Is Landscape Infrastructure

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Chapter 8: Is landscape infrastructure?

Pierre Bélanger
A narrow and pedantic taxonomy has persuaded us that there is little or

nothing in common between what used to be called civil engineering and
landscape architecture, but in fact from an historical perspective their more
successful accomplishments are identical in result. The two professions may
work for different patrons, but they both reorganize space for human
needs, both produce works of art in the truest sense of the term. In the
contemporary world it is by recognizing this similarity of purpose that we
will eventually formulate a new definition of landscape: a composition of
man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or
background for our collective existence; and if background seems
inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern use of the
word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence,
but also our history.
(John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Word Itself,” 1976–1984)
The outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the

dominance of pathways over settlements . . . The pathways of modern life
are also corridors of power, with power being understood in both its
technological and political senses. By channeling the circulation of people,
goods, and messages, they have transformed spatial relations by
establishing lines of force that are privileged over the places and people
left outside those lines. . .the concept of connective systems and pathways
is primarily phenomenological rather than sociological. These constructions
are tangible structures existing in geographical space, and their
components are related primarily in physical rather than in social terms.
When engineering involves the creation of such structures, it looks more
like a “mirror twin” of landscape architecture than of science.
(Rosalind Williams, “Cultural Origins and Environmental
Implications of Large Technological Systems,” 1993)
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Is landscape infrastructure? 䊏
Infrastructure has grown in complexity vis-à-vis the urbanization of the world. As

“one of the most impressive facts of modern times,”1 infrastructure is both force
and effect, a fixture to the horizontal patterns of urbanization that characterize the
majority of the planet. Often buried or overlooked as background to development,
infrastructure is the unseen interface—urbanism’s ghost—by which we influence
and interact with the material, biological, and technological world. If all aspects of
contemporary urban life are mediated by large technological systems as historian
Rosalind Williams and J. B. Jackson proposes, then the preconception of infra-
structure as closed, mechanical, engineered system needs to be radically rethought
ecologically, as open systems of live media operating across different geographical,
politic, and temporal scales.
LIVE MODELS, OPEN SYSTEMS
With the agency of ecology coming into focus as fin de siècle system and strategy,
the contemporary reconsideration of urban infrastructure and large scale
technological systems is further magnified by massive transitions from industrial-
ization to urbanization occurring globally: the rise of environmental concerns
since the 1970s, the crisis of public works planning in the 1980s, and the erosion
of post-war engineered structures from the 1990s onwards, whose legacy total
more than 2.2 trillion dollars in urgently needed reinvestment according to the
American Society of Civil Engineers.2 Today, the vertical, linear, centralized systems
of urban economies—Fordist infrastructure—puts into question the very nature of
urbanization, where patterns of remote consumption are further and further
removed from the means and processes of production. Spatially, the complexity
and inflexibility of these highly engineered environments—below and above
ground—have not only displaced or disrupted the distribution of biophysical
resources and dynamics of biophysical processes across vast territories, the
infrastructures of extraction and cultivation are obscured by more mute, middle
systems of logistical distribution, subsurface conveyance, internalized processing,
and distributed storage required to service growing populations.
When infrastructure is considered politically and ethnographically, this
“infrastructural fixing and fragmentation” of seemingly ecological processes
naturally contributes to “frictions” and “resistances” that will only continue to
grow. Anthropologist Anna Tsing,3 historian Jo Guldi, and geographer David
Harvey4 have been at the forefront of explaining how “flexibilities” are straight-
jacketed of centralized bureaucracies, lopsided land development policies, and
standardized, end-of-pipe engineering whose ideological origins are rooted in past
colonial and military histories (Figure 8.1). “Infrastructure pits region against region,
experts against the people, and class against class. It produces and informs the
identities and divisions that characterize politics in the modern era.”5 The largely
uncoordinated practice of planning today has now become ironically reactionary,
and civil engineering—its palliative sister. Finally, in the foreground of an exhausted
environmentalism, the overexertion of mechanical technology and overregulation
191 䊐
Pierre Bélanger 䊏
Figure 8.1
Race space: the central
role of the Mississippi
river as sociopolitical
division and boundary
infrastructure between
free states, slave states
and aboriginal territories
in John Bishop Estlin’s
“Moral Map of North
America, 1854.”
Courtesy Yale Digital
Humanities—Yale Slavery
and Abolition Portal.
Figure 8.2
Urban agency: the first
report of the US Federal
Urbanism Committee in
1937 identifying major
challenges of
metropolitan
concentration, following
the great population
explosion marked in
1921.
Copyright © 1921 New
York Times, courtesy of
US Government Printing
Office & US House
Committee on Natural
Resources.
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of property have fueled a growing divide between political platforms of environment

and economy, while remaining largely impotent vis-à-vis the space and pace of
urban change (Figure 8.2).
So, is the reclamation of infrastructure purely a technical, technological, or a
fiscal question in light of massive tax cuts and public service drawdowns that spread
nationally since the Reagan and Thatcher era of the 1980s? Or, does infrastructure’s
decay represent a deeper political conundrum of the State?6 “What is, after all, a
beautiful city with bad drains, or a fine concrete highway in a barren landscape?”7
L’esprit nouveau of ecology is both a turn-of-the-century reaction, as well as
forward-looking projection to this infrastructural obscurity and environmental
apartheid. This strategic spirit is rappel-à-l’ordre through the recapitulation of
spatial and temporal scales of urban life that propose new geographies of relation
across infrastructures of consumption, distribution, processes and extraction. As live,
lived, living model, this new ecological order is shaped (not constrained) by
oppositions. By reformulating the fundamental “problematization” of urbanization,
the friction of political climates and anthropogenic flows (population, technology,
consumption, capital) as well as the collision of changing climates and environ-
mental pressures (sea level rise, atmospheric emissions, hydrologic effluents, tropical
storms, seasonal droughts) establish new, negotiated ground for alternative models
and synergistic precedents for an era of unprecedented transformation (Figure 8.3).
Using the format of a retroactive narrative, this fundamental millennial con-
undrum is explored here with two reciprocal questions: Is landscape infrastructure?
That is, can we consider the “non-mechanical,” “non-linear” and “non-stable”
media of living systems as infrastructure? And conversely, is infrastructure landscape?
That is, can we consider non-biologic, non-dynamic, and non-adaptive material of
infrastructure as a constructed landscape and lived experience (Figure 8.4)?
By chronicling milestone events and canonical thinkers from the past two
centuries, this ontological recall looks back at series of transitions and revolutions
in thought occurring across fields ranging from engineering and economics, to
anthropology and geography, in order to question distances between ecology and
Figure 8.3
American monument:
1929 benchmark of the
US Geological Survey, the
year that the 1929
National Geodetic
Vertical Datum was
established to measure
elevation (altitude)
above, and depression
(depth) below, mean sea
level (MSL).
Courtesy of NOAA—
Vertical Datums Project.
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infrastructure and the division between landscape architecture and civil engineering. Figure 8.4
By unearthing hidden power structures behind the “instrumentality of reason” that Sensing through sections:
cross-sectional analyses
underpins infrastructural form, the conjecture of landscape as infrastructure (and of urban terrain of New
its pragmatic inflexion, infrastructure as landscape) can thus reveal and loosen York streets by landscape
gridlocked ideologies to propose new strategies of design and patterns of practice architect Frederick Law
Olmsted and
vis-à-vis dominant challenges of our time. In light of the massive infrastructural
civil/topographical
transformation occurring worldwide, this shared cultural project demands engineer James Croes.
alternative “infrastructural inversions” and “ecological foregrounding.”8 Since this Source: New York City
Board of the Department
proposal puts into question the conventions and capacities of any single discipline
of Public Parks,
to address the magnitude of urban and environmental complexities today, what is Document No. 72, 1876.
proposed here is the compound, comingled, and collaborative formulation of
landscape as infrastructural field of practice that addresses the entangled and
unpredictable flows of global capital and population migration, in relation to
evolving, telescopic dynamics of planetary ecologies.
ECOLOGY AS REVERSE ENGINEERING
The historic lack of engagement of infrastructure, as territory of design, surprisingly

