The timing could hardly be better for "The Infrastructural City," a new collection of essays on Los Angeles edited by Kazys Varnelis, director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University. A book with a title like that, unless written by Mike Davis or John McPhee, would typically have a tough time steering clear of the remainder bin. But in recent weeks, as the details of the stimulus package were being hammered out in Congress, the same few questions moved near the top of the political agenda not just in Washington but in cities around the country: In 2009, what is infrastructure, exactly?
LA Times Critic's Notebook
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what a let down for all those hawk eyes on the infrastructure money! be careful of all the usual suspects though...
"Pragmatism, efficiency and human relationships seem to be far higher on his (obama's) list of priorities than any corner of the aesthetic realm."
thank obama for that.
city is as beautiful as ever. it is a state of mind. we don't need fancy railway stations to celebrate the decorated consumer hubs at every stop.
give me extra mile of public transportation instead.
"Are you willing to trade notoriety, present or future, for work?"
well, let's see how the hotel developers interact with the brand name architects? "urbanism" in the hands of real estate opportunists have never gone further than boutique level. have fun!
*that last comment by me only goes as far as to the addressee(s)...
they know who they are. people who jumps on every vacum zone and design glass housing along the la river and (try to) come back as heroes dishing out "urbanist" medals to night club magnets...
lets hope they add another lane in either direction to the 405...
i like his writing overall, so no disrepect intended,
at least for his serious writing, but
re: his commentary/blog: god damn, kazys is a pompous ass!
I kinda wish Chris Hawthorne could have managed, somewhere in the course of his review, to utter the phrase "landscape architect".
I have to recluse myself from this thread since Chris didn't mention my essay....
on infrastructural city and tunnels
we make money not art book review
The first academic paper I've found exploring the topic...
Monstadt, Jochen. "The urban political ecology of networked infrastructures: What can we learn from technology studies and urban studies?"
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Sheraton Boston and the Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston, MA, Jul 31, 2008 Online 2009-02-23
Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Networked urban infrastructures like energy, water, wastewater, and transport systems are "material mediators between nature and the city" (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000). They can be regarded as both, a vital root cause of many environmental problems, while also offering important keys for reducing the ecological footprint of cities. These socio-technical systems are co-evolving in a dialectic relationship with cities: On the one hand the development of the modern city was made possible only by urban infrastructures that guide and facilitate urban functioning and urban life in a multitude of ways. On the other hand the urban environment was a precondition for the development of these "urban ma-chines" and still today cities are the loci and foci of socio-technological and socio-environmental innovations that sustain the development of networks. The co-evolution between cities and technical infrastructures and the ways in which we develop, govern and renew our infrastructures in cities are thus key matters of urban political ecology and societal relationships with nature.
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