New World city-centrism of social science, regional urbanist Howard W. Odum emerged in support of regional growth and value of decentralization, proposing the aggregated advantage of overlapping ecological, economic or social regions, “as a technique of decentralization and redistribution of population, industry, wealth, capital, culture, and of bigness, complexity, and technology.”** Sustainability of suburbanization Usurping the goals of the American Civic Association and the grandeur of the City Beautiful Movement where architects once dominated, the new planning discipline found power in institutional presence and capitalized on the separation of government powers, where local authority forms the backbone of the USConstitution. Although local governments were the largest stakeholders and bene ficiaries of planning expertise, master plans could not keep up with the unpredict able pace and pressure of population migration. But, unlike early antecedents of institutional planning, urbanization could not simply be planned like a prison or contained like a hospital. The compound effect of squalid inner city conditions, cheap low-rise housing, road construction, and postwar deindustrialization forced the opening of new regions for the spread of populations along new lines of access and the horizontal elevators of transportation corridors, leaping across legal boundaries of incorporated cities. The so-called problem of uncontrollable spread of urban populations and the rise of suburbanization not only demonstrated the incapacities and inflexibilities of city planning (including housing authorities and policing powers) to deal with the delirium of sprawl but commanded a sense of attention needed in the historiography of cities and urban regions, captured in 1961 by none other than Lewis Mumford in his voluminous book, The City in History. Unplanning: zoning, after Euclid If the task of planning has relied on the strict separation of services and individual Jand use categorizations, then transportation networks naturally inserted themselves in between incompatible uses of land, or classes of communities. By 1927, faith in the scientific basis for planning and local government control led to the precedent setting establishment of basic single-use categories according to Euclidean planning principles: residential, commercial, institutional and industrial. With the evacuation of geographic knowledge from Ivy league schools,” cities ironically took on new levels of complexity at the precise moment when John Kenneth Galbraith claimed that the concentration of “capital [and power] became more important than land.”4° Dependent on jurisprudence, the spatially neutered planning discipline irreversibly became entrenched in land use legislation and property politics while geography disappeared altogether from the functional basis of planning. Twentieth century planning was now relegated, for the most part, to a generation of lawyers and economists with reductive world views. In stark contrast, the regional process of suburbanization provided a general advantage in the upscaling of urban conditions, as “productive milieu for social advancement and family life’‘" rendering it both a controversial and subversive subject of ecologic significance. As historian of sprawl Robert Bruegmann notes, the global phenomenon of suburbanization is widely understudied: “flattening of the density gradient,” is indicative of the leveling (read de-centering) of socio-economic structures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across “a more dispersed landscape [that] has afforded many people greater levels of mobility, privacy, choice.” Thanks to the rise in automobility, mobile technologies and growing consumer credit, the increase in individual purchasing power has thus contributed to a horizontal pattern of urbanization that functions largely as an alternative to the “denselysettled cities that were the norm at the end of the nineteenth century.” ‘The great question in the field once known as urban design, is no longer that of Alberti’s day —how to choose the site where a city or a given program will be built—but how to accommodate sites that have now all been subsumed, in one way or another, by the suburban condition.’> Chaos as complexity If aberrant suburbanization potentially provides a greater level of spatial, economic, and cultural freedom in the twenty-first century, as Olmsted previously foretold in the nineteenth century, then distinct spatial democracies may lie between the ecology and the economy of the city. As transitional process, the decentralization of power structures entails a flattening of institutional hierarchies that goes hand in hand with the deconcentration of urban form. The organization of new powers is thus made possible, not by the buildup but by the drawdown of power in the unbuilding of state-led engineering infrastructure, and the underdevelopment of regulatory structures. Contributing to these strategies of suburbanization and underdevelopment, landscape architect and urbanist James Corner has recently proposed how “organizational ecologies” provide an advanced understanding of urbanism “to produce a critical understanding of what is at stake when practicing in a world of constant change and uncertainty ... and to develop new vocabularies and techniques pertinent to more openly fluid forms and practices.” “ Corner’s critical emphasis on the generative capacity of uncertainty echoes the groundbreaking polemic of urbanist Rem Koolhaas: “since it is out of control, the urban is about to become a major vector of the imagination. Redefined, urbanism will not only, or mostly, be a profession, but a way of thinking, an ideology: to accept what exists."1 JAHR ALT 50 100 200cm Figure 8.11 Self-organizing structure: the thick, fibrous, and stabilizing root mat system of heath-like species