stems from the banality that ironically masks its technological complexity. While
urban design concentrated on the “the part of planning concerned with the
physical form of the city” when it emerged as a discipline in late 1950s,9 its focus
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Figure 8.5 -- mainly involving the design of streets, blocks, and buildings as generators of
Chaos and complexity: growth and urban development—overlooked the potential of infrastructure as great
academic disciplines
enabler and glue of urbanization at the precise moment it was on the rise.
struggle with the
liberating yet form- Alternatively, “the engineer has often been nearer to future developments than
defying mega- the town planner,” as Siegfried Giedion remarked during the interwar explosion
infrastructures of speed
of planning and the increasing distance between engineer and architect, “who has
and seamlessness.
Sert, 1942: Courtesy of too frequently been concerned exclusively with the reorganization of the body of
The President and the city itself” (Figure 8.5).10
Fellows of Harvard However neutral it appears, the constellation of infrastructural equipment—
College; Giedion, 1941:
courtesy of Harvard
from sewers and sidewalks to airports and power plants—forms the technological
University Press; Tunnard, apparatus—natural hardware—that compose the urban world. Buried in its banal
1964; Copyright © 1964 repetition, infrastructure is instrumental as a “tool and technique of power” as
Yale University Press.
Michel Foucault references, deployed as “lines” of control” and “equipment of
power” by institutions across vast territories from the City to the State.11
Behind this stacked system of sites and spaces, lies an infrastructural
background: an operating systems of data collection, standards, specifications,
feedbacks, protocols and practices that is continually reengineered and replanned.
In the continuous operating and rebuilding of large scale technological systems,
lies the silent circulation and unspoken transmission of race-based spatial ideologies
and class-based political biases.
Ethnographically, several key dimensions of infrastructure’s pervasive diffu-
sion stand out: “environmental embeddedness,” “operational transparency,”
“spatial reach,” “temporal scope,” “culturally learned,” “linked through con-
ventions of practice,” “embodied by standards,” “built on installed bases,” “visible
on breakdown,” and “modular or incremental.”12 While we may argue on where
infrastructure starts and ends, or how it actually works—sometimes almost too
well, its perverse influence has exerted itself most often to the point of near-
invisibility lending an appearance of irreversibility. As media, infrastructure
completely works us over.
Often obscuring connections with the “software” of social environments and
biophysical resources, the remote spaces of production (where food is grown and
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resources mined) and consumption (where people live and work) are often far Figure 8.6
removed, geographically and materially, from sites of extraction and distribution Valleys of production and
streams of consumption:
(Figure 8.6). Except for the odd roadside or airside glimpse, rarely do we see the longitudinal profile of
entirety of these systems until they fail. Largely out of sight is the river reservoir urbanization with Ian
that supplies drinking water, or the subsurface soils and spoils that support McHarg’s River Profile
and Patrick Geddes’s
highways, the landfill that swallow the city’s garbage, or the coal mine that feeds
Valley Section of
the region’s power plant . . . notwithstanding the invisibility of its workforce Civilization.
and sweat equity—la main d’oeuvre—that is continually running and repairing McHarg, Design with
Nature, 1969: courtesy of
this remote substructure. Mostly perceived as smooth, seamless and permanent,
American Museum of
the invisible human power underlying urban infrastructure are nevertheless like the Natural History, Geddes,
large scale technological networks themselves: extremely fragile and short-lived, 1909: National Library of
fundamentally indivisible. Scotland OF.1314.6.20.
As the prominent city building professions of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, the reconsideration of the historic roles of civil engineering and urban
planning is central to the understudied influence of contemporary infrastructure.
Through the instrumentality of reason,13 basic models of control and efficiency
ideologically shaped cities during the past two centuries. Unquestioned by the
authority of engineers and planners, the uncontestable notions of speed and
seamlessness often carry political undertones that cloak critical ontologies of power.
As mechanization took command and reason swept cities clean, specialized
practices became more and more atomized, reason and “logic” reached their own
limits requiring “a method of linking rationality with the organic.”14
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Figure 8.7 Seeing beyond the fog of disciplinary specialization and illusion of quantitative
Destruction as design: reason, what is required in the rethinking of reason in the conditioning of spatial
the demolition of the GM
automotive plant in Flint,
infrastructures and large scale technology systems is a three-point, ecological
Michigan. turn—a process of reverse engineering—to recalibrate the hegemony of three
Photo: Leonard Thygesen predominant assumptions: planning’s city-centrism, engineering’s supremacy, and
Demolition Videos &
technology’s permanence (Figure 8.7).
Buick Prints, 2013.
The first degree shift entails a geographic turn away from core-periphery
models of organization. Locating the city centrally as sociological problem at the
turn of the twentieth century has lent the inevitability of infrastructure as state
building enterprise. Placed far from peripheries of emergent activity, the
centralization of control in cities has instrumentalized land and systematized
Euclidean zoning, Calvinist conservation and Taylorist categorizations that privilege
“use,” over “effect.”
Ironically, the infrastructural “fixing” of ecological flux and fragmentation of
systemic flow has been framed territorial boundaries most often drawn centuries
ago during periods of war or conflict by revolving state institutions. From the
Mississippi River to the Great Lakes, the legibility of rivers, coastlines and other
hydrological regions bodies naturally served as political divisions and borders across
North America. Through damming and channelization, the fragmentation of
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hydrologic systems of water rendered resource habitats into nearly invisible patches Figure 8.8
State failure, architect’s
formerly reliant on systemic interconnectivity. Singular functions of navigation or
demise: from public
power production reduced regional water bodies into state backwaters. Epitom- divestments in the mid-
ized by the military motto “Building Strong” of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 1980s to the mortgage
(USACE), the unshakable adherence to instrumental reason and fortified perma- crisis 2008, the baby
boom generation has
nence has drastically confined once diverse, dynamic and productive hydrological
witnessed a revolution in
systems within fixed grids of political borderlines. Framed by state-bound foci, real estate and public
sustainability agendas now stand in sharp contrast and contradiction to works.
Source: Duke University
unpredictable changes in climates, population streams and consumption patterns
Press, 1983, Copyright ©
(Figure 8.8). 2013 TIME.
Risk and reason

At a second degree, and in correspondence with the hidden and buried systems
of urbanization, the reprofiling of prevailing city models15 steeped in state power
must reconsider the scientific disciplines of planning and engineering themselves.
Based on Fordist models of production, the linearity of closed infrastructural systems
has required systems of separation that isolated or marginalized other forms and
fashions of life: from flora and fauna, region and religion, race and gender, to family
and ethnicity. Infrastructure’s technological performance effectively neutered
ecological complexity and reduced it to functional utility and operational efficiency.
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In contrast to the unifying and democratic promises of public infrastructure, diversity

was simply suppressed or externalized as constraint, often leading to social
disengagement.16 Since infrastructure is biased, it divides as much as it connects.
“In the era of the infrastructure state, conflict is inevitable because building,
although expensive, is necessary. Without state building, economies never expand
to a national scale, peripheries are left behind, and the poor cannot afford to
participate in the market.”17
If the disciplines of urban planning and civil engineering respectively form
the impervious architecture and fixed framework of cities of Western industrial
society today, then planners and engineers are the foot soldiers in the maintenance
and management of the myth of instrumental reason. Perpetuated by State-driven
policy, the over-emphasis on “legibility” in strategies of abstraction (land use key)
and data aggregation (demographics) have simplified complex information, and
where “predictions have often been wildly wrong.”18 The risk of reason is
personified in positivist role of technocratic engineer “the best exemplar of the
power of expertise. . .reinforcing directly and indirectly the rule of instrumentalism
and unending economic growth.”19
Over time, the implementation of legal limits, and categories of account-
ability—institutionalized through standardization and systematization, have
gradually contributed to the rigid and segregated space of cities today. “The
modern engineering enterprise is primarily a colonizing project,” both self-
aggrandizing and totalizing.20 Removed more and more from regional resources
and dynamic biophysical processes, the neutralization and normalization of process
is heightened by the security found in quantitative logic and numerical precision.
Anthropocentric economies of expediency and exactitude simply externalized
ecologies of race, class, and gender. The assumed neutrality of infrastructure is its
most dangerous weapon.
From engineering to design

