Category Archives: infrastructure

Where the water comes from

Back in March, the New York Times featured DC WASA’s (now DC Water) new director, George Hawkins, talking about the challenges of dealing with aging water and sewer infrastructure in American cities. The piece lays out the challenges facing most American cities, currently resting on our laurels of the investments from previous generations:

For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.

Mr. Hawkins’s answer to such problems will not please a lot of citizens. Like many of his counterparts in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta and elsewhere, his job is partly to persuade the public to accept higher water rates, so that the utility can replace more antiquated pipes.

The problem is serious, and Hawkins is here to spread the word:

“We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them,” said Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor at Tufts University and a member of the E.P.A.’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council.

“There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick,” he added. “But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”

To bring those lapses into the light, Mr. Hawkins has become a cheerleader for rate increases. He has begun a media assault highlighting the city’s water woes. He has created a blog and a Facebook page that explain why pipes break. He regularly appears on newscasts and radio shows, and has filled a personal Web site with video clips of his appearances.

Part of Hawkins’ ‘cheerleader’ duties included a recent blogger roundtable, with several local blogs (DCist, Greater Greater Washington, District Curmudgeon, We Love DC, Hill is Home, etc) offering detailed insight into the the most seemingly basic aspects of city life. For me, the most interesting visual to come out of these meetings is this map from the Curmudgeons of DC’s water mains in 1985.

The system is based on gravity and pressure, each color represents a band of elevation served by certain reservoirs in the city. There are two separate systems (for the most part) east and west of the Anacostia river. The width of the lines represents the diameter of the water mains under the street. When seen from afar, the color bands give a rough approximation of DC’s topography – the red and blue colors clearly show the extent of the L’Enfant plan, for example – which L’Enfant specifically limited to the flat parts of DC.

A closer inspection (click the image for a larger version) shows the fantastic level of detail in the various water main routes, the large mains that connect reservoirs to areas of similar elevation, as well as the local distribution to the end users.

Hacking the city

Mammoth’s excellent series of posts covering any and all topics on The Infrastructural City recently touched on chapter 5 – Blocking All Lanes, the first of the book’s section on the fabric of this city of networked infrastructure. Mammoth notes a couple of big themes from the chapter, each with profound implications for how cities are built and how they evolve.

The interesting fact that arises from the complexity of these co-evolved systems (and, as noted in Varnelis’s introduction to The Infrastructural City, from the primacy of individual property rights in L.A.’s political culture) is that, “as the possibilities for adding new highways — or even lanes — dwindle in many cities, most new progress is made at the level of code”. This shift which the authors identify is a part of a systemic shift in the methodology of urbanism, from plan to hack, that we’ve been fascinated with for some time now. In a mature infrastructural ecology, like Los Angeles, the city has developed such a persistent and ossified physical form that, barring a radical shift in the city’s political culture, designing infrastructure becomes more a task of re-configuration and re-use than a task of construction.

The idea is simple – big moves, such as new highways, new subways, and other massive infrastructure investments are much harder in a developed city than in a greenfield site. I’d also argue that such challenges are not solely physical or political, but also financial (see previous discussions of the limitations of nostalgia for private-sector transit funding).

Mammoth continues:

Initially, this may seem an extraordinarily frustrating condition for urbanists, who have of late been so interested in the possibility that the design of infrastructures might offer an alternative instrument for shaping cities, combining the intentionality and vision of the plan with the vibrancy and resilience characteristic of emergent growth. Infrastructures, we’ve noticed, can be a stable element which mold and manipulate the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, property values, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies. Historically, governments and private developers have sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along a new infrastructure or by supplementing existing infrastructure to reinforce growth and density in a locale (the initial growth of Los Angeles along privately-owned streetcar lines being one of the classic examples of the former sort of infrastructural generation). But if, as the authors of “Blocking All Lanes” suggest (and, I think it is fair to say, The Infrastructural City suggests as a whole), opportunities to plan and design new infrastructural frameworks are likely to be extremely rare in mature infrastructural ecologies, should urbanists abandon their interest in infrastructure as an instrument for shaping the city?

