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.

    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.

    Coding Urban Metabolism

    by Mona El Khafif

    Yesterday’s models of zoning and planning are outmoded. Perhaps it’s time for a new ecological urban framework.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Coding Flux: Redesigning the Migrating Coast

    by Fadi Masoud

    As sea levels and groundwaters rise, 20th-century planning practices no longer suffice. Innovative planning approaches that embraces dynamic water levels and changing weather patterns are sorely needed.

    Urban Regeneration: Foresting Vacancy in Philadelphia

    by Chieh Huang

    Urban Regeneration proposes a land management strategy for vacant urban land that accumulates parcels and turns them to forest, aiming to redefine the meaning and function of vacancy in a city.

    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.

    Butte Montana: A Case for the Mining Metropolis

    by Bradford Watson & Sean Burkholder

    Extraction is an ugly process. Still, the vast resources present beneath the ground and the motivation to pull them to the surface are intimately tied to the settlement and permanent occupation of the landscape.