Through the relentless reliance on efficiency as spatial economy then, civil engineers
have become central figures of urban environments, “trustees of public aspiration,”
whose contributions are concretized by landmarks and great public works of
American technological might.21 Compared to the over-theorized architect or
sociologist of today, 22 the commanding respect of the common engineer in
Western industrial society since the eighteenth century is astonishing: “Americans
respected engineers [not farmers or architects], wherever they worked but settles
in the backlands especially honored them. Without their expertise—professional or
common—the settlers well knew, canals and railroads existed only as pipe
dreams.”23
In the absence of substantive critical reflection, superlative landmarks and
technological bigness are now basis for communicating societal performance across
the high risk technological landscape for the twenty-first century. At less than 1
percent of project life-cycle costs, the cost-benefit of engineering services and civic
preeminence today are practically uncontestable. Its image is communicated as
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investment.24 Informed mainly by the recursive and forensic study of failure—from

the prosaic to the epic,25 the bureaucratic bedrock of engineer’s technical prowess
and precision rests on the exclusion of often less quantifiable sociopolitical
processes.26
If “engineers introduced not only massiveness and great scale to American
building, they introduced standardization too,” then they also managed in their
paths, a great and thorough cleaning of complexity.27 The internal specter of
scientific reason thus raises the external question of the spatial context in which
large scale technologies are employed, and how knowledge is organized by
dominant disciplines.28 While civil engineering emerged, for example, from the
glut of military engineers at West Point during a prolonged period of peace at the
end of the nineteenth century,29 defense imperatives literally put structures in the
stream making clear divisions between “dry” and “wet” land, “high” and “low”
ground, “above” and “below” water. As metropolitan demands grew larger and
larger, so did demands for hydraulic engineering and topographic earthworks.
Applied to the North American context, French military engineers neatly transferred
wartime techniques of fortification and planning ideologies to civilian applications,
across the Atlantic Ocean, one coast after another.
Predictability and post-Taylorism

Together, the criticism of planning and engineering argues for a third, temporal
turn that puts in question the “certainty” and “stability” upon which the undisputed
utopias of “security” and “safety” are predicated. Through the illusion of insurance
and Newtonian predictability, mono-functional land uses and standardized
infrastructures have reduced flexible alternatives and often expose large populations
to mass vulnerabilities and high risks.30
Exemplified by planning’s reactionary behavior to hazards, accidents and
disasters, the unpredictable contexts and side effects of engineering structures
prompt a critical reconsideration of the perceived permanence and persistent
recycling of infrastructure itself. Stemming the magnitude of technological systems,
infrastructural amnesia has generated a sense of technological determinism and
state naturalism from one generation to another. Founded in eighteenth-century
institutions of colonial control and modernized by nineteenth-century principles of
scientific management from mechanical engineer and systems theorist Frederick
Winslow Taylor, the centralization of management (read planning) was required to
control production and stabilize inventories. Not only did these Taylorist principles
of planning and predictability influence the development of factories during the
rise of mechanization and Fordist modes of mass-production, they shaped the
management of industrial environments and metropolitan territories.
However, the short-term economic gains of the Taylorist model excluded
factors that did not “fit” within the closed system of industrial production in the
long term. Instead, any externalities literally and figuratively went downstream,
underground, abroad, or amuck: emissions, effluents, resource depletion, worker
rights, race relations, international policies, family structures, gender differences,
200 䊐
cultural ingenuity.31 After a century of trial and error, the rational Taylorist model
was polluted by growing externalities, no longer able to demonstrate improvements
in labor productivity through rationalization of work flows or by standardization of
production lines alone. The contours of fluctuating environmental pressures and
urban risks simply did not correspond with the boundaries of political jurisdictions,
professional competencies, or information data. Compounded by dwindling state
budgets, growing environmental hazards make visible the inflexibility of this
predominantly industrial structure. Events such as the displacement of hundreds of
thousands during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the destruction of estuarine economies
after the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and the financial damage of
Figure 8.9 Hurricane Sandy in 2012, have become vivid images—not unlike revolutionary
Cross-scalar codification events of the late 1960s—of the limits of disciplinary models based on the perceived
systems: the national
predictability and assumed certainty of forecast planning (Figure 8.9).
land use classification
systems, relations of As the basis of civil engineering and planning, precision has become a
adjacency, plant handicap. Whether it was the shoreline engineering of the eighteenth century,
proportions. sanitary engineering in the nineteenth century, or transportation planning in the
Courtesy of USGS, 1992;
Jacques Bertin, 1963; Piet
twentieth century, we now find ourselves at a crossroads pushing beyond the logic
Oudolf, 2009. of the City Scientific, the City Rational or the City Efficient models. Both process
201 䊐
Figure 8.10
Plant processes as spatial
programs: vegetal
urbanism and
intermediate landscapes
for brownfields and
blackfields.
Copyright © 2009 Michel
Desvigne Paysagiste.
and product of urbanization, the inconvenient truth is that the city cannot be
contained like a canal or a sewer, nor controlled like a factory or an inventory.
Fortunately, in the past few decades century “non-technical factors have come to
exert an influence that is unprecedented in the history of technology” favoring the
environment, or the “field,” in which technologies are applied. The geopolitical re-
reading of fixed borders—legal, jurisdictional, political, biophysical—in relation to
flows—sociocultural, geopolitical, biophysical—helps retrace the contours of
instrumental reason and thus provide the basis for reforming current economies in
relation to the biophysical systems, cultural plurality, and dynamic processes that
program them (Figure 8.10).
In this “space of flows,” the projective rescaling of urban economies proposes
alternative models of organization—constructed ecologies of systems, services, and
scales, whose data is live and form, constantly in flux. “Most interestingly, it is not
architecture but landscape, with its weak boundaries, interconnected topographies
and ambiguous modes of occupation, which ultimately remains the best agent
for this type of territorial change.”32 Climate change thus opens scales and of
urbanization as processes and patterns, challenging the contours state power
and boundaries of institutions. In this fluid space, non-static “process” usurps fixity
of “place.”33
ORGANIZATIONAL ECOLOGIES
In this shift away from disciplinary dominance, alternative modes of spatial

organization are required to develop less-linear and more flexible strategies that
202 䊐
capitalize on the evolving, less-stable nature of urban economies. With more than
60 percent of the European, and more than 80 percent of the American population
living on the periphery of cities, “form-defying”34 systems of circulation clearly
contribute to processes of decentralization today, as they have for the past century.
The population bomb that exploded at the turn the early twentieth century, with
the deruralization that followed, radically transformed the size of cities and
countrysides. Seemingly unprecedented in America’s history, US demographers
recorded in 1921 “for the first time in the country’s history more than half of the
population of continental United States is living in urban territory.”35
Captured by the First Planning Conference in 1909, planning emerged from
an infrastructural boom in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York,
as populations doubled and tripled in size.36 With gangs rampant, slums growing,
and motorization swelling, the dramatic rise in city populations during the 1920s
marked a legal turning point for newly incorporated cities.
The factory system brought more and more people to the urban centers, land
values increased, and the century saw . . . a tidal wave of “city planning.” With
these [City Beautiful] movements . . . all cities with a population of 10,000 or
more were required to establish a Planning Board.37
Attempting to alleviate the growing prevalence of crime and congestion,