that thrive in rugged environments of extreme daily and seasonal temperature variations, autrient-poor soil, intense sunlight, and salt-laden winds Copyright © 1994 Hugo Meinhard SchiechtlCOMPONENT NOS Farsi} Crowe: BRANCHING nelunt f-crown- ‘BRANENING Lenerent conn Ted arimoe \, ‘CROWN DIAMETER — “al or. aRhe — Blaoeney ae | S8E / } +e fy onsSaDN so oe BERT Se fins ne ce ee Tin it LANIMETRIC fas wocardvior enti “acter ow fi Z re a Figure 8.12 On growth and deformation: plant assemblages and morphologies Copyright © 1972 Atomic Energy Commission This organizational ecology becomes dependent on the cultivation of processes that are spatially programmatic and economically generative, across scales. If there is to be a “new urbanism” it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty: it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the new, only about the “more” and the “modified.” It will not be about the civilized, but about underdevelopment (Figures 8.11-12). From control to contingency If the formlessness*®° of urbanization is best seen across long periods of time, then the process of suburbanization can be proposed as both a productive reaction and response to dominant modes of Fordist production and Taylorist management. This re-reading of cities, from closed color-blind systems that are reduced to a few controllable variables, is thus succumbing to a growing body of knowledge and expertise on dynamic and distributed, ecologies of cities as open systems. When viewed as a valley, this lateral and longitudinal view refigures the “ground” and the “geography” of contemporary urbanization beyond economic and legal perspec tives, supplanting supposed efficiencies and efficacies of planning and engineering.” In the current reallocation of public sector work to the private sector expertise and more collaborative forms of project financing, the advantage that risk distribution affords is through greater flexibility, both as a constructedecology and infrastructural interface. This shift proposes to transcend the political and legal boundaries associated with public works and private properties. To capitalize on this strategy of risk, design must clearly be more opportunistic and leverage disciplinary knowledge while engaging more synergistic collaborations. Economically, the advantage of appropriating infrastructure as landscape is heightened by the amount of fanding for renovating public infrastructure [that] is likely to far exceed the amount that will be available for buildings, parks and open space. Large budgets can be used to produce urban design that simultaneously solves utilitarian problems, and help repair cities and regional landscapes at a scale not dreamed of since the days of the great dams.** Here, the processes of decentralization—that is, the erosion of economic hierarchy and political hegemony through ecological aggregation—produces new horizontal territories of interventions where spaces can be charged with ecological forces by strategies of spatial dispersal, and where processes can be synchronized with new morphologies through temporal distribution in the future. The expansion of urban economies through the regional decentralization of cities is a more contingent process that yields potentially greater benefits, opening new territories for occupation and cultivation beyond the grey matter of cities. “This is the ground structure that organizes and supports a broad range of fixed and changing activities in the city. As such, the urban surface is dynamic and responsive; like a catalytic emulsion, the surface unfolds events in time.”* ECOLOGIES OF SCALE The recovery of geography in ecology’s nascent agency is both operative and imperative. Despite the death-of-distance thesis foreshadowed in the late 1990s by the globalization and rise of communication networks, geographic knowledge figures more prominently as scalar and systemic instrument. ‘The geographic re-reading of the dominant models of urbanization in the past two centuries circumvents disciplinary cul-de-sacs, and dissolves historic oppositions between concepts such as city and country, rural and urban, natural and human, modern and historic. Spatial conventions borne from the techno- bureaucratic factions of public works departments (waste, water, energy, food and transport agencies) and inherited from classical, Old World notions of master- planning can be purposefully put into question. Moving beyond the limits of municipal tax zones, the regional field harnesses the power of resource flows across watersheds, energysheds and foodsheds to index the greater extents of urbanization, from the material scale at 1:1 to the planetary scale at 1:1 billion. Regionalization Now that legal and regulatory frameworks are being counterbalanced by pressing concerns about carbon footprints, infrastructure lifespans, environmental economies and changing climates. Through unplanning and dezoning,? the removal of regulatory controls may take on unprecedented roles in the design ofregions at “sub-urban” and “super-urban’ scales.5! They will transition from being tools of prevention (control) to instruments of projection (contingency) through forces that may eventually yield a richer, more productive set of ecologies. From this flattening of urban hierarchy, a set of new regionalized identities are emerging that privilege diversity and differentiation, with a renewed focus on biophysical resources and live processes as self-maintaining and self-organizing, spatially expressive of cultural innovation and advancement. By virtue of its bigness alone, the “regime of complexity” instigated by infrastructure requires a mobilization of design intelligence, less dependent on “meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries.”5* Upsetting the linearity of technological determinism and the certainty of engineered