OpERATIVE URbANISM ON INFRASTRUCTURAL LANdS Ward Verbakel “The time has come to approach architecture urbanistically and urbanism architecturally.””1” Although infrastructure nowadays is often seen as contradictory to public space or valuable landscapes, the relation between land and infrastructure hasn’t always been problematic. Examples of difficult juxtapositions, scarred urban fabrics, and disconnected ecological systems are manifold; nevertheless, infrastructure is a ubiquitous part of the contemporary city and has been so in previous times. This text examines how mobility and hydraulic infrastructures can perform as an agent for new urbanity and landscape through the concept of operative urbanism. Integrated Infrastructural Operations The design of infrastructure is being ever more dictated by the concerns of structural engineering, hydrodynamics, traffic simulations, etc. This technical problemsolving approach can easily be criticized for its narrow interpretation of space, urbanity, and landscape. Infrastructure due to its scale has a strong effect on the spatial quality of its surroundings, if not becoming a landscape in and of itself. How many streets have disappeared under elevated railroads and overpasses hovering above, deprived of sunlight and silence? In an attempt to retroactively stitch and weave fragmented landscapes and disconnected neighborhoods, numerous urban design and landscape architecture projects have been commissioned for reclaimed rail yards and redeveloped waterfronts. Bridge ramps and tunnel entrances remain blind spots in the nonvehicular use of the city. The question is where we lost the integrated approach to infrastructure that was able to combine spatial qualities, engineering demands, real estate logics, and social constructs. The notion of functional infrastructure, with only secondary aesthetic or symbolic aims to fulfill, is a fairly recent one.
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The Medieval city defended itself through an infrastructure of ramparts and moats. This defense infrastructure however, also delineates the cultural divisions between free man and the ruling nobility, or the economic separation between free trade and feudal dependence. City wall–building is an act of self-declaration and identity creation. Not only built as fortification, the ramparts and gates served as symbols of power and social status. The mere architecture of these walls transcends functional defense needs, not to mention the elaborate designs for
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TRACES OF HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE Ilana Hastings
One Square Mile: Curfew Exclusion Zone for Aboriginal People During the 1950s a one-square-mile boundary was marked around what was known as Brisbane Town. The aim of the divide was to separate the spaces of indigenous and nonindigenous peoples. The river boundary enforced this racial divide. Police were able to enforce the removal and prevention of “nuisances” and the exit of every Aboriginal by curfew to ensure there were no “undesirables” within the boundaries after dark. As a result of this, major postcontact campsites emerged outside the virtual space. Areas of Aboriginal Significance The Queensland Government officially adopted a policy of assimilation in 1957, and in 1965 the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders Affairs Act was passed, combining the principle of assimilation with amendments made to the 1946 Act. This eventually led to urban drift, with people moving to the city for housing and employment, particularly after 1970. Musgrave Park in South Brisbane, a traditional hunting and meeting place, became the primary gathering area for indigenous people in Brisbane. 1 South Brisbane 1885 2 Brisbane and Suburbs 1806 3 one Square Mile ONE SQUARE MILE
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4 Brisbane 1866 5 Brisbane Electoral and Town Boundaries 1886
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RAIL INFRASTRUCTURE Erica Nuttal
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6 Rail infrastructure 7 Space adjacent to rail infrastructure 8 Utilized space 9 Unutilized space RAIL INFRASTRUCTURE LAND INFLUENCED BY RAIL INFRASTRUCTURE
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NOISE/VIBRATION: Dba levels at Peak Times Christina Watterson
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gates and towers. The multifaceted role this infrastructure fulfilled can be described as an integrated approach to the design of physical infrastructure, integrated in the sense that through this operation not only military needs are met, but in one effort a spatial logic is formed for social, symbolic, aesthetic, economical, and cultural needs. A similar approach one finds in the vast urban transformation of 19th century Paris by Haussmann. The boulevard system laid over the city surely serves a military purpose of controlling the revolting population, making the barricade utterly impossible and allowing the military to move about the city rapidly. However the layout was also based on a symbolic connection of landmark buildings and monuments of power. Furthermore it was supported - and financed - by an advanced set of property laws, real estate redevelopment and new construction. The Haussmannian transformation of Paris draws its strength from its operational character. The city was transformed beyond the confined surface needed to build a boulevard. The services put in place for sewer and transport, flanked by new building typologies and landscaping principles, triggered a wide range of cultural and social behavior by Parisians. It goes without saying that Haussmann’s operations have induced many criticisms, however his integrated approach is widely acknowledged and might help us to redirect the current problematics experienced with more recent infrastructural works and their repercussions on the surrounding landscapes and urban fabrics.