concentrated demands for drinking water, waste management, energy generation,
food distribution, and transportation corridors all placed significant pressures upon
the services of growing, congested cities. In the early twentieth century, Chicago
reversed the Chicago River to divert sewage away from its freshwater source in
Lake Michigan. Control of these conditions seemed imperative, leading to the
separation of urban services into distinct more manageable categories, thanks in
part to the rise of public involvement from 1937 onwards, with the newly formed
Urbanism Committee at the national level, and the Planning Boards at the municipal
level. Premised on the management of population growth through taxation within
municipal growth boundaries, policies and zoning regulations of height restrictions,
density limits, and land use constraints naturally formalized the disciplinary centrality
of planning. Against the foreground of Old World core–periphery models of
development and New World city-centrism of social science, regional urbanist
Howard W. Odum emerged in support of regional growth and value of
decentralization, proposing the aggregated advantage of overlapping ecological,
economic or social regions, “as a technique of decentralization and redistribution
of population, industry, wealth, capital, culture, and of bigness, complexity, and
technology.”38
Sustainability of suburbanization
Usurping the goals of the American Civic Association and the grandeur of the City
Beautiful Movement where architects once dominated, the new planning discipline
found power in institutional presence and capitalized on the separation of
203 䊐
government powers, where local authority forms the backbone of the US Constitu-
tion. Although local governments were the largest stakeholders and beneficiaries
of planning expertise, master plans could not keep up with the unpredictable pace
and pressure of population migration.
But, unlike early antecedents of institutional planning, urbanization could not
simply be planned like a prison or contained like a hospital. The compound effect
of squalid inner city conditions, cheap low-rise housing, road construction, and
postwar deindustrialization forced the opening of new regions for the spread of
populations along new lines of access and the horizontal elevators of transportation
corridors, leaping across legal boundaries of incorporated cities.
The so-called problem of uncontrollable spread of urban populations and the
rise of suburbanization not only demonstrated the incapacities and inflexibilities of
city planning (including housing authorities and policing powers) to deal with the
delirium sprawl but commanded a sense of attention needed in the historiography
of cities and urban regions, captured in 1961 by none other than Lewis Mumford
in his voluminous book, The City in History.
Unplanning: zoning, after Euclid

If the task of planning has relied on the strict separation of services and individual
land use categorizations, then transportation networks naturally inserted them-
selves in between incompatible uses of land, or classes of communities. By 1927,
faith in the scientific basis for planning and local government control led to
the precedent setting establishment of basic single-use categories according to
Euclidean planning principles: residential, commercial, institutional and industrial.
With the evacuation of geographic knowledge from Ivy league schools,39 cities
ironically took on new levels of complexity at the precise moment when John
Kenneth Galbraith claimed that the concentration of “capital [and power] became
more important than land.”40
Dependent on jurisprudence, the spatially neutered planning discipline
irreversibly became entrenched in land use legislation and property politics while
geography disappeared altogether from the functional basis of planning. Twentieth
century planning was now relegated, for the most part, to a generation of lawyers
and economists with reductive world views.
In stark contrast, the regional process of suburbanization provided a general
advantage in the upscaling of urban conditions, as “productive milieu for social
advancement and family life”41 rendering it both a controversial and subversive
subject of ecologic significance.
As historian of sprawl Robert Bruegmann notes, the global phenomenon of
suburbanization is widely understudied: “flattening of the density gradient,” is
indicative of the leveling (read de-centering) of socio-economic structures of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries across “a more dispersed landscape [that] has
afforded many people greater levels of mobility, privacy, choice.” Thanks to the
rise in automobility, mobile technologies and growing consumer credit, the increase
in individual purchasing power have thus contributed to a horizontal pattern of
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urbanization that functions largely as an alternative to the “densely settled cities

that were the norm at the end of the nineteenth century.”42
The great question in the field once known as urban design, is no longer that of
Alberti’s day—how to choose the site where a city or a given program will be
built—but how to accommodate sites that have now all been subsumed, in one
way or another, by the suburban condition.43
Chaos as complexity
If aberrant suburbanization potentially provides a greater level of spatial, economic,
and cultural freedom in the twenty-first century, as Olmsted previously foretold in
the nineteenth century, then distinct spatial democracies may lie between the
ecology and the economy of the city.
As transitional process, the decentralization of power structures entails a
flattening of institutional hierarchies that goes hand in hand with the deconcen-
tration of urban form. The organization of new powers is thus made possible, not
by the buildup but by the drawdown of power in the unbuilding of state-led
engineering infrastructure, and the underdevelopment of regulatory structures.
Contributing to these strategies of suburbanization and underdevelopment,
landscape architect and urbanist James Corner has recently proposed how
“organizational ecologies” provide an advanced understanding of urbanism “to
produce a critical understanding of what is at stake when practicing in a world of
constant change and uncertainty . . . and to develop new vocabularies and
techniques pertinent to more openly fluid forms and practices.” 44 Corner’s critical
Figure 8.11
Self-organizing structure:
the thick, fibrous, and
stabilizing root mat
system of heath-like
species that thrive in
rugged environments of
extreme daily and
seasonal temperature
variations, nutrient-poor
soil, intense sunlight, and
salt-laden winds.
Copyright © 1994 Hugo
Meinhard Schiechtl.
205 䊐
emphasis on the generative capacity of uncertainty echoes the groundbreaking Figure 8.12
polemic of urbanist Rem Koolhaas: “since it is out of control, the urban is about On growth and
deformation: plant
to become a major vector of the imagination. Redefined, urbanism will not only, assemblages and
or mostly, be a profession, but a way of thinking, an ideology: to accept what morphologies
exists.”45 Copyright © 1972 Atomic
Energy Commission.
This organizational ecology becomes dependent on the cultivation of
processes that are spatially programmatic and economically generative, across
scales. If there is to be a “new urbanism” it will not be based on the twin fantasies
of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty: it will no longer
be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with
the irrigation of territories with potential. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism
will never again be about the new, only about the “more” and the “modified.” It
will not be about the civilized, but about underdevelopment (Figures 8.11–12).
From control to contingency

If the formlessness46 of urbanization is best seen across long periods of time, then
the process of suburbanization can be proposed as both a productive reaction
and response to dominant modes of Fordist production and Taylorist management.
This re-reading of cities, from closed color-blind systems that are reduced to a
few controllable variables, is thus succumbing to a growing body of knowledge
and expertise on dynamic and distributed, ecologies of cities as open systems.
When viewed as valley, this lateral and longitudinal view refigures the “ground”
206 䊐
and the “geography” of contemporary urbanization beyond economic and legal

perspectives, supplanting supposed efficiencies and efficacies of planning and
engineering.47 In the current reallocation of public sector work to the private sector
expertise and more collaborative forms of project financing, the advantage that
risk distribution affords is through greater flexibility, both as a constructed ecology
and infrastructural interface. This shift proposes to transcend the political and legal
boundaries associated with public works and private properties. To capitalize on
this strategy of risk commons, design must clearly be more opportunistic and
leverage disciplinary knowledge while engaging more synergistic collaborations.
Economically, the advantage of appropriating infrastructure as landscape is
heightened by
the amount of funding for renovating public infrastructure [that] is likely to far
exceed the amount that will be available for buildings, parks and open space.
Large budgets can be used to produce urban design that simultaneously solve
utilitarian problems, and help repair cities and regional landscapes at a scale not
dreamed of since the days of the great dams.48
Here, the processes of decentralization—that is, the erosion of economic hierarchy

and political hegemony through ecological aggregation—produces new horizontal
territories of interventions where spaces can be charged with ecological forces by
strategies of spatial dispersal, and where processes can be synchronized with new
morphologies through temporal distribution in the future.
The expansion of urban economies through the regional decentralization of
cities is a more contingent process that yields potentially greater benefits, opening
new territories for occupation and cultivation beyond the grey matter of cities. “This
is the ground structure that organizes and supports a broad range of fixed and
changing activities in the city. As such, the urban surface is dynamic and response;
like a catalytic emulsion, the surface unfolds events in time.”49
ECOLOGIES OF SCALE
The recovery of geography in ecology’s nascent agency is both operative and