controls, “instead of concentrating on an identifiable desirable end state as something which can be achieved through planning and management, neo-modernist environmentalism [i.e. ecology] focuses on setting up a dynamic, which, it is assumed, will lead to a desirable—as if yet unknown— direction” (Figure 8.13).3 Figure 8.13 Bioengineering: subsurface vegetative reproduction systems for vigarous forest growth (Black Locust) and biomass density amid highly fragmented urban conditions Source: Foad Vahidi, Mark Jongman-Sereno, Antonia Rudnay.Environment as megastructure This shift comes at a moment of crisis in the field of urban design as growing groups of architects are weakened or disillusioned by increasing complexities of built environments. Blindsided by the failure of the megastructures’ movement to capture the world within a single building, “there is another kind of megastructure,” according to cultural geographer J. B. Jackson, “in terms of the whole environment.”®° Out of the dogmatism of urban design, the characterization of the environment as a constraint and its inability to harness non-mechanical (living) and non-stable (dynamic) systems—merely an open system, the synthetic capacities of landscape architecture conflate both infrastructural form and ecological process. Across different scales, open-ended systems reclaim formerly abandoned sites (disurbanization) and intensify new ones (superurbanization). Together, they form a field that extends from the bio- molecular and the metabolic at the systemic scale of plants and species, to the geographic scale of networks and climactic scale of the global. As a system of systems, this extended field is operationalized by ecological intelligence across disciplines, ecological engineering at the smallest level, and transboundary strategy at the highest level. In contrast to closed, industrial systems of production from economies of mass production, these new economies of scale operate as an open system of exogenous and endogenous flows. Wastes and excesses, the surpluses of urbanization, become absorbed into a re-circulating economy of secondary and tertiary materials, through downcycling and upcycling (Figure 8.14).Figure 8.14 Free section, open plan: the strategic deployment of sectional strategies in OMA’s Parc de la Villette vegetal systems (1982) and open space diagram for Yokohoma. Copyright © 1992, OMA. Mapping as multimedia method If the information age is an infrastructure age, then the representation of living systems beyond conventional “use-value” categories becomes vital to the future of landscape practice. Since infrastructure is encoded with information systems and is exercized with power (democratic or not), then mapping is a means of decoding externalities generating collective empowerment “and can underpin a social justice agenda by valorizing previously neglected people and things.”** Whether by diagrams or maps, composite imaging provides an important alternative to the conventional orthographic methods of drafting inherited from engineers and architects. Beyond its linear and mechanistic function, the exclusive use of construction contracts as legal and contractual representations needs to be reconsidered as devices of public communication in landscape architectural production. Three primary characteristics emerge from these new blueprints: “the designer's indirect and detached, or remote, access to the landscape medium, the incongruity of drawing with respect to its subject—its abstractedness with respect to actual landscape experience, and the anterior, prevenient function of the drawing—its generative role” (Figure 8.15).57 In the realm of public works projects, the visual representation of research and the communication of strategies for the public, is essential practice in design. As means of public disclosure and method of exposing decision making processes beyond conventions of display, James Corner recognized early on that differences in modes of representation and notation affect the way in which one sees: the amore points of view that one is able to include, the more one is able to see, In drawing, the exchange of ideas can most effectively be propagated through the making of “composi drawings, wherein plans, sections, views, textures, scorelines, words and images are played off and against one another in dialogue. To use drawing to think and see in a more complex way is to overcome a blinkered, singular viewpoint and to relinquish total control.**Figure 8.15 Surface programming: Ger Dekkers’s panoramic series of the highly engineered Aflsuitdijk in the ‘Netherlands and Berlin Street Source: New Dutch Landscapes, 1986; Capital/Costa-Gavras, 2013. In an age where information is being generated more rapidly than it can be absorbed and used,” accelerating over the past three decades,® the representation of flows, processes and relationships beyond the naked eye underlies much of the work to be done. New, multimedia modes of representation can redefine the conventions of design historically rooted in technical drafting, scenic illustration, pictorial imaging. “The creative use of landscape representation to project alternative futures for urban form, infrastructure investment, ecological restoration and environmental management can be a powerful counter to the technocratic dominance of other forms of knowledge. The understanding of the particularity and distinction of local and regional landscapes can provide a point of resistance to the homogenizing effects of globalization.” Surface, section, strategy In contrast to the specificity of the plan and planometric representations, the section offers a much more flexible and longitudinal means of communication. Bridging civil engineering and urban design, sectional representation elucidates change across several scales—both large and small—through the recapitulation of