SCENARIO 03: Rethinking Infrastructure
  • Spring 2013
  • Edited by Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner

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?

NaCl: Operations Enabling Emptiness

by Meg Studer

Year after year, salt transforms our highways, byways and city streets from seasonably passable, climatically contingent networks to eminently open, logistic lines.

Feedback: Designing The Dredge Cycle

by Rob Holmes & Brett Milligan

Dredging constitutes a sedimentary infrastructure essential to the functioning of contemporary coastal urban systems. Wherever possible, human inputs can and should be opportunistically designed to improve upon degraded natural systems, and to build better natures.

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.

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.

Reconsidering The Underworld Of Urban Soils

by Laura Solano

If we truly understood the delicacy of soil as a dynamic living system integral to the health of our towns and cities, we would be more cautious about how it is perceived, treated, and protected.

The Next Generation Of Infrastructure

by Scott Muller

A sustainable future will not come from new technologies. The barriers to the next generation of infrastructure are neither technical nor financial — they’re social and political.

Skeleton Forms: The Architecture Of Infrastructure

by Laila Seewang

What determines the boundary of an infrastructural project? How does it overlap with other discrete projects and what part of the larger ‘network’ is adopted into the urban fragment?

Queens Plaza: A New Core For Long Island City

by Margie Ruddick

The Queens Plaza project transformed a tangled and hostile landscape of elevated trains, bridges, aborted bikeways and traffic medians into a hybrid landscape: not just street, not just park, not just conduit.

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.