imperative. Despite the death-of-distance thesis foreshadowed in the late 1990s
by globalization and rise of communication networks, geographic knowledge
figures more prominently as scalar and systemic instrument.
The geographic re-reading of the dominant models of urbanization in the past
two centuries circumvents disciplinary cul-de-sacs, and dissolves historic oppositions
between concepts such as city and country, rural and urban, natural and human,
modern and historic. Spatial conventions borne from the techno-bureaucratic
factions of public works departments (waste, water, energy, food and transport
agencies) and inherited from classical, Old World notions of master-planning can
be purposefully put into question. Moving beyond the limits of municipal tax zones,
the regional field harnesses the power of resource flows across watersheds,
207 䊐
energysheds and foodsheds to index the greater extents of urbanization, from the
material scale at 1:1 to the planetary scale at 1:1 billion.
Regionalization
Now that legal and regulatory frameworks are being counterbalanced by pressing
concerns about carbon footprints, infrastructure lifespans, environmental economies
and changing climates. Through unplanning and dezoning,50 the removal of
regulatory controls may take on unprecedented roles in the design of regions at
“sub-urban” and “super-urban” scales.51 They will transition from being tools of
prevention (control) to instruments of projection (contingency) through forces that
may eventually yield a richer, more productive set of ecologies. From this flattening
of urban hierarchy, a set of new regionalized identities are emerging that privilege
diversity and differentiation, with a renewed focus on biophysical resources and
live processes as self-maintaining and self-organizing, spatially expressive of cultural
innovation and advancement.
By virtue of its bigness alone, the “regime of complexity” instigated by
infrastructure requires a mobilization of design intelligence, less dependent on
“meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions,
denying boundaries.”52 Upsetting the linearity of technological determinism and
the certainty of engineered controls, “instead of concentrating on an identifiable
desirable end state as something which can be achieved through planning and
management, neo-modernist environmentalism [i.e. ecology] focuses on setting up
a dynamic, which, it is assumed, will lead to a desirable—as if yet unknown—
direction” (Figure 8.13).53
Figure 8.13
Bioengineering:
subsurface vegetative
reproduction systems for
vigorous forest growth
(Black Locust) and
biomass density amid
highly fragmented urban
conditions.
Source: Foad Vahidi,
Mark Jongman-Sereno,
Antonia Rudnay.
208 䊐
Environment as megastructure
This shift comes at a moment of crisis in the field of urban design as growing groups
of architects are weakened or disillusioned by increasing complexities of built
environments. Blindsided by the failure of the megastructures movement to capture
the world within a single building,54 “there is another kind of megastructure,”
according to cultural geographer J. B. Jackson, “in terms of the whole environ-
ment.”55 Out of the dogmatism of urban design, the characterization of the
environment as a constraint and its inability to harness non-mechanical (living) and
non-stable (dynamic) systems—merely an open system, the synthetic capacities of
landscape architecture conflate both infrastructural form and ecological process.
Across different scales, open-ended systems reclaim formerly abandoned sites
(disurbanization) and intensifies new ones (superurbanization). Together, they form
a field that extends from the bio-molecular and the metabolic at the systemic scale
of plants and species, to the geographic scale of networks and climactic scale of
the global. As a system of systems, this extended field is operationalized by
ecological intelligence across disciplines, ecological engineering at the smallest level,
and transboundary strategy at the highest level. In contrast to closed, industrial
systems of production from economies of mass production. These new economies
of scale operate as an open system of exogenous and endogenous flows. Wastes
and excesses, the surpluses of urbanization, become absorbed into a re-circulating
economy of secondary and tertiary materials, through downcycling and upcycling
(Figure 8.14).
Figure 8.14
Free section, open plan:
the strategic deployment
of sectional strategies in
OMA’s Parc de la Villette
vegetal systems (1982)
and open space diagram
for Yokohoma.
Copyright © 1992, OMA.
209 䊐
Mapping as multimedia method

If the information age is an infrastructure age, then the representation of living
systems beyond conventional “use-value” categories becomes vital to the future
of landscape practice. Since infrastructure is encoded with information systems and
is exercised with power (democratic or not), then mapping is a means of decoding
externalities generating collective empowerment “and underpin a social justice
agenda by valorizing previously neglected people and things.”56 Whether by
diagrams or maps, composite imaging provides an important alternative to the
conventional orthographic methods of drafting inherited from engineers and
architects. Beyond its linear and mechanistic function, the exclusive use of con-
struction contracts as legal and contractual representations needs to be reconsidered
as devices of public communication in landscape architectural production. Three
primary characteristics emerge from these new blueprints: “the designer’s indirect
and detached, or remote, access to the landscape medium, the incongruity of
drawing with respect to its subject—its abstractedness with respect to actual
landscape experience, and the anterior, prevenient function of the drawing—its
generative role” (Figure 8.15).57
In the realm of public works projects, the visual representation of research
and the communication of strategies for the public, is essential practice in design.
As means of public disclosure and method of exposing decision making processes
beyond conventions of display, James Corner recognized early on that
differences in modes of representation and notation affect the way in which one
sees: the more points of view that one is able to include, the more one is able to
see. In drawing, the exchange of ideas can most effectively be propagated
Figure 8.15
Surface programming:
Ger Dekkers’s panoramic
series of the highly
engineering Aflsuitdijk in
Netherlands and Berlin
Street.
Source: New Dutch
Landscapes, 1986;
Capital/Costa-Gavras,
2013.
210 䊐
through the making of “composite” drawings, where in plans, sections, views,

textures, scorelines, words and images are played off and against one another in
dialogue. To use drawing to think and see in a more complex way is to
overcome a blinkered, singular viewpoint and to relinquish total control.58
In an age where information is being generated more rapidly than it can be

absorbed and used,” accelerating over the past three decades,59 the representation
of flows, processes and relationships beyond the naked eye underlies much of the
work to be done. New, multimedia modes of representation can redefine the
conventions of design historically rooted in technical drafting, scenic illustration,
pictorial imaging. “The creative use of landscape representation to project
alternative futures for urban form, infrastructure investment, ecological restoration
and environmental management can be a powerful counter to the technocratic
dominance of other forms of knowledge. The understanding of the particularity
and distinction of local and regional landscapes can provide a point of resistance
to the homogenizing effects of globalization.”60
Surface, section, strategy

In contrast to the specificity of the plan and planometric representations, the section
offers a much more flexible and longitudinal means of communication. Bridging
civil engineering and urban design, sectional representation elucidates change
across several scales—both large and small—through the recapitulation of surface
as structure. The sectional shift reveals new understandings by disclosing and
revealing interrelationships across different topographical zones, namely through
surface and systems of access, zones of plant and root growth, different degrees
of soil permeability, and variations in moisture and water levels. Minute variations
in profile can have significant effect over long distances, making possible the design
of geographic territories across vast scales. With all of its attendant variations
(cutaways, cross-sections, section-perspectives, developed profiles, expanded and
exploded sections, and longitudinal sections, aerial oblique sections), the ground
section graphically reveals the ground as variegated interface and striated
environment that are superimposed on the surface itself and often buried in the
complex data of quantitative information or spreadsheets (Figure 8.16).61
Hydrologically for example, the depth of the section simultaneously reveals
the invisibility of what is below ground or underwater, and translates what is
downstream and what is upstream. Foreshadowed by James Corner, these
mappings have agency because of the double-sided characteristic of all maps.

First, their surfaces are directly analogous to actual ground conditions; as
horizontal planes, they record the surface of the earth as direct impressions. . . .
By contrast, the other side of this analogous characteristic is the inevitable
abstractness of maps, the result of selection, omission, isolation, distance and
codification.62
211 䊐
Figure 8.16 Figure 8.17

Infrastructural piggy-backing: lakeside promenade Materials as infrastructural media: the hardwood boardwalk
integrated into and constructed above a stormwater made of Ipe and Yellow Edar, with sinuous chrome-brushed,
interceptor tunnel in Toronto. stainless steel railings forming informal amphitheaters and
Copyright © 2012 West 8/Adriaan Geuze. water’s edge wave decks.
Courtesy of Waterfront Toronto.
Logistically, the exchange of resources, materials and information will drive the
modification and reprogramming of urban surfaces to accommodate greater auto-
mobility through surface variability and different speeds of movements (Figure 8.17).
Surface differentiation, markings and codifications at one end, and infrastruc-
tures of mobility at the other are imminently transforming the built environment
for the foreseeable future. In this titled space of the section, the components and
complexities of time—between the economy of mechanical time (9–5 work hours,
traffic rhythms, production periods, distribution deadlines) and the ecology of
climactic time (vegetal emergence, breeding, migration, seasonal growth, decay,
inundation, drought) can be made not only visible but also operative in design.
From grade to ground