surface as structure. The sectional shift reveals new understandings by disclosingand revealing interrelationships across different topographical zones, namely through surface and systems of access, zones of plant and root growth, different degrees of soil permeability, and variations in moisture and water levels. Minute variations in profile can have a significant effect over long distances, making possible the design of geographic territories across vast scales. With all of its attendant variations (cutaways, cross-sections, section-perspectives, developed profiles, expanded and exploded sections, and longitudinal sections, aerial oblique sections), the ground section graphically reveals the ground as a variegated interface and a striated environment that are superimposed on the surface itself and often buried in the complex data of quantitative information or spreadsheets (Figure 8.16).5! Hydrologically for example, the depth of the section simultaneously reveals the invisibility of what is below ground or underwater, and translates what is downstream and what is upstream. Foreshadowed by James Corner, these mappings have agency because of the double-sided characteristic of all maps. First, their surfaces are directly analogous to actual ground conditions; as horizontal planes, they record the surface of the earth as direct impressions. ... By contrast, the other side of this analogous characteristic is the inevitable abstractness of maps, the result of selection, omission, isolation, distance and codification. Figure 8.16 Infrastructural piggy-backing: lakeside promenade integrated into and constructed above a stormwater interceptor tunnel in Toronto, Copyright © 2012 West8/Adriaan Geuze.Figure 8.17 Materials as infrastructural media: the hardwood boardwalk made of Ipe and Yellow Cedar, with sinuous chrome-brushed, stainless steel railings forming informal amphitheaters and water's edge wave decks. Courtesy of Waterfront Toronto Logistically, the exchange of resources, materials and information will drive the modification and reprogramming of urban surfaces to accommodate greater auto- mobility through surface variability and different speeds of movements (Figure 8.17). Surface differentiation, markings and codifications at one end, and infrastructures of mobility at the other are imminently transforming the built environment for the foreseeable future. In this tilted space of the section, the components and complexities of time—between the economy of mechanical time (9-5 work hours, traffic rhythms, production periods, distribution deadlines) and the ecology of climactic time (vegetal emergence, breeding, migration, seasonal growth, decay, inundation, drought) can be made not only visible but also operative in design. From grade to ground Sectional strategies become the privileged interface between the complexity of the subsurface below (soils, foundations, wires, conduits, tunnels, pipelines) and the banality of the surface above (curbs, edges, surfaces, manholes, posts, grates, markings). Small and often minuscule changes of surface profiles in cross-section can have pronounced effects, much like slopes and grade changes, when seen across vast distances. The section therefore liberates the field from the stronghold of orthographic drawings and hegemony of axial projections to engage the design of relationships, associations and synergies across a multitude of sites, properties, and boundaries (Figure 8.18).If the projection of information influences perception, then sectional representation proposes not only the production of new optical projections, it becomes a process of research, and projective media of intervention in time. Media becomes method, and contemporary practice becomes active in both the design and designation of new territories. Emissive and interactive, the collaborative and interdisciplinary process of mapping is programmatic agent in project making, a space where thinking big is fast and easy. Modes of representation—such as design scenarios, section profiles and construction sequences—that enable a level of precise approximation and strategic generalization, can exploit situations of uncertainty and indeterminacy, promoting flexible forms of spatial imagination, inviting creativity and critical reflection. Combined together, maps, drawings, diagrams and photographs actively engage a field of various levels of engagement, not so much to seek out agreement, but to expose multiple, latent possibilities. As the field takes a geographic turn, this projective potential of mapping renders regional complexities more palpable, and closer to the ground ... an emerging agency formed by senses and sensations, between uncertainties and interactions, content and contingency, the temporal and the transmissive, that ultimately lie between image and imagination (Figure 8.19). Figure 8.18 Fluid planning and operational design: layering of political, environmental, economic and spatial information for Alvjso, a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. Courtesy of James Corner/Field Operations, phota by Pierre Bélangerwind pressure Es Figure 8.19 Environmental programming: analytical drawing of wind direction, velocity, and topography for the distribution and organization of wind farms in the American West. Source: James Corner, 1995. PROTOECOLOGIES As the ultimate infrastructural scale, the agency of time and temporality extends and expands the medium of landscape through the malleability of terrain and territory, as futurist geographer J. B. Jackson writes: a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a “synthetic” space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving ... a composition of man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence; and if “background” seems inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern sense of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence but also our history ... a landscape is thus a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature... it represents man taking upon himself the role of time.