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

    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.

    Urban Forests as Landscape Artifacts

    by Brian Davis & Jamie Vanucchi

    The urban forest can’t pretend to be ‘natural’; it’s a construction that relies on both ecological processes as well as human ingenuity to survive. It marries the technical with the material, and expands the range of social experience and ecological resilience.

    Yangtze River Delta Project

    by Catherine Seavitt

    Coastal urban estuaries are dynamic sites. These sedimentary terrains must be reconsidered at the infrastructural scale to create a more resilient and adaptive landscape, a system that dynamically responds to the increasing risks of the coastal environment.

    Landscape Urbanism: Definitions & Trajectory

    by Christopher Gray

    Long described as an “emerging” practice, landscape urbanism—with all of its ambiguity and complexity—has in fact already emerged and represents a significant 21st century design and planning ethos.

    One Percent: Mining Bone Valley

    by Rob Holmes, Lauren Sosa & Christie Allen

    Florida is the epicenter of phosphate mining in the United States. The sheer scale of the impact of this extraction on the Floridian landscape is immense. As it grows, phosphate mining is producing enormous accidental monuments to the current American way of life.

    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.

    To Multiply or Subdivide: Futures of a Modern Urban Woodland

    by Jill Desimini

    The Pruitt-Igoe site has remained in limbo, long enough to grow into a substantial wild urban woodland, overlooked as a resource and now threatened by development.

    Energy extraction from wind: marine re-territorialization in the North Sea

    by Claudia Bode

    The deployment of offshore wind power on a massive scale is driving new forms of marine management and cartographic representation, and upending traditional ideas about what constitutes national territory.

    Wild Innovation: Stoss in Detroit

    by Jill Desimini

    In the context of decreasing physical density, decentralization and sprawl, landscape has been found by many as a medium affording a unique traction on the problematics of the contemporary city.

    Exhibit: Lebbeus Woods at The Drawing Center

    by Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner

    LEBBEUS WOODS, ARCHITECT, on exhibit at The Drawing Center in New York, traces the career of Lebbeus Woods, a visionary architect whose responses to the sites of trauma have given us haunting designs — intricate, beautiful, full of memory, and ultimately optimistic.