Introduction: Architecture and Urban Infrastructure Landscapes

2018

This article argues for the importance of social imagination in the understanding of urban infrastructures, especially those designed and built by engineers. It begins by defining social imagination as image-based systems of representation and values that are shared by various collective stakeholders concerned with infrastructure, such as engineers, but also politicians, administrators, operators, maintenance technicians and indeed users, and then introduces a tripartite model of infrastructure. Infrastructure is interpreted as the result of the interactions between a material basis, professional organizations and stabilized socio- technical practices, and social imagination. The notion of network is interpreted from such a perspective. Its dependence on imagination is outlined. Through two case studies, the nineteenth-century networked metropolis, epitomized by Haussmann’s Paris, and the rise of the contemporary smart city perspective, the role of social imagination in the conception of urban infrastructure is analyzed further. What seems at stake in the transition towards the smart city is the increased importance given to occurrences, events and scenarios as the basis for urban infrastructure regulation.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008

There has been a profusion of work in recent years exploring the links between infrastructure and the city. This has entailed a conceptualization of cities and infrastructure that recognizes their mutual constitution and the inherently political nature of networked urban infrastructure. In introducing this symposium, we find that a comparative approach to infrastructure can reveal a diversity of ways in which the urban fabric is produced, managed and distributed, and comes to matter in everyday life. We argue for a more globally informed conceptualization of the politics of infrastructure by exploring three key themes in the symposium: fragmentation, inequality and crisis.

Architecture is closely yet paradoxically connected to the two basic and complementary human instincts; to construct and to destruct, in other words to live and to die. Therefore, architecture and urbanism can be considered as the spatial dimensions of an ideological war of different interest groups in cities. Such a war mainly manifests itself as the polarisation between corporate sector and public sector, global and local, modern and traditional. Planning acts as a means of capitalist control over the urban (public) space under a macro-orthodoxy approach despite the public reaction via manipulation of public space through; microurbanism in urban-leftovers and queer-spaces, reclamation of landfills, and ephemeral architecture. A large body of community seem to resist through guerrilla war tactics of architecture against the comprehensive strategic war plans, technoscientific artillery, and devoted and well-trained troops of neo-liberal corporate bodies. Who will survive in such a relentless spatial war depends largely on the development of counter-strategies and accurate calculations based on game theory. The chapter will address the issue of reconstruction and resilience of cities with particular reference to the case of Istanbul, her transformation zones and conservation areas. Hence, the study will focus on urban paradigm shift and complexity of Istanbul as a multi-cultural, multi-layered metropolitan city in a post-modern era. The article intends to develop alternative strategies towards reshaping urban environment via architecture primarily by analysing the morphology of new urban spaces and emergent forms of life. Consequently, architecture of cities is argued as a para-military instrument for the tactical deployment of conflicting ideologies into an ongoing state of socio-cultural battle between opposing parties of the city.

One of the densest rail networks in the world, a density of highways exceeding three times the European average and in the density ranking of canal networks, Belgium comes in second. 1 This intensively knitted network of transport infrastructure is counterparted by a dispersed urbanisation pattern. Besides the constellation of five metropolitan regions (such Brussels or Antwerp), this urbanised landscape shares spatial characteristics with those which have been denominated in the past as 'citta diffusa', 'urban sprawl' or 'periferia. 2 Composed out of scattered patches of urban, industrial or recreational program and agricultural relicts, the average Belgian territory forms a low density fragmented reality. 3 The correlation between the development of this dense transport infrastructure network and the urbanisation process, remains however an underexposed item in the history of planning and urbanism. In common research and design practice, infrastructure and urbanism belong to different disciplinary domains. 4 While the first one is claimed by the engineer, occupied by criteria such as optimal technical performance, safety or feasibility, the discipline of urbanism is often situated on the transition between architecture, social and policy science. Both are the subject and object of different journals, departments and designers. Also their historiography shows little common ground. While the first one concentrates on the developing and perfectioning of the network and its benchmarks or analyzes the technological evolution, the history of urbanism chooses systematically the perspective of the traditional city. The concentric growth of the classic nuclear city, adding built belts along centripetal patterns of transport, is well documented, but outside this specific morphological context, the conception of infrastructure and its attendant urbanisation patterns remain treated a black box. 5