®wae) (rine) ( Fooe : sels Wet Seer Figure 8.20 Open systems: regional flow diagram of a representative urban region by Howard T. Odum showing ranges, vectors, and magnitudes of energy flows, Courtesy of Colorado University Press. Figure 8.21Valley of energy: exploratory combination of surface and subsurface flows of waste, water, mobility and forestry. Copyright © 2012 OPSYS Temporally, design strategies can be launched across extremes: short, immediate interventions that are graduated and sequenced over long periods of time with large, durable geopolitical and ecological effects. Design becomes strategic, capable of integrating multiple scales of intervention at once (Figure 8.20). Emerging from these economic interactions and exigencies, the project of landscape infrastructure proposes an expanded operating system for contemporary economies where the full complexity of biodynamic processes and resources is visualized and deployed in the refiguration of urban infrastructure. Departing from conventional bureaucratic and centralized forms of civic administration, this contemporary formulation foreshadows a more flexible, cooperative and process-driven agency for the design disciplines with a co- commitment to the metrics of design, research and implementation. As a theoretical evolution of the reformist discipline of landscape architecture at the beginning of the twentieth century, infrastructural ecologies engage the full capacity of post-Euclidean planning and global contextualism of capital flow while exploiting the techno-spatial capacity of twenty-first-century civil engineering in order to deploy ecology as agent of urban renewal and expansion (Figure 8.21). Time as territorial medium When viewed over time, this technological ecological vantage sheds light on the interconnections of infrastructure, spatially, socially, geographically and temporally. The heavy equipment of urban support such as roads, sewers and bridges, that has been over privileged in America's new New Deal® will benefit from leaner, lighter, and “softer” infrastructures premised on ecology as the catalyst of infrastructural reform and the driver of urban morphology (Figure 8.22).Figure 8.22 Fluidity as form: exploratory perimeter of intertidal marshlands and estuarine cultivation as infrastructural apron for the island of Dordrecht in the Dutch Delta region. Copyright © 2010 OPSYS/Nina-Marie Lister. ‘ime becomes more than a tool, it translates ecology into a medium in and of itself. Overcoming the chronic “institutionalized black boxing of [predictive] models"®, temporal strategy can be based on degrees of risk and levels of uncertainty. Like new datums, the design of new time scales and new time zones becomes instrumental to the orchestration of large scale effects through simple and fragmentary forms or formats (points, patches, planes) of interventions (Figure 8.23). Operating on prolonged time scales, the vegetal dimension of design —encompassing the metabolic, horticultural, the botanical, the silvi-cultural, the agronomic, the faunal, the fluvial, the experiential—thus can be integrated as emergent organic infrastructure operating at economic scales across political seasons that were previously marginalized. In the most extreme circumstances, the urban field demonstrates landscape’s agility as open ground plan (Figure 8.24).Figure 8.23 Altitudinal ecologies: systems of silviculture, rescue/recreation, and aerial mobility for the future of the Dibendorf military airfield. Copyright © 2012 OPSYS.bb, te Figure 8.24 Urban field: exploratory fragmentation and systems of forestry and intercropping with overlapping networks of aerodromes for the Dibendorf airfield. OPSYS with Foad Vahidi, Mark Jongman-Sereno, Antonia Rudnay. ‘The converging project of landscape infrastructure will thus be contingent on a range of processive practices: 1 of reversal, reversibility and reflexivity where more flexible and fluctuating formats of construction enable biologic emergence, tidal fluctuation, moisture variations, climactic regimes, shifting bio-diversities, and social functions to flourish and grow: 2. of synchronization that calibrate schedules of production with flows of biotic systems across public and private jurisdictions that distribute and share risks; 3 of deterritorialization through the slackening of political and regulatory controls as regions spread wider and as racial diversities color the grey zones of urbanism or ghosted cycles of infrastructure; 4 of materialization of processes through ecological engineering, where sites of resource extraction and spaces of production are visibly integrated with end uses and spaces of consumption; and 5 of lived experiences constructed from living systems and live infrastructures where the cosmopolitan ecology of flora, biota and fauna perform as thenew wealth and cultural capital (Figure 8.25), Across this expanded “plane of services and performances” of urbanization,” design becomes telescopic, sliding across different scales, systems and strategies that are no longer defined by professional jurisdictions or political divisions but rather by transdisciplinary collaborations and cosmopolitan objectives. In contraposition to the hard, fixed infrastructures, this interpretation provides the room for the design of softer, looser ecological systems, where the design of microinterventions has macro-effects, producing new relations across systems of trade, exchange, conveyance, mobility and communications. Through this dual lens, we can open a territory of new scales, systems, and synergies, upstream or downstream across the gradient of urban economies. Informed by geospatial