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.

    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.

    How Many Trees are Enough? Tree Death and the Urban Canopy

    by Lara A. Roman

    Realizing the ecosystem services benefits of tree programs depends on tree survival. Despite the focus on planting over the past few decades, overall canopy cover levels in major US cities have been declining.

    Building the Urban Forest

    by Stephanie Carlisle, Nicholas Pevzner & Max Piana

    The forest carries deep cultural significance. Within the urban landscape, this ecologically complex system is also understood to perform a wide range of essential ecosystem services, from increasing property values to mitigating climate change. Reforesting cities is one of the defining trends of twenty first century urbanism, but there is little agreement about how our urban forests are to be designed, planned and managed.

    Polydome: Healing the Industrial Agricultural System

    by Ariana Bain & Eva Gladek

    Sustainability is a property of systems, not objects. True sustainability emerges from complex interactions within society unfolded through space and time.

    Performance

    by Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner

    Tomorrow’s cities will need to perform better than today’s. To meet this challenge, designers (and their clients) have assembled a host of goals for urban projects—from encouraging smart transportation to protecting wildlife, from remediating toxic sites to building diverse neighborhoods—and increasingly, landscape projects are sold on such claims rather than their formal or aesthetic value alone.

    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.

    China’s giant transmission grid could be the key to cutting climate emissions

    by James Temple

    But are the country’s next-generation power lines a clean-power play or a global power move?

    Building the Global Forest

    by Richard Weller & Tatum Hands

    If we accept that ‘the city’ is now a continuous system of global exploitation, then any discussion of the ‘urban forest’ should also scale up its thinking and ambition.