Sectional strategies become the privileged interface between the complexity of the
subsurface below (soils, foundations, wires, conduits, tunnels, pipelines) and the
banality of the surface above (curbs, edges, surfaces, manholes, posts, grates,
markings). Small and often minuscule changes of surface profiles in cross-section
can have pronounced effects, much like slopes and grade changes, when seen
across vast distances. The section therefore liberates the field from the stronghold
of orthographic drawings and hegemony of axial projections to engage the design
of relationships, associations and synergies across a multitude of sites, properties,
and boundaries (Figure 8.18).
If the projection of information influences perception, then sectional repre-
sentation proposes not only the production of new optical projections, it becomes
212 䊐
Figure 8.18
Fluid planning and
operational design:
layering of political,
environmental, economic
and spatial information
for Alvjso, a suburb of
Stockholm, Sweden.
Courtesy of James
Corner/Field Operations,
photo by Pierre Bélanger.
Figure 8.19
Environmental
programming: analytical
drawing of wind
direction, velocity, and
topography for the
distribution and
organization of wind
farms in the American
West.
Source: James Corner,
1995.
a process of research, and projective media of intervention in time. Media becomes

method, and contemporary practice becomes active in both the design and
designation of new territories. Emissive and interactive, the collaborative and
interdisciplinary process of mapping is programmatic agent in project making, a
space where thinking big is fast and easy. Modes of representation—such as design
213 䊐
scenarios, section profiles and construction sequences—that enable a level of

precise approximation and strategic generalization, can exploit situations of
uncertainty and indeterminacy, promoting flexible forms of spatial imagination,
inviting creativity and critical reflection. Combined together, maps, drawings,
diagrams and photographs actively engage a field of various levels of engagement,
not so much to seek out agreement, but to expose multiple, latent possibilities. As
the field takes the geographic turn, this projective potential of mapping renders
regional complexities more palpable, and closer to the ground . . . an emerging
agency formed by senses and sensations, between uncertainties and interactions,
content and contingency, the temporal and the transmissive, that ultimately lie
between image and imagination (Figure 8.19).
PROTOECOLOGIES
As the ultimate infrastructural scale, the agency time and temporality extends and
expands the medium of landscape through the malleability of terrain and territory,
as futurist geographer J. B. Jackson writes:
a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a “synthetic” space,

a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning
and evolving . . . a composition of man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure
or background for our collective existence; and if “background” seems
inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern sense of the
word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence but
also our history . . . a landscape is thus a space deliberately created to speed up
or slow down the process of nature . . . it represents man taking upon himself
the role of time.63
Figure 8.20
Open systems: regional
flow diagram of a
representative urban
region by Howard T.
Odum showing ranges,
vectors, and magnitudes
of energy flows.
Courtesy of Colorado
University Press.
214 䊐
Figure 8.21 Temporally, design strategies can be launched across extremes: short, immediate
Valley of energy:
interventions that are graduated and sequenced over long periods of time with
exploratory combination
of surface and subsurface large, durable geopolitical and ecological effects. Design becomes strategic, capable
flows of waste, water, of integrating multiple scales of intervention at once (Figure 8.20).
mobility and forestry. Emerging from these economic interactions and exigencies, the project of
Copyright © 2012 OPSYS.
landscape infrastructure proposes an expanded operating system for contemporary
economies where the full complexity of biodynamic processes and resources are
visualized and deployed in the refiguration of urban infrastructure. Departing
from conventional bureaucratic and centralized forms of civic administration, this
contemporary formulation foreshadows a more flexible, cooperative and process-
driven agency for the design disciplines with a co-commitment to the metrics
of design, research and implementation. As a theoretical evolution of the reformist
discipline of landscape architecture at the beginning of the twentieth century, infra-
structural ecologies engages the full capacity of post-Euclidean planning and global
contextualism of capital flow while exploiting the techno-spatial capacity of twenty-
first-century civil engineering in order to deploy ecology as agent of urban renewal
and expansion (Figure 8.21).
Time as territorial medium

When viewed over time, this technological ecological vantage sheds light on the
interconnections of infrastructure, spatially, socially, geographically and temporally.
The heavy equipment of urban support such as roads, sewers and bridges, that
215 䊐
has been over privileged in America’s new New Deal64 will benefit from leaner, Figure 8.22
lighter, and “softer” infrastructures premised on ecology as the catalyst of Fluidity as form:
exploratory perimeter of
infrastructural reform and the driver of urban morphology (Figure 8.22). intertidal marshlands and
Time becomes more than a tool, it translates ecology into a medium in and estuarine cultivation as
of itself. Overcoming the chronic “institutionalized black boxing of [predictive] infrastructural apron for
the island of Dordrecht in
models”65, temporal strategy can be based on degrees of risk and levels of
the Dutch Delta region.
uncertainty.66 Like new datums, the design of new time scales and new time Copyright © 2010
zones becomes instrumental to the orchestration of large scale effects through OPSYS/Nina-Marie Lister.
simple and fragmentary forms or formats (points, patches, planes) of interventions
(Figure 8.23). Operating on prolonged time scales, the vegetal dimension of
design—encompassing the metabolic, horticultural, the botanical, the silvi-
cultural, the agronomic, the faunal, the fluvial, the experiential—thus can be
integrated as emergent organic infrastructure operating at economic scales across
political seasons that were previously marginalized. In the most extreme
circumstances, the urban field of demonstrates landscape’s agility as open ground
plan (Figure 8.24).
216 䊐
Figure 8.23
Altitudinal ecologies:
systems of silviculture,
rescue/recreation, and
aerial mobility for the
future of the Dübendorf
military airfield.
Copyright © 2012 OPSYS.
Figure 8.24
Urban field: exploratory
fragmentation and
systems of forestry and
intercropping with
overlapping networks of
aerodromes for the
Dübendorf airfield.
OPSYS with Foad Vahidi,
Mark Jongman-Sereno,
Antonia Rudnay.
217 䊐
The converging project of landscape infrastructure will be contingent on a

range of processive practices:
1 of reversal, reversibility and reflexivity where more flexible and fluctuating

formats of construction to enable biologic emergence, tidal fluctuation,
moisture variations, climactic regimes, shifting bio-diversities, and social
functions to flourish and grow;
2 of synchronization that calibrate schedules of production with flows of
biotic systems across public and private jurisdictions that distribute and
share risks;
3 of deterritorialization through the slackening of political and regulatory
controls as regions spread wider and as racial diversities color the grey
zones of urbanism or ghosted cycles of infrastructure;
4 of materialization of processes through ecological engineering, where
sites of resource extraction and spaces of production are visibly
integrated with end uses and spaces of consumption; and
5 of lived experiences constructed from living systems and live infra-
structures where the cosmopolitan ecology of flora, biota and fauna
perform as the new wealth and cultural capital (Figure 8.25).
Across this expanded “plane of services and performances” of urbanization,67

