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
SITE DOCUMENTATION UQ 139
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.