Landscape infrastructure : urbanism beyond engineering

Abstract

As ecology becomes the new engineering, the project of Landscape Infrastructure - a contemporary, synthetic alignment of the disciplines of landscape architecture, civil engineering and urban planning - is proposed here. Predominant challenges facing urban regions today are addressed, including changing climates, resource flows, and population mobilities. Responding to the inertia of land use zoning and overexertion of technological systems at the end of 20th century, the thesis argues for the strategic design of “infrastructural ecologies”, a synthetic landscape of living, biophysical systems that operate as urban infrastructures to shape and direct the future of urban economies into the 21st century. cum laude graduation (with distinction