and geobotanical practices of “soft thinkers” such as geographer Carl O. Sauer, ecologist Howard T. Odum, and botanist Liberty H. Bailey, to name a few, the collaborative and cross-disciplinary project of landscape infrastructure can emerge from historical juxtapositions. This convergence of the landscape infrastructure project entails a double-entendre and dual identity—that is, landscape as infrastructure and infrastructure as landscape. The single-use infrastructure along corridors of movement and pathways of urbanization that Rosalind Williams identified more than two decades ago, establishes as ground zero for combined strategies of geographic zoning, boundary realignments, material surfaces, subsurface programming, sectional thickening and ecological reengineering. Staging uncertainty and harnessing contingency become the new urban imperatives, time becomes a dimension of slow but enduring spatial programming for racial recombination and class desegregation. Ecologies of scale are therefore the economies of time (Figure 8.26).Figure 8.25Spatial synchronization: exploratory, programmatic sequencing of the processes of migration, military training and remote sensing as spatial activators at different altitudes Courtesy of Jing Guo, Kyle Trulen, Cara Walsh. Figure 8.26 Volunteer ecology: terrestrial emergence of pioneer and invasive plant species, through self- seeding and root suckering, at the rubble dump and open space park of the Leslie Steet Spit dump in Toronto. Copyright © 2010 OPSYS, with Michael Hough. Infrastructural ecologies Moving beyond the Calvinist conservation of resources and the redemptive contradiction of preservationist restoration, the ecological imperative instigates the design of relationships, where associations and synergies become infrastructural. Softer, more fluid configurations generate open, flexible relationships: risk becomes opportunity, contingency informs morphology, indeterminacy yields interaction, and flux generates form. Design can operate across greater extents of time: from the largest scales of geography and regions to the engineering and genetics of the smallest size, the basic building blocks of urbanization—plants, soils, and waters—prove necessary and vital to future development. Through the redesign of infrastructure as complex ecology, the work in the future lies in the re-coupling, re-configuration, and re-calibration of these processes. Urgent and pressing, the project of the ecological re-adaptation of existing systems—where transportation departments collaborate with localconservation groups or, where port authorities partner with fisheries and waterside settlements or, where power corporations work with waste recycling companies—is a necessary corollary to the next generation of post-Fordist, post- Taylorist infrastructures, Our education and communication of these processes is a pedagogical part of that project. In the wake of the over-planning, over-regulation and over-engineering of the past century, countervailing models can be proposed across, and between different economies either in slums, suburbs or skyscrapers: dispersal substitutes density, pace instead of space, sequence over speed, ecology instead of technology, concurrency over control, citizen as much as science, culture instead of growth. In short, ecology becomes urbanism’s best insurance policy, landscape is infrastructure’s most flexible strategy (Figure 8.27). Figure 8.27 Delineating time: evolutionary transformation of the Leslie Street Spit 1959-2010, from dre dump to wilderness zones. Lake Ontario Park, courtesy of James Corer/Field Operations, time sequence: Copyright © 2010 OPSYS/David Christensen. If the shape of land is most visibly transformed by the infrastructure of the State—from the scale of institutional regulation to the scale of the individual engineer, including its engineers and its regulations, then the production of landscape is a political-technological project: it is as much a tool of the people as it is a technology of the state (Figure 8.28). The primitive nature of “trees, daylightand dirt” as modern infrastructural media may then be equivalent to the wiring of modern economies in the hardware of roads, bridges, pipes, conduits and cables (Figure 8.29). This software of urbanization—a ground plane formed by the patterns of plants, the circulation of soils, the flows of water and streams of population that support the culture of economies—then profiles the contours of new spatial production. Along the permutations and pathways of urbanization— from highway, to pathway, to subway, to airway—the contemporary project of landscape infrastructure can contribute to a “sense of enlarged freedom’—one that Frederick Law Olmsted so adamantly advocated for in his designs and surveys of contemporary urbanization at a period of spatial turbulence in nineteenth-century America—as it grows in kind, to form a landscape democracy, for years and ). 70 decades to come (Figures 8.30-31) In this body politic and body ecologic then,’! to speak of landscape as infrastructure is not only to express landscape as an urban form of life and living language; but, as a form of freedom and sovereignty, it simultaneously proposes the urban field as both process and projection of power. Figure 8.28 Post-Fordist infrastructure: proposed markets and lagoon open space for the proposed 4th Mainland Bridge in Lagos. Copyright © 2012 OMA.Figure 8.29 Region of risk: coastal zone of the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Rita during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. Courtesy of NASA. Figure 8.30Entangled geographies: the overlapping network of submarine oil pipelines and coastal reefs off the coast of New Orleans, in the Gulf of Mexico. Copyright © 2014 OPSYS/Alexandra Gauzza Figure 8.31 Space race: kids sneak through the border fence to swim in the All-American Canal that divides the US from Mexico and diverts the Colorado River towards the agricultural region of the Imperial Valley. Photo: Peggy Peattie.Figure 8.32 Part of a 600-kilometer wall, the limited access route and barrier fence snaking through the Samarian hills of the West Bank between Israel and Palestine. Photo: Reinhard Krause. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Adapted from an earlier version of “Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism Beyond Engineering,” originally published in Infrastructure Sustainability and Design, edited by Spiro N. Pollalis, Daniel Schodek, Andreas Georgoulias, and Stephen J.Ramos (London: Routledge, 2012): 276-315. NOTES 1 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, The American Journal of Sociology 44(1) uly 1938): 1. 2 See James Heintz, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, How Infrastructure Investments Support the US Economy: Employment, Productivity and Growth (Amherst, MA: Political Economy Research Institute, 2008) 3. Anna Twentaug ‘Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 4 See David Harvey, "Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization, Reflections on Post-Modernism in the American City,” in Post-Fordism: A Reader, edited by Ash Amin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1994) 361-386. 5 Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 1. 6 See America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure (Durham, NC: Duke Press Paperbacks, 1983) by Pat Choate and Susan Walter, and Report Card for America’s Infrasiructure (2009) by the American Society of Civil Engineers, www infrastructurereportcard.org. 7 See Lewis Mumford, “The Renewal of Landscape,” in The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts of America, 1865-1895 (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1931): 60-61. See also Mumford’s “The Natural History of Urbanization,” in Man’s Role in the Changing the Face of the Earth, edited by Willian L. Thomas, Jr, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956): 382-398, 8 See Geoffrey C. Bowker “Information Mythology. The World of/as Information” in Lisa Bud-Frierman (ed.) Information Acumen: the Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business (London: Routledge, 1994): 231-247 9 See Knud Bastlund, José Luis Sert, Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (New York: Praeger, 196 10 See Sighted Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941): 823 11 See “Equipments of Power: Towns, Territories and Collective Equipments,” in Foucault Live: Miche! Foucault Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, edited by Sylvére Lotringer, translated by Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), £996), 105-112, 12 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Sctentist 43(3) (November 1999): 380-382. 13 For two critiques of instrumental reason, see Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947) and André Gorz’s Critique of Economic Reason (London: Verso, 1989), an English translation of Métamorphoses du Travail. 14 Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: 872-873, 15 Lars Lerup, After the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) 16 See Brin A. Cech, “Culture of Disengagement in Engineering Education” Science Technology Human Values 39(1) (January 2014): 42-72. 17 Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 19, 18 See James Scott’s chapter on “Transforming Visions: Authoritarian High Modernism,” in Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998): 145. 19 Donald Worster, “The Flow of Power through History.” in his Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Random House, 1985). 20 See Gene Moriarty’s profiling of the colonization effect of engineering as "hyper-modernism” in The Engineering Project: Its Nature, Ethics, and Promise (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2008): 85. a Dent Schodek, Landmarks in American Civil Engineering (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987): itl,2 a Pay 25 26 a 28 29 30 31 32 3 34 35 36 37 38 39 0 4 a a “4 5 46 a 48 o Engineering plays a prominent role in city building disciplines. Today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, professional membership of the city building disciplines in 2011 included 26,700 Landscape Architects, 38,400 Urban & Regional Planners, 141,000 Architects, 551,000 Construction ‘Managers, and 971,000 Engineers (combining civil, mechanical, industrial, electrical, environmental). See Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition, www.blsgov/oco. When Norman T. Newton ‘wrote about the development of landscape architecture in Design on the Land (Cambridge, MA’ Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), there were over 1,500 members and 1,200 associates in 1971 compared to only 112 in 1920. (658) John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982): 128. Nag Grigg et al., Civil Engineering Practice in the 21st Century: Knowledge and Skills in Design and Management (Reston, VA: ASCE Press, 2001): 103 See Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). See Robert Poo!’s discussion on control and collaboration in Beyond Engineering: How Saciety Shapes Technology (New York: Oxford, 1997): 215-248, Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America: 125 Pool, Beyond Engineering: 7 See Todd Shallat, "Prologue: A Nation Builder” and “The West Point Connection” in Structures in the Stream: Water Science, and the Rise of the US Army Corps of Engineers (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1994): 1-9, 79-81 Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press/Blackwell Publishers, 1996) La Paucelle, “From Taylorism to Post-Taylorism: Simultaneously Pursuing Several Management Objectives”, Journal of Organizational Change Management 13(5) (2000): 452-467. Christopher Sawyer, “Territorial Infrastructures” in The Mesh Book Landscape/Infrastructure, edited by Julian Raxworthy and Jessica Blood (Melbourne: RMIT Press, 2004): 275, ‘See Manuel Castells’s chapter on “Space of Flows” in his The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, UK Blackwell, 2006): 407-459 See Giorgio Cucci, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Manieri-Elia and Manfredo Tafuri in The American City: From the Civil War and the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979): xi “Urban population now exceeds rural, more than 51 per cent live in cities and towns, the Census Announces,” The New York Times, January 14, 1921 See Raymond Mohl’s The Rise of Urban America (Lanham, MD: Rowinan é Littlefield, 2006). Demeter G. Fertis and Anna Ferlis, Historical Evolutions of Infrastructure: 15,000 Years of History (New York: Vantage Press, 1998): 151-192. Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore, “The Rise and Incidence of American Regionalism” in American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1938): 5 See Neil Smith, “Academic War over the Field of Geography: The Elimination of Geography at Harvard, 1947-1951" Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77(2) (june 1987): 155-172. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967): 388, Christopher Tunnard, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963): 19. tober Broegnan Spr A Compt story (Chg Is Univers Cag Pes, 208) 28 Sébastien Marot, Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory (London: AA Publications, 2003): 4 See James Comer, Organizational Ecologies: Course Brief (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Design, 2002): 1 Rem Koolhaas, “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” Design Quarterly 164 (Spring 1995): 28-31. Kevin Lynch, “The Patter of the Metropolis,” Daedalus 90(1) (Winter 1961): 79 Patrick Geddes, “The Valley Plan of Civilization,” The Survey (une 1, 1925}: 289. Gary L, Strang, “Infrastructure as Landscape,” Places 10(3) (Summer 1996): 15. ‘Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” in Recovering Landscape: Essays on ContemporaryLandscape Architecture, edited by James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999): 233, 50 See Charles Siegel, “The Failures of Planning” and “The Failure of Growth’ in his Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Chotces (Berkeley, CA: Preservation Institute, 2010). 51 See Benton Mackaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928): 66-67, 69. 52 Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XT (New York: Monacelli, 1995): 969. 53. Bronislaw Szerszynski, “On Knowing What to Do: Environmentalism and the Modern Problematic,” in Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, edited by Scott lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Brian Wynne (London: Sage, 1996): 15. 54 Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (New York: Harper & Row, 1976): sleeve 55 John Brinkerhoff, "The Public Landscape (1966),” in Landscapes: Selected Writings by J. B. Jackson, edited by Ervin H. Zube (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970): 153. 56 Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 379-380 57 James Comer, “Representation and Landscape,” Word & Image 8(3) (July-September 1992): 245. 58 James Comer, “Projection and Disclosure in Drawing,” Landscape Architecture 83(9) (May 1993): 66. 59 Howard T. Fischer, Mapping Information: The Graphic Display of Quantitative Information (Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1982): sleeve 60 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983 61 See Stephenie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevaner, “The Performative Ground: Rediscovering The Deep Section,” Scenario 62: Performance (Spring 2012), http://scenariojournal.com/article/the-performative- ground, 62 James Comer, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Intervention,” in Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 214-215, 63 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Word Itself” (1976-1984), in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984): 8 64 President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is comparable to Roosevelt's National Industry Recovery Act of 1933 conceived after the Great Depression and the Dust Bow! Decade. See the "New New Deal” issue of Time Magazine 172(21) (November 24, 2008). 65. Mary P. Anderson, “Groundwater Modeling: The Emperor has No Clothes,” Ground Water 21(6) (November 1983): 669. 66 See the hydrologist Vit Kleme in his “Risk Analysis: The Unbearable Cleverness of Bluffing,” in Risk, Reliability, Uncertainty, and Robustness of Water Resource Systems, edited by Jénos Bogirdi and Zbigniew Kundzewicz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 22-29, and James Comer’s “Irony and Contradiction in an Age of Precision,” in Taking Measure across the American Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996): 25-37, 67 Andrea Branzi, “The Hybrid Metropohis,” in Learning from Milan: Design and the Second Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988): 24 68 See Stuart Elden’s concept of "territory as state technology” in his “Land, Terrain, Territory,” Progress in Human Geography 34(6) (2010): 799-817, 69 Paul Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in Modernity and Technology, edited by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 226. 70 Frederick Olmsted, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Supplementary Series Volume I: Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems, edited by Charles E. Beveridge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015): 83. 71 See André Gor2, Ecology as Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1980): 11-50.