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 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.

    PatchWork, Living City Design Competition

    by Sarah Kathleen Peck

    OLIN's award-winning submission to the Living City Design Competition met ambitious development standards for historically rich, yet socially and ecologically underserved neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

    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.

    Introduction: Rethinking Infrastructure

    by Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner

    As landscape advocates and practitioners argue for a more central role in the design of cities, many are starting to ask, how can a focus on landscape transform traditional conceptions of infrastructure? Can we rethink how infrastructure of the next century is imagined and built?

    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.

    West 8 Airport Landscape: Schiphol

    by Adriaan Geuze & Maarten Buijs

    To make sense of the fragmented territory of an ever-expanding Airport, West 8 planted a bombardment of trees. With hundreds, sometimes thousands at the same time, it was a strategy that worked everywhere.

    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.

    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.

    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.