There’s no doubt about urbanists and their interests in large scale infrastructural investments (see the various transit fantasy maps at Greater Greater Washington – spilling out to reader submissions, for example – and even my own contribution here). Many of these ideas are financial non-starters, but the overall ideal is not something to be completely dropped. Instead, the focus should be on encouraging those infrastructures to evolve within this urban context, while also continuing to use the useful parts of the old infrastructure plans and ideas of capturing increased land value, etc. Mammoth seems to agree:

I don’t think so […]
First, the rarity and scarcity of those opportunities does not mean that they should not be seized when they are realistically presented. And when opportunities for the construction of new infrastructures within a mature city do occur, they are likely to appear in hack-like guises: concretely, like Atlanta’s Beltline, which utilizes a defunct rail right-of-way as the foundation for a new commuter rail line¹, or Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which redirects the flow of cleaned wastewater in Orange County from ocean to aquifer; speculatively, like Velo-City’s Toronto bicycle metro (which, as it happens, has a less-speculative southern Californian counterpart, the Backbone Bikeway Network). Go over, go under, re-deploy, tag along, piggyback.

…
[T]he key realization is that successful shifts in urban form will only happen when they are paired with successful alterations of the infrastructures, systems, and flows that generate those forms. Attempts to construct a new vision for the city that fail to grapple with the underlying systems that, like traffic, constitute and produce the city will ultimately either be ineffective or collapse catastrophically.

Instead of using the hack to replace the era of infrastructure, hacking instead is the method to implement these infrastructural changes. In the comments, faslanyc likens the hack (as opposed to the plan) to the tactic (as opposed to the strategy) – tactical urbanism:

by the way, i like your reading of this chapter and think that it is basically what the nyc dot is doing with a lot of their bike lane/pedestrian plaza initiatives. A while ago I likened it to tactics and strategies, certainly they are not mutually exclusive, though in practice they aren’t usually working in concert.

Reconfiguring extant street space for new and re-prioritized uses is a good example, with bike lanes and NYC’s ‘temporary’ pedestrian plazas representing the lower end of the spectrum in terms of investment. I’d argue that streetcars in DC (when compared against the costs for new Metro lines) represent another level of investment. Even large scale investments, such as the Federal stimulus money for High Speed Rail involves a hack approach – key investments in grade separation, signaling, and other small moves to offer incremental improvements rather than wholesale development of TGV-style trains from the onset. Federal grant programs such as TIGER tend to focus on these kinds of investments, as well.

Large scale investments are still crucial to our urban systems, but as Mammoth notes, opportunities to capitalize on them will be both rare and scarce.

Infrastructural and industrial spaces

CC image from nathansnider

The Infrastructural City – Something I’m eagerly anticipating is a sort of on-line book club discussion of the infrastructural city, spearheaded by mammoth.

Over the course of the next several months, mammoth will be coordinating an online discussion of The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles (edited by Kazys Varnelis and published last year by Actar), as an experiment in the cooperative reading and discussion of a text.

As Varnelis explains in the introduction to The Infrastructural City, Los Angeles is perhaps the American city most fully indebted to infrastructure for its existence and survival:

“If the West was dominated by the theology of infrastructure, Los Angeles was its Rome. Cobbled together out of swamp, floodplain, desert, and mountains, short of water and painfully dependent on far-away resources to survive, Los Angeles is sited on inhospitable terrain, located where the continent runs out of land. No city should be here. Its ecological footprint greater than the expansive state it resides in, Los Angeles exists by the grace of infrastructure, a life-support system that has transformed this wasteland into the second largest metropolis in the country. Nor was this lost on Angelenos. They understood that their city’s growth depended on infrastructure and celebrated that fact. After all, what other city would name its most romantic road after a water-services engineer?”

Yet despite that history and the continued role of infrastructures such as the Alameda Trench and the Pacific Intertie in shaping the physical, social, and economic form of Los Angeles, the city has also developed an extraordinary resistance to the planning of new infrastructures. A myriad of factors, including ferocious NIMBYism and empty state coffers, make it increasingly difficult to implement new infrastructures or expand existing systems. Furthermore, the city’s infrastructures are increasingly inter-related and co-dependent, interwoven into what Varnelis terms networked ecologies — “hypercomplex systems produced by technology, laws, political pressures, disciplinary desires, environmental constraints and a myriad other pressures, tied together with feedback mechanisms.”

Free Association Design will also be participating, as will the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Speaking of CLUI – mammoth also points out CLUI’s spring newsletter, with some fascinating pieces on everything from ghost fleets and shipbreaking to urban oil extraction in Los Angeles.

Agglomerations – Paul Krugman has to give a talk in a couple weeks, and he found inspiration in northern New Jersey’s claim to be the embroidery capital of the world.

It’s an interesting history of individual initiative and cumulative causation — the same kind of story now being played out all across the world, especially in China. I still love economic geography.

Never Stop the Line – last weekend’s edition of This American Life featured the fascinating tale of NUMMI – a join GM-Toyota auto plant in Fremont, CA. Toyota showed GM all their secrets to making high quality cars – lessons that GM couldn’t easily translate to other plants.

A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn’t learn the lessons – until it was too late.

Given GM’s current status and Toyota’s recent recall issues (many of which are attributed to growing too fast to control quality), it’s a fascinating tale for anyone interested in American industry and manufacturing.

Water Conservation

Via Matt Yglesias, a great chart from the recent Gold Medal hockey game between Canada and the US in Vancouver. When 2/3rds of the entire country is watching, you know it’s a big deal.

This chart looks at the water consumption in Edmonton, Alberta over the course of the game – comparing it to the day before, an average weekend day.

You can see the tension building with higher peaks after each period. Now you can see why one of the major milestones for any new sports stadium is flushing all of the toilets and urinals at the same time.

Infrastructure + Networks + Security

A series of (somewhat) tangentially related post/items/articles I’ve been meaning to mention here:

1. Security Theater – mammoth

There are always tensions between openness and security, and cities like DC have plenty of examples of this – everything from bollards anchored in 6 feet of subterranean concrete to jersey barriers strewn in front of building entrances. Given these tensions, there are questions about how much is necessary, and how that which is necessary can be better designed:

Though Perlin’s project explores the former possibility, the latter fascinates me, as it reminds me of the concept of “security theater”, coined by Bruce Schneier to describe the ways in which the public apparatus of security (at airports, government buildings, schools, transit stations, etc.) exists primarily not to provide security, as those measures are demonstrably ineffective, but to provide a fearful public with the illusion of security.

This tension has serious consequences for how we use space…

2. Death of a Lie – DCist

The Capitol Visitors Center was built, amongst many reasons, to help enhance security for visitors to the halls of Congress. It’s also meant the death of traditions:

Before the advent of the CVC, a visit to the Capitol meant a tour for taxpaying citizens guided by hapless interns who would straight up lie to them. Just bald-faced, outrageous, entirely untrue claims about the nation’s history and its legislative process.

Is nothing sacred? Security kills even the most benign and stupid traditions.

3. Regional Security – CSG + COG

At the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s 11/12 forum to discuss the Greater Washington 2050 plan, one attendee asked about the inherent contradiction between the agglomerations and concentrations inherent to urbanism and the desire for various federal agencies to have uber-secure campuses – or at least ones that put on that particular show in the theater.

DC’s Planning Director, Harriet Tregoning, mentioned the inherent tension between the openness of urbanism and the desired security, but also noted there were some design considerations that need to be taken into account.

All the more reason to push for the elimination of unnecessary security theater – as the built forms that result likely aren’t all that desirable.

4. Secure + Connected Infrastructure – mammoth

Mammoth again notes the challenges of updating our infrastructure, both to provide redundancy and security, as well as enhance development and feed the economy.

I do greatly appreciate the thrust of one of those student projects, ‘The Diversity Machine and Resilient Network’², which argues that, though Beirut’s “urban fabric… lacks consolidation… optimization or efficiency”, this is not a weakness, but a strength: “it is precisely the ‘redundancy’ of the distributed social infrastructure and relative autonomy of the neighbourhoods that lends the city its resilience.” Though made more specifically in reference to urban form and less in reference to infrastructure, this point reminds me of two things.

First, as faslanyc noted in the comments on a previous post, the impact of an infrastructure on the territory in which it resides should be evaluated not just by its scale, but also for its degree of distribution and connectivity…

Second, and directly related to that first advantage, I’m also reminded of the article Fracture Critical, which ran recently in Places and draws an interesting parallel between two ways of designing specific infrastructures, fracture-critical and fracture-resistant, and ways of designing larger systems. […] Given that the consequences of a networked super-project being fractured would be enormous, I suspect that there’s a place for being cautious about the design of such projects, even while recognizing their value.

Lots to digest here – the notion of how we perceive ‘infrastructure’ is key. I suspect the urbanist sees it as the backbone on which a city can grow – as we see vestiges of that growth in the urban forms and fabric from various generations of housing stock, transportation facilities, etc…

5. Parcel by Parcel

It also raises the issue I noted with some of the proposed Eco City Beautiful infrastructure – how does one visually convey the vision of urban development around a core infrastructure system without dictating architecture and urbanism? How do you convey the kind of organic growth of a city – parcel by parcel, building by building? Mammoth again:

I’d like to think that learning to work infrastructurally (to use Lahoud’s language¹) means working more flexibly (despite rhetoric which differs sharply from modernist rhetoric, the two designs presented appear to be close kin of modernist residential housing collectives and contemporary superblocks, as both take a large piece of land and develop urban fabric wholesale upon it), less directly (designing the infrastructure upon which the city grows, with an awareness of how the shaping of the infrastructure will affect the growth of the city, but not presuming to design the city itself) and accepting a degree of loss of control over the aesthetics of the resulting city fabric (which presents a host of drawing problems — how do you draw something which you are not presuming to design and still manage to communicate the importance of the work you’ve done in designing the scaffolding? — but still seems to me to be a humility worth developing).

“Accepting a degree of loss of control” is a nice way to put it. Kostoff described the key attribute of cities as “energized crowding,” a kind of social context that can’t fully be designed.

6. But, what about scale? – mammoth + NYT + Infrastructurist

Louis Uchitelle argues that we’ve got a superproject void in the US these days – Infrastructurist responds with an impressive list of projects, if only a little disjointed – and mammoth notes the missing connective tissue:

That said, Infrastructurist doesn’t really respond to Uchitelle’s points about the relationship between scale and economic effect, as Uchitelle is arguing not just that that contemporary infrastructure projects are smaller, but that there’s something fundamentally different about the economic effect of a very large project, like the ARC Tunnel, which, while physically impressive, operates in a relatively small geographic territory, and a superproject, which connects formerly disconnected territories (as the interstate highway system did), aggregating markets. The obvious contemporary corollary to the interstate is high speed rail, but Uchitelle also rightly notes that the Obama administration project which is closest to a superproject, defined not just by impressive physical impact, but also by economic effect and ability to facilitate new connections, is the proposed integrated health care computer network.

While the idea of high speed rail has the potential for that kind of connectivity and transformation of markets, what’s missing is the systemic planning. Looking at DC as a analogous situation, the city and region have benefited immensely from a system planned as a system – and built out in full. Piecemeal construction on a line by line basis has been less than successful in other cities, and that pattern could hold for intercity rail, too.

7. Paying for it – The Transport Politic + Streetsblog

One place that has taken a system-oriented approach is Denver, and TTP notes the pain they’re dealing with for their foresight.

Perhaps good long term decisions like those in Denver could be vindicated with a little help from a National Infrastructure Bank?

City Block

a work in progress…