design becomes telescopic, sliding across different scales, systems and strategies
that are no longer defined by professional jurisdictions or political divisions but
rather by transdisciplinary collaborations and cosmopolitan objectives. In contra-
position to the hard, fixed infrastructures, this interpretation provides the room
for the design of softer, looser ecological systems, where the design of micro-
interventions have macro-effects, producing new relations across systems of trade,
exchange, conveyance, mobility and communications. Through this dual lens, we
can open a territory of new scales, systems, and synergies, upstream or downstream
across the gradient of urban economies.
Informed by geospatial and geobotanical practices of “soft thinkers” such as
geographer Carl O. Sauer, ecologist Howard W. Odum, and botanist Liberty H.
Bailey, to name a few. The collaborative and cross-disciplinary project of landscape
infrastructure can emerge from historical juxtapositions. This convergence of the
landscape infrastructure project entails a double-entendre and dual identity—
that is, landscape as infrastructure and infrastructure as landscape. The single-use
infrastructure along corridors of movement and pathways of urbanization that
Rosalind Williams identified more than two decades ago, establish ground zero
for combined strategies of geographic zoning, boundary realignments, material
surfaces, subsurface programming, sectional thickening and ecological reengineer-
ing. Staging uncertainty and harnessing contingency become the new urban
imperatives, time becomes a dimension of slow but enduring spatial programming
for racial recombination and class desegregation. Ecologies of scale are therefore
the economies of time (Figure 8.26).
218 䊐
Figure 8.25
Spatial synchronization:
exploratory,
programmatic
sequencing of the
processes of migration,
military training and
remote sensing as spatial
activators at different
altitudes.
Courtesy of Jing Guo,
Kyle Trulen, Cara Walsh.
219 䊐
Figure 8.26
Volunteer ecology:
terrestrial emergence of
pioneer and invasive
plant species, through
self-seeding and root
suckering, at the rubble
dump and open space
park of the Leslie Steet
Spit dump in Toronto.
Copyright © 2010 OPSYS,
with Michael Hough.
Infrastructural ecologies
Moving beyond the Calvinist conservation of resources and the redemptive
contradiction of preservationist restoration, the ecological imperative instigates the
design of relationships, where associations and synergies become infrastructural.
Softer, more fluid configurations generate open, flexible relationships: risk becomes
opportunity, contingency informs morphology, indeterminacy yields interaction,
and flux generates form. Design can operate across greater extents of time: from
the largest scales of geography and regions to the engineering and genetics of
the smallest size, the basic building blocks of urbanization—plants, soils, and
waters—prove necessary and vital to future development. Through the redesign of
infrastructure as complex ecology, the work in the future lies in the re-coupling,
re-configuration, and re-calibration of these processes. Urgent and pressing, the
project of the ecological re-adaptation of existing systems—where transportation
departments collaborate with local conservation groups or, where port authorities
partner with fisheries and waterside settlements or, where power corporations work
with waste recycling companies—is a necessary corollary to the next generation of
post-Fordist, post-Taylorist infrastructures. Our education and communication of
these processes is a pedagogical part of that project.
In the wake of the over-planning, over-regulation and over-engineering of
the past century, countervailing models can be proposed across, and between
different economies either in slums, suburbs or skyscrapers: dispersal substitutes
density, pace instead of space, sequence over speed, ecology instead of technology,
concurrency over control, citizen as much as science, culture instead of growth. In
short, ecology becomes urbanism’s best insurance policy, landscape is infra-
structure’s most flexible strategy (Figure 8.27).
220 䊐
Figure 8.27
Delineating time:
evolutionary
transformation of the
Leslie Street Spit 1959—
2010, from dredge dump
to wilderness zones.
Lake Ontario Park,
courtesy of James
Corner/Field Operations,
time sequence: Copyright
© 2010 OPSYS/David
Christensen.
If the shape of land is most visibly transformed by the infrastructure of the

State—from the scale of institutional regulation to the scale of the individual
engineer, including its engineers and its regulations, then the production of
landscape is a political-technological project: it is as much a tool of the people as
it is a technology of the state (Figure 8.28).68 The primitive nature of “trees, daylight
and dirt” as modern infrastructural media may then be equivalent to the wiring of
modern economies in the hardware of roads, bridges, pipes, conduits and cables
(Figure 8.29).69 This software of urbanization—a ground plane formed by the
patterns of plants, the circulation of soils, the flows of water and streams of
population that support the culture of economies—then profiles the contours of
new spatial production. Along the permutations and pathways of urbanization—
from highway, to pathway, to subway, to airway—the contemporary project of
landscape infrastructure can contribute to a “sense of enlarged freedom”—one
that Frederick Law Olmsted so adamantly advocated for in his designs and surveys
of contemporary urbanization at a period of spatial turbulence in nineteenth-century
America—as it grows in kind, to form a landscape democracy, for years and
decades to come (Figures 8.30–31).70
**INSERT ISL_08_INFRASTRUCTURE_BE_LANGER 29.JPG!>
**INSERT ISL_08_INFRASTRUCTURE_BE_LANGER 30.JPG!>
221 䊐
Figure 8.28
Post-Fordist infrastructure: proposed markets and stacked open space for the proposed 4th
Mainland Bridge in Lagos.
Copyright © 2012 OMA.
Figure 8.29
Region of risk: coastal zone of the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Rita during the 2005 Atlantic
hurricane season.
Courtesy of NASA.
222 䊐
Figure 8.30 Figure 8.31

Entangled geographies: the overlapping network of Space race: kids sneak through the border fence to swim in
submarine oil pipelines and coastal reefs off the coast of the All-American Canal that divides the US from Mexico and
New Orleans, in the Gulf of Mexico. diverts the Colorado River towards the agricultural region of
Copyright © 2014 OPSYS/Alexandra Gauzza. the Imperial Valley.
Photo: Peggy Peattie.
Figure 8.32
223 䊐
In this body politic and body ecologic then,71 to speak of landscape as

infrastructure is not only to express landscape as an urban form of life and living
language; but, as a form of freedom and sovereignty, it simultaneously proposes
the urban field as process and projection of power.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Adapted from an earlier version of “Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism Beyond

Engineering,” originally published in Infrastructure Sustainability and Design, edited
by Spiro N. Pollalis, Daniel Schodek, Andreas Georgoulias, and Stephen J. Ramos
(London: Routledge, 2012): 276–315.
NOTES
1 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, The American Journal of Sociology 44(1) (July
1938): 1.
2 See James Heintz, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, How Infrastructure Investments
Support the US Economy: Employment, Productivity and Growth (Amherst, MA: Political
Economy Research Institute, 2009).
3 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).
4 See David Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization, Reflections on Post-
Modernism in the American City,” in Post-Fordism: A Reader, edited by Ash Amin
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1994): 361–386.
5 Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012): 19.
6 See America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure (Durham, NC: Duke Press Paperbacks,
1983) by Pat Choate and Susan Walter, and Report Card for America’s Infrastructure
(2009) by the American Society of Civil Engineers, www.infrastructurereportcard.org.
7 See Lewis Mumford, “The Renewal of Landscape,” in The Brown Decades: A Study of
the Arts of America, 1865–1895 (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1931): 60–61. See
also Mumford’s “The Natural History of Urbanization,” in Man’s Role in the Changing
the Face of the Earth, edited by William L. Thomas, Jr. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1956): 382–398.
8 See Geoffrey C. Bowker “Information Mythology. The World of/as Information” in Lisa
Bud-Frierman (ed.) Information Acumen: the Understanding and Use of Knowledge in
Modern Business (London: Routledge, 1994): 231–247.
9 See Knud Bastlund, José Luis Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (New York:
Praeger, 1967).
10 See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941): 823.
11 See “Equipments of Power: Towns, Territories and Collective Equipments,” in Foucault
Live: Michel Foucault Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, edited by Sylvère Lotringer,
translated by Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 105–112.
12 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist
43(3) (November 1999): 380–382.
13 For two critiques of instrumental reason, see Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1947) and André Gorz’s Critique of Economic Reason
(London: Verso, 1989), an English translation of Métamorphoses du Travail.
224 䊐
14 Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 872–873.