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Infrastructure is commonly perceived through the interpretive monopoly of hegemonic frames of modernity, leading to the frequent oversight of everyday infrastructures. Extensive capital-intensive infrastructures that are fully integrated and have paled into the background of everyday life are commonly dismissed, criticized, or misconstrued as deteriorating, incongruous, and in need of repair and reinforcement to "measure up." Similarly, ordinary and hybrid techno-popular infrastructures are frequently demeaned as alternative, informal, secondary, less modern, and not belonging. In an era where preference and priority are given to shiny new things and innovations, everyday infrastructures are seldom acknowledged as substantive modes of operation in their own right. This article advocates a shift in perspective. Drawing illustrative cases from eastern Africa, I examine everyday infrastructures as critical sites of reference for analyzing, theorizing, and organizing the urban. Rather than starting from a preconceived notion of modernity, I examine everyday infrastructures on their own terms. I propose a series of registers-incomplete relationalities, mundane temporalities, and heterogeneous modernities-to stimulate a reappraisal of how we view, read, and think about infrastructure. Accordingly, I reiterate the need to reorient the foundational parameters of infrastructure, advocating for a decentered and heterodox perspective that emphasizes infrastructural plurality, multiplicity, and inherent incompleteness.

2011

In "The Right to the City" Henri Lefebvre states that urban praxis requires "places of simultaneity and encounters" that make room for the fluid, shifting relationships of everyday life and social interaction (Lefebvfre 1996). Designers cannot create these relationships; they come from the people who actually inhabit the city. Designers can, however, "clear the way" and "give birth to the possible" by creating opportunities for praxis to occur. This paper discusses how contemporary design activism realizes Lefebvre's "right to the city" through techniques rooted in historical participatory design. It presents examples from the work of Aldo Van Eyck and Lucien Kroll and builds on these with the work of the contemporary activist designers Teddy Cruz and Urban Think Tank. These designers approach design as a facilitator of social interactions that can be shaped to meet the needs of diverse users and generate new types of social and economic relationships. Designed as systems rather than objects, their projects are open-ended and flexible while remaining functional and they make use of the informal systems already operating in their communities. These projects not only serve needs through spatial infrastructure but also create opportunities for urban praxis by operating as social infrastructure. Disciplines Architectural History and Criticism | Architecture Comments This paper license under a Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5

Landscape Journal, 2011

How architects means today the reality has to be? From South America to China, the hyper-metropolis, is paradoxical in its inhumanity. Is the economics and financial system a degenerate form of ideology, or an implicit destiny in the construction of the city of the past, unable to accept and include or even resist the social and economic transformations of our time? Or the European city can still set an example or an alternative to global mega-cities? The uniquely instrumental ability, or, the ability of architecture to materialize the idea of a city, or more generally the idea of space, is an assumption of this argument, and yet, although we can be certain that this capacity is always expressed, by Renaissance treatises up to the heteronomous expressions as «S, M, L, XL» which urges us to take a position as architects on the contemporary city is its aesthetic reason.

Spatium, 2020

The aim of this paper is to research the relations between the contemporary networked context and transformations in the understanding of architectural and infrastructural spaces, and to research the main models of fluidity within this relation. The contemporary urban context is characterized by globalization, transculturalism and increased technological development, which simultaneously change the everydayness, usage and perception of urban spaces and architecture. New networking phenomena occurring on informational, communicational and spatial levels transform the city and its architecture into constant processes of flows. Fluidity is positioned as the main problem of this research, simultaneously causing, and manifesting in, transformations of contemporary spatial conditions where the notion of flow becomes the new spatial quality. This research is focused on one of the main spatial manifestations of the fluidity phenomenon in contemporary cities - the dispersion of the boundary ...