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.
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[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.
