“Leading design professionals should refuse to be merely producers of high-end cultural icons and luxury housing, and make themselves relevant to every part of the infrastructure challenge, and work to re-instate the public's trust in their authority.” The New Republic (sub. req.)
Related: Impact of Infrastructure Privatization
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a few excerpts:
Sarah Williams Goldhagen on Architecture
American Collapse
by Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Post date 08.16.07 | Issue date 08.27.07
“This country's negligence of its physical plant, its extent and its far-reaching implications, becomes especially evident if we conceive of our urban settlements differently. Dispense with the categories of city, suburb, and exurb; dispense absolutely with the dichotomy of city versus suburb. Instead, consider the city-suburb-exurb nexus as the interwoven entity that it now is: a metropolitan region.”
“Altering our view of the United States to that of a country composed of a collection of metropolitan regions helpfully relegates the local and particularistic qualities of these problems to the background and highlights their commonality instead.”
"Infrastructure is one crucial point at which politics and architecture merge. A country's physical plant should be front and center in the policy agendas of its public officials, and it should be front and center in the intellectual and professional agendas of the professional stewards of its built environment. For many reasons, this is not the case in the United States."
"Infrastructure is the classic public good that the free market does not and cannot provide. On the scale that is necessary, only the federal government can make the difference."
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