While the design professions often criticize engineering logic for its pragmatic and narrow views, that same logic has been able to move vast resources. The necessity for flood protection is nonnegotiable, and therefore the
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Infrastructure that Operates on Urbanism A widely accepted definition of infrastructure does not exist. The concept of infrastructure originates in the military, referring to fixed and permanent installations and facilities allowing military forces to operate. The physical nature referred to in this definition makes it an undeniable part of the landscape and urbanity. With the current proliferation of scales this is all the more apparent. Nevertheless architects, landscapers, and urban designers have not been successful in validating their contributions to large-scale infrastructural works, if not completely excluded from the process. Engineering logic defines and guides the operations. If designers aspire to an integrated infrastructural operation as described above, there will be a need for shared languages and modes of operation between the disciplines involved.
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budgets required are questioned less than, say, the landscaping project along that new dike. This assumption of priority is even more complex, though. It might seem clear that the 100-year flood line is what determines the height of a dike. However a dike is designed according to an equation of the probability of flooding during a certain time period (100 years in this case) multiplied by the value of what lies on the other side of that dike. What seemed at first to be a matter of the probability of a natural flood occurring already assumes that the protection is desirable. Of course we can continue raising defense levels against what seems to be an uncontrollable flood, but an equivalent approach lies in the value of the territory. We could just as well lower the value of the lands on the other side, to obtain the same result. The problem with flooding is not only the protection of inhabited areas, it starts with the inhabitation itself. While spreading out, low-density urbanity increases the impermeability of surfaces and leaves little land to the necessary expansion for dynamic water systems. In this way the dike as a piece of infrastructure can operate both ways. The dike controls the water level for the flooding areas and it can serve as a confinement to stop continuous low-density occupation of the landscape. A dike can be both for water and for urbanism, operating as a negotiation between one another. The idea of employing infrastructure to operate on urban and landscape processes is far from the current norm, in which infrastructure cuts its way through urban and natural landscapes. Rather than causing friction between colliding systems, infrastructure could play an active role in defining public spaces, both urban and natural. The dike could be conceived as a series of relationships with landscape, public space, and other forms of inhabitation. In that sense, the prevalent use of greenery as camouflage could become obsolete. Growing like scar tissue, vegetation is too often applied when problematic relationships need to be hidden, exactly where urban fabric and landscapes are cut by highway, viaducts, dams, and dikes. The infrastructure that operates on urbanism as a process would act on the local conditions and internal dynamics, therefore not causing the ruptures in the first place. Stan Allen mentions in his essay on “infrastructural urbanism�2 how infrastructure because of its functionalism is interested in what it can do more than how it looks. By rethinking the operative nature of the infrastructure, the designer is concerned 2004 South brisbane VIDEO ANALYSIS Erica Nuttal
with the behavior of large-scale assemblages over time. Infrastructure, according to Allen, is flexible and anticipatory at the same time. It specifies what is fixed and what is subject to change, precise and indeterminate at the same time. Most relevant to this argument is his point about the construction of sites and how infrastructure prepares the ground for future building and creates the conditions for future events. However the essay continues to state how static by itself the infrastructure is able to organize and manage complex systems of flow, movement, and exchange: “What seems crucial is the degree of play designed into the system, slots left unoccupied, space left free for anticipated development.” At this point I would like to take the argument further and explore how infrastructures can operate beyond inducing new developments and events. Can the form and architecture of infrastructure within itself generate landscape and urban conditions, an operative urbanism through infrastructures? Operative Urbanism through Infrastructures A second definition of infrastructure that we can expand upon, goes as follows: infrastructure is the set of underlying elements and facilities needed to sustain a system, flow or process. This description is fairly broad and allows both physical objects and organizational elements to be seen as infrastructure. Such an expanded interpretation can be linked to the operational mode advocated above. These underlying elements need not only to sustain the dynamics of a system while remaining inert or static. The element itself can become an operator. The infrastructure as an actor is what we are after. Infrastructural elements facilitate a system through their operational behavior, thereby sustaining it and rendering it viable.
The strategic importance of this operative design I would like to illustrate with an urban design project by PLUS for the Greenway, part of the London Olympics 2012.4 The design brief called for a transformation of the 4-kilometer historical brick sewer infrastructure, lying on top of the flat landscape, into a green path serving both as entrances to the Olympic park and as recreational spine for the legacy period after the games. This functional spine to East London needed to perform for a short-term, intense event, yet be equally operational for a long period afterwards, dealing just with local residents and commuter flows. This double timescale became the code to design a series of operative infrastructures that allowed for natural fluctuations in occupancy of species, users, and vegetation. The ideas presented would start to differentiate the apparently linear route into a perceptual trajectory in which layers of vegetation, seasonal scents, textures, and nesting and breeding areas coexist with user flows. Intensity and accent would vary throughout several overlays of time (seasonal, day-night, games-legacy period, and so forth). Flexible in both use and biodiversity, the infrastructures for the Olympic occupancy of the site are designed to naturally return to biodiverse fields intertwined with public urban spaces. The multiple temporalities designed into the infrastructure enables them to operate within shifting blends of urbanity and landscape. Another more elaborated example of an operative urbanism is the design project in Bonheiden Belgium by “TV Derman Verbakel Architecture—Ward Verbakel Architect”5. In the fall of 2005, the town of Bonheiden called for a master plan that could cope with necessary urban growth without losing the country-like nature that once famed the place. The task was to redesign the town’s public spaces and to equip it with “infrastructure” to cope with future growth and its changing nature from agrarian village to densified town. The design team suggested an alternative to a master plan by presenting a “design toolbox,” a matrix of highly flexible, pinpointed interventions of various scales and budgets that can be arranged and modified based on demand. The common denominator of these interventions is the ability to operate always on urbanity and landscape. Each element is designed as a hybrid instrument in which urban and natural dynamics play, operating as a stimulator for its surrounding sites at both levels. The Bonheiden project is in the first place
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Akin to a genetic code, infrastructures could be designed to incorporate within themselves urban and natural qualities. These underlying elements when inserted into the landscape would generate an urbanity that bears all the qualities desirable for natural, urban, and infrastructural space. If an element had already the foundation or base knowledge to operate with a minimal intelligence, a population of these elements would be able to radically change the spatial organization of urbanity and landscapes. Population thinking, originally developed in the domain of biology and first coined by Ernst Mayr3, is based on the notion of “many” (as opposed to one). Many small operators show complex behaviors when studied as a population. So rather than focusing on the design of one overarching master plan for the layout of infrastructure, a new type of plan is sought, operating through many infrastructures that incorporate all concerns raised earlier (social,
spatial, economic, symbolic, structural). Designing such operating elements could eventually lead to more powerful results when acting as a population.
an infrastructural operation. The alternative toolbox equips the town with the necessary infrastructure in the broad sense of the word: tools and elements that operate within the urban and natural landscape. They work together guiding the system of urbanization, all with a shared goal in which the urban space holds the landscape as its main component. The proposed elements tackle the urbanization process in an integrated way. A set of interventions is deployed simultaneously working on the layout of public space, road infrastructure, private development, urban design guidelines, building regulations, architecture for public programs, and landscaping. A piecemeal and guided approach permits greater flexibility but also offers space for close collaboration with inhabitants and other user groups. This feedback mechanism allows the results of the interventions to be continuously evaluated and redirected in order to adjust the design of future operating infrastructures. Infrastructural lands as an opportunity for natural and urban space The large-scale infrastructures supporting economical systems and controlling hydraulic flows occupy vast lands within the contemporary city. The infrastructural omnipresence has directed the design profession and academic research to explore the logic of contemporary infrastructures. Recent scale jumps and the development of physical infrastructure for data flows are just a few of the phenomena architects and urbanists are dealing with. While taxonomies of infrastructural landscapes are made and new typologies are designed, this argument on operative urbanism seeks not only to question our notion of infrastructure not only regarding its internal system of flow but also to respond to direct physical encounters of its surroundings. The integrated approach to infrastructure can combine the hardware resulting from a technological viewpoint with what could be regarded as software: The ability of the element to respond and act upon input from surrounding systems based on its internal design is related to the operational behavior of programmed algorithms, hence software. Operative urbanism in which infrastructure is designed as operative in a population therefore manages to reclaim infrastructural lands as valuable urban and natural landscapes.
South bank VIDEO ANALYSIS Jackie Chi Ho Cheng