Giving/Holding/Taking Ground

While infrastructure, landscape, and architecture have been intertwined for time immemorial, this reciprocal relationship was reinvigorated approximately a decade ago in Stan Allen’s seminal “Infrastructural Urbanism” in Points + Lines: Diagrams for the City. In this article, he makes seven propositions, the four most salient maxims to landscape and this thesis being:

“Infrastructure works not so much to propose specific buildings on given sites, but to construct the site itself.”

“Infrastructures are flexible and anticipatory.”

“Infrastructures accommodate local contingency while maintaining overall continuity.”

“Although static in and of themselves, infrastructures organize and manage complex systems of flow, movement, and exchange.”

These concepts have thoroughly permeated contemporary theory and practice, and with the formulations of infrastructural urbanism, landscape urbanism, and most recently ecological urbanism, landscape has taken the opportunity to emerge as a leading, rather than lagging field. No longer merely taking inspiration from architecture, the kitsch, land art, or minimal modernism, landscape architecture has in fact mined its own past to build its future.

Looking to these historical trends in more depth and breadth, the field finds itself at an inflection point, and much as economics emerged from philosophy during the Enlightenment to dominate future discourse, so too landscape shows the potential to emerge from civil engineering and architecture. This renaissance has been, in part, inspired by critically revisiting the great landscape architecture projects at the founding of the field. Rather than addressing the City Beautiful movement’s immediately tangible goals such as hygiene, democracy, and poverty, landscape must grapple with the quest for the City Sustainable, where we face dynamic, nuanced issues climate change, empowerment, and equity.

As such, landscape has recently begun to reevaluate the regionalist perspectives of the 1920s and 1930s. Conceived in a similar economic times to the past decade and our own currently, these large scale ecologic and socioeconomic plans were well suited to a climate of greater governmental intervention and private market risk. This financial and political instability has forced us to reexamine long-held assumptions, not dissimilar to how dramatic social change instigated many aspects of postmodernism. We are currently in a period of reconsidering the achievements (and indeed problems) of megastructures created by engineers and megaforms theorized by architects, and we should realize that our present infrastructural and climate crises find their roots in the energy shocks and neoliberalization of the 1970s and 1980s.

As the above begins to demonstrate, a contemporary subject as rapidly changing as modern infrastructure, urban areas, and the landscape is especially difficult to theorize, and it is all too easy for an academic paper or design to fall victim to the times in which it was written. This essay will therefore take a historical approach to its analysis rather than charting the path of a speculative future. Consequently, as alluded to previously, it may be unsurprising that this paper is in turn influenced by the perceived collapse of the internet, housing, and credit bubbles in recent years, which has had the effect of casting doubt and uncertainty on prior assumptions and claims of new paradigms.

The past two years of a US president who has repeatedly promised change have created both a time for reflection and a renewed can-do attitude for the future. As change is an inevitable and constant phenomenon which has accelerated ever since the Enlightenment, the reader is encouraged to move back and forth across time and scale, seeking what the simplest, clearest ideas might be – distilling, but neither reducing nor reinventing the past century’s thought on and built work in the industrialized city. In this light, “Giving/Holding/Taking Ground” seeks not to establish an unprecedented new paradigm (a hackneyed design formulation), but rather redefine with nuance the strategic adaptation of our cities and infrastructure to a changing climate and century.