15 Lars Lerup, After the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
16 See Erin A. Cech, “Culture of Disengagement in Engineering Education” Science Tech-
nology Human Values 39(1) (January 2014): 42–72.
17 Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
18 See James Scott’s chapter on “Transforming Visions: Authoritarian High Modernism,”
in Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998): 145.
19 Donald Worster, “The Flow of Power through History,” in his Rivers of Empire: Water,
Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Random House , 1985).
20 See Gene Moriarty’s profiling of the colonization effect of engineering as “hyper-
modernism” in The Engineering Project: Its Nature, Ethics, and Promise (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2008): 85.
21 Daniel L. Schodek, Landmarks in American Civil Engineering (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1987): xiii.
22 Engineering plays a prominent role in city building disciplines. Today, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, professional membership of the city building disciplines in 2011
included 26,700 Landscape Architects, 38,400 Urban & Regional Planners, 141,000
Architects, 551,000 Construction Managers, and 971,000 Engineers (combining civil,
mechanical, industrial, electrical, environmental). See Occupational Outlook Handbook,
2010–11 Edition, www.bls.gov/oco. When Norman T. Newton wrote about the develop-
ment of landscape architecture in Design on the Land (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1971), there were over 1,500 members and 1,200 associates
in 1971 compared to only 112 in 1920. (658)
23 John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, CT: Yale
24 Neil S. Grigg et al., Civil Engineering Practice in the 21st Century: Knowledge and Skills
in Design and Management (Reston, VA: ASCE Press, 2001): 103.
25 See Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (New
York: Vintage Books, 1992).
26 See Robert Pool’s discussion on control and collaboration in Beyond Engineering: How
Society Shapes Technology (New York: Oxford, 1997): 215–248.
27 Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 125.
28 Pool, Beyond Engineering, 7.
29 See Todd Shallat, “Prologue: A Nation Builder” and “The West Point Connection” in
Structures in the Stream: Water Science, and the Rise of the US Army Corps of Engineers
(Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1994): 1–9, 79–81.
30 Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press/Blackwell
Publishers, 1999).
31 Jean-Louis Paucelle, “From Taylorism to Post-Taylorism: Simultaneously Pursuing Several
Management Objectives”, Journal of Organizational Change Management 13(5) (2000):
452–467.
32 Christopher Sawyer, “Territorial Infrastructures”in The Mesh Book Landscape/
Infrastructure, edited by Julian Raxworthy and Jessica Blood (Melbourne: RMIT Press,
2004): 275.
33 See Manuel Castells’s chapter on “Space of Flows” in his The Rise of the Network Society
(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006): 407–459.
34 See Giorgio Cucci, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Manieri-Elia and Manfredo Tafuri in The
American City: From the Civil War and the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1979): xi.
225 䊐
35 “Urban population now exceeds rural, more than 51 per cent live in cities and towns,
the Census Announces,” The New York Times, January 14, 1921.
36 See Raymond Mohl’s The Rise of Urban America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2006).
37 Demeter G. Fertis and Anna Fertis, Historical Evolutions of Infrastructure: 15,000 Years
of History (New York: Vantage Press, 1998): 151–152.
38 Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore, “The Rise and Incidence of American
Regionalism” in American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National
Integration (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1938): 5.
39 See Neil Smith, “Academic War over the Field of Geography: The Elimination of
Geography at Harvard, 1947–1951” Annals of the Association of American Geographers
77(2) (June 1987): 155–172.
40 John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1967): 388.
41 Christopher Tunnard, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control (New Haven, CT: Yale
42 Robert Bruegmann Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2006): 220.
43 Sébastien Marot, Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory (London: AA Publications,
2003): 4.
44 See James Corner, Organizational Ecologies: Course Brief (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Graduate School of Design, 2002): 1.
45 Rem Koolhaas, “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” Design Quarterly 164 (Spring
1995): 28–31.
46 Kevin Lynch, “The Pattern of the Metropolis,” Daedalus 90(1) (Winter 1961): 79.
47 Patrick Geddes, “The Valley Plan of Civilization,” The Survey (June 1, 1925): 289.
48 Gary L. Strang , “Infrastructure as Landscape,” Places 10(3) (Summer 1996): 15.
49 Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” in Recovering Landscape: Essays on
Contemporary Landscape Architecture, edited by James Corner (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1999): 233.
50 See Charles Siegel, “The Failures of Planning” and “The Failure of Growth” in his
Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Choices (Berkeley, CA: Preservation Institute,
2010).
51 See Benton Mackaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928): 66–67, 69.
52 Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli, 1995): 969.
53 Bronislaw Szerszynski, “On Knowing What to Do: Environmentalism and the Modern
Problematic,” in Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, edited by
Scott lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Brian Wynne (London: Sage, 1996): 115.
54 Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (New York: Harper &
Row, 1976): sleeve.
55 John Brinkerhoff, “The Public Landscape (1966),” in Landscapes: Selected Writings by J.
B. Jackson, edited by Ervin H. Zube (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press,
1970): 153.
56 Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 379–380.
57 James Corner, “Representation and Landscape,” in Word & Image 8(3) (July–September
1992): 245.
58 James Corner, “Projection and Disclosure in Drawing,” Landscape Architecture 83(5) (May
1993): 66.
59 Howard T. Fischer, Mapping Information: The Graphic Display of Quantitative Information
(Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1982): sleeve.
226 䊐
60 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of

Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster
(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983).
61 See Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner, “The Performative Ground: Rediscovering
The Deep Section,” Scenario 02: Performance (Spring 2012), http://scenariojournal.com/
article/the-performative-ground.
62 James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Intervention,” in
Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 214–215.
63 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Word Itself” (1976–1984), in Discovering the Vernacular
Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984): 8.
64 President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is comparable to
Roosevelt’s National Industry Recovery Act of 1933 conceived after the Great Depression
and the Dust Bowl Decade. See the “New New Deal” issue of Time Magazine 172(21)
(November 24, 2008).
65 Mary P. Anderson, “Groundwater Modeling: The Emperor has No Clothes,” Ground
Water 21(6) (November 1983): 669.
66 See the hydrologist Vit Kleme_ in his “Risk Analysis: The Unbearable Cleverness of
Bluffing,” in Risk, Reliability, Uncertainty, and Robustness of Water Resource Systems,
edited by János Bogárdi and Zbigniew Kundzewicz (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002): 22–29, and James Corner’s “Irony and Contradiction in an Age of
Precision,” in Taking Measure across the American Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1996): 25–37.
67 Andrea Branzi, “The Hybrid Metropolis,” in Learning from Milan: Design and the Second
Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988): 24.
68 See Stuart Elden’s concept of “territory as state technology” in his “Land, Terrain,
Territory,” Progress in Human Geography 34(6) (2010): 799–817.
69 Paul Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time and Social Organization in the
History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in Modernity and Technology, edited by Thomas J.
Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 226.
70 Frederick Olmsted, The Papers of Frederic Law Olmsted: Supplementary Series Volume
I: Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems, edited by Charles E. Beveridge
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015): 83.
71 See André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1980): 11–50.
227 䊐

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6601 LANDSCAPE ESSAYS-A1_246 x 174 mm 30/07/2015 16:40 Page 190

Chapter 8: Is landscape infrastructure?

A narrow and pedantic taxonomy has persuaded us that there is little or

The outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the

Infrastructure has grown in complexity vis-à-vis the urbanization of the world. As

LIVE MODELS, OPEN SYSTEMS

of property have fueled a growing divide between political platforms of environment

ECOLOGY AS REVERSE ENGINEERING

The historic lack of engagement of infrastructure, as territory of design, surprisingly

As the prominent city building professions of the nineteenth and twentieth

Risk and reason

In contrast to the unifying and democratic promises of public infrastructure, diversity

From engineering to design

investment.24 Informed mainly by the recursive and forensic study of failure—from

Predictability and post-Taylorism

In this shift away from disciplinary dominance, alternative modes of spatial

Attempting to alleviate the growing prevalence of crime and congestion,

Unplanning: zoning, after Euclid

urbanization that functions largely as an alternative to the “densely settled cities

From control to contingency

and the “geography” of contemporary urbanization beyond economic and legal

Here, the processes of decentralization—that is, the erosion of economic hierarchy

The recovery of geography in ecology’s nascent agency is both operative and

Mapping as multimedia method

through the making of “composite” drawings, where in plans, sections, views,

In an age where information is being generated more rapidly than it can be

Surface, section, strategy

mappings have agency because of the double-sided characteristic of all maps.

Figure 8.16 Figure 8.17

From grade to ground

a process of research, and projective media of intervention in time. Media becomes

scenarios, section profiles and construction sequences—that enable a level of

a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a “synthetic” space,

Time as territorial medium

The converging project of landscape infrastructure will be contingent on a

1 of reversal, reversibility and reflexivity where more flexible and fluctuating

Across this expanded “plane of services and performances” of urbanization,67

If the shape of land is most visibly transformed by the infrastructure of the

**INSERT ISL_08_INFRASTRUCTURE_BE_LANGER 29.JPG!>

**INSERT ISL_08_INFRASTRUCTURE_BE_LANGER 30.JPG!>

Figure 8.30 Figure 8.31

In this body politic and body ecologic then,71 to speak of landscape as

Adapted from an earlier version of “Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism Beyond

14 Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 872–873.

60 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of

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