Fall 2019

Edited by Nicholas Pevzner & Stephanie Carlisle

Infrastructure is always political, and energy transitions have always been contested, pitting established players against upstart technologies and new coalitions. How can a radical reimagining of energy infrastructure create opportunities for an inclusive and participatory conversation about climate change and social justice? Who has the power to talk about infrastructure, and who gets left out?
Introduction: Power
Community Power As Provocation: Local Control For Resilience And Equity
Our Energy For Our Country
Speculative Designs For Energy Democracy
The TVA, Fuzzy Spaces Of Power, And Other Purposes
The Missouri River Basin: Water, Power, Decolonization, And Design
Power Plant Power
Arctic Present: The Case Of Teriberka
Coal Ash Wastescapes: The Byproduct Of Our Coal-Fired Power Dependency
Biomass For All: Designing An Inclusive Biomass Infrastructure
China’s Giant Transmission Grid Could Be The Key To Cutting Climate Emissions
2050 – An Energetic Odyssey: Persuasion By Collective Immersion
The Blue Lagoon: From Waste Commons To Landscape Commodity
Territory Of Extraction: The Crude North
Daylighting Conflict: Board Games As Decision-Making Tools

Popular

    The Performative Ground: Rediscovering The Deep Section

    by Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner

    The landscape we see happens above ground, yet much of its true intelligence lies beneath the surface.

    Made in Australia: The Future of Australian Cities

    by Richard Weller & Julian Bolleter

    The Australian population is increasing at a rate of one person every 84 seconds. Taking population growth seriously means planning for an extra 40 million Australians by century’s end.

    The Hole World: Scales and Spaces of Extraction

    by Gavin Bridge

    Landscapes of energy extraction are portals, wormholes between two worlds in which time and space work differently.

    The Blue Lagoon: From Waste Commons to Landscape Commodity

    by Catherine De Almeida

    Waste legibility can be an asset shared by active power generating operations, a novel ecological community, and recreational uses. At the Blue Lagoon, the formalization of a wasteland commons created instead a high-end, privatized spa that conceals the underlying landscape and its unique conditions.

    The Humanity of Infrastructure: Landscape as Operative Ground

    by Dane Carlson

    When landscape is modified and inhabited, it becomes the medium through which humanity can produce, move, and live. As landscape fulfills these roles, it becomes infrastructural.

    Infrastructure Adrift: West 8's Shells

    by Laura Tepper

    The Dutch government commissioned West 8 to create a project along the Roggenplaat, one of several artificial islands used to construct a storm surge barrier. The firm shaped the island’s sand deposits into plateaus bold enough to impress passing drivers. So, where is it?

    The High Line: Section 1

    by Sarah Kathleen Peck

    The High Line is a 1.2-mile long abandoned elevated freight rail line along the west side of lower Manhattan.  This 5.9 acre stretch of open space spans 20 city blocks in between and through buildings in New York City.

    The TVA, Fuzzy Spaces of Power, and Other Purposes

    by Micah Rutenberg

    In the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority transformed an entire region through electrification. This piece explores how the TVA exercised power at multiple scales: the dam, the map and the electrical appliance.

    National HEDGE

    by Stephanie Carlisle

    This project is a response to a call to redesign the traditional British electricity pylon. Instead of designing a new engineering object, we saw an occasion to fundamentally re-conceive the broader urbanistic role of the entire electricity grid across the British landscape, bundling ecological connectivity and habitat expansion with the necessary control and management of an urban infrastructure system.

    Landscape Urbanism

    by Sarah Kathleen Peck and Eliza Shaw Valk

    What is landscape urbanism? What are we? Where do we want to go? Deliberately avoiding definitions? What is landscape urbanism? What are we? Where do we want to go?