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RECAP Hard, Soft, Fast, Slow: Access and Mobility in 21st Century Cities

On April 9th and 10th, the Center for Architecture, Infrastructure and Urbanism held a workshop that brought together scholars, designers, and policy experts. Organized by Tom Wright (Regional Plan Association and Woodrow Wilson School) and Mario Gandelsonas, the workshop focused on issues of transportation planning facing cities in the near future.

“Hard, Soft, Fast, Slow: Access and Mobility” considered the possibilities opened up by the growing trends of regional commuting and personal digital technology.  How do soft systems of communication—smart phones, social media, GPS—change our understanding of existing, hard systems of transportation—roads, rails, airplanes? How can a slow infrastructure respond to the immediacy of tele-media communications and encourage variety, diversity, and new patterns of use that enhance the urban environment? The themes of the workshop were addressed broadly in order to reconsider the effects of an urban monoculture of highways amidst the increasing influence of mobile communications technology.

The Friday evening keynote speech was given by Chris Ward, the Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who assessed his department’s challenges with the World Trade Center Site and reflected on the issues surrounding unglamorous problems like the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Ward’s respondents, Prof. Kenneth Jackson (Columbia), Dean Marilyn Taylor (University of Pennsylvania), and Dean Stan Allen, focused respectively on history, planning, and architecture.

In Saturday’s first panel, Tom Wright moderated a discussion on automobile transportation. Aaron Woolf presented his documentary film on Detroit’s auto industry describing the effects of car-focused urban planning. Prof. Owen Gutfreund (Hunter College) offered a historical perspective on highway planning in the U.S., and illustrated the importance of transportation policy in a world that separates work, leisure, and living spaces. Jon Zeitler (Zipcar) discussed Zipcar’s model for auto transport that benefits from existing infrastructure while decreasing auto use. Representing a perspective from architecture, Paul Lewis presented speculative design projects from his office, Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, that addressed the interaction between cars and cities.

The second panel looked at rail infrastructure and its impacts on urban and regional planning. The panel’s moderator, Petra Todorovich (Regional Plan Association), began the session by presenting the Regional Plan Association’s America 2050 plan. Frederik Pretorius (University of Hong Kong) discussed the special case of Hong Kong’s high urban density and how the government manages rail line expansions. Ariella Masboungi (state architect/planner, France) discussed how sprawling cities in Europe are responding with new modes of transportation like light rail and dedicated bus lines to reinforce density. Wu Jiang (Tongji University, Shanghai) described China’s network of high speed rail lines as a compliment to their highway planning program. Dana Cuff (UCLA cityLAB) explained her idea for post-suburban mobilities in Southern California, and described the challenge creating ‘smart growth’ in post-suburban landscapes. Cuff also suggested that a strong vision for design is what drives good policy, linking two of the main themes of the workshop.

The third panel on digital technologies’ overlaps with transportation, moderated by Mario Gandelsonas, offered new ways to consider transportation questions. Joanna Berzowska (Concordia University, XS Labs) presented her work with new technologies embedded in wearable items that encourage more sensual interaction with the digital. Kristen Purcell (Pew Research Center) described her research on teens’ internet and cell phone use. Axel Kilian reframed how we think about technologies of mobility, from shoes to sedan chairs to eliminating the idea of waiting. Prof. Christine Boyer was skeptical about the newness of new media, and suggested that what might be new was the invisible layer of information that overlays space today.

Overall, the workshop brought together many interesting presentations from different fields that found common points for discussion, and highlighted the challenges facing design and planning disciplines in the future.

*Originally published in from RUMOR 01.02 in Spring 2010 and edited October 10, 2011*

*Sara Stevens is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. Her dissertation, Developing Expertise: Architecture, Construction, and Real Estate in the U.S., 1908-1940 studies the real estate development industry’s adoption and deployment of a new kind of expertise that resulted in a qualitatively different set of professional practices while also influencing urban form—bigger, better, faster. Currently she is writing about the professionalization of real estate developers and how they attempted to create a stable image for their industry by combining moral, economic, and legal standardization while befriending colleagues in allied fields like city planning. She holds a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University, where her research looked at familiar, big-box architectural formats of the suburban landscape and the underlying networks of business and finance that produced them. With a professional degree in architecture from Rice University, she has also worked as an architect in Houston and New York.*

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Slow Infrastructure

The Federal-Aid Highway Act was enacted exactly fifty years ago, when Dwight Eisenhower signed it into law in 1956 from his hospital bed. Rumor has it that Eisenhower drew a three by three grid onto a piece of paper, handed it over to his staff, and told them to base the new highway system on it. The diagram was clearly more symbolic than literal. Even so, the Federal Highway system organized economics, politics, and defense with much the same impact as