The Interoperative

Infrastructure can be wielded as a means of promoting the common good or as an institutional weapon of exploitation. Regardless of how a particular infrastructure is represented, it is not always clear which role it plays at any given moment

Second Nature

The idea of virgin nature is more metaphor than reality – a metaphor best represented by the fabled garden paradise from which Homo sapiens’ ancient forebears were exiled. Despite the fact that virtually every development site borders on an existing city or infrastructure, and that billboards or industry are visible in every panorama, contemporary planning and modern architecture have stubbornly continued to cherish the illusion of a nature that is authentic. In an increasingly urbanized world, it is interesting that landscape urbanism or ‘landscape-as-infrastructure’ movements seek to define a new theoretical framework for the relation between city and nature. One obvious contribution to this set of ideas would be the evolution of a ‘second nature’ as a promising new strategy for urbanism

Infrastructured Landscape

Infrastructure can be wielded as a means of promoting the common good or as an institutional weapon of exploitation. While the highways, bridges and dams funded by international economic interests and built in outlying regions like the Amazon play a role that is difficult to conceive of as being anything other than devastatingly exploitative, the public parks and greenways of the world’s major cities also clearly serve economic functions while delivering a variety of benefits to the common good. Infrastructure can be conceived of as opportunistic and multilayered, serving explicit functions of enabling mobility, energy, and communications – but also potentially prioritising access to light, air, and water: creating open space for social gathering and spatial continuity for ecological habitats. This is true whether infrastructure is regarded as a public space or as private commodity. Semi-public spaces now proliferate in major cities. Of course, the term ‘semi-public space’ is effectively a euphemism for ‘private property’, and while this trend might be criticised, there are also examples of these spaces being used in such a way as to provide alternative commons when the public are denied their right of free access to public space

Taller Princeton. The periphery.

Sobre la Route 1 Corridor entre las capitales provinciales de Trenton y New Bruswick y la ciudad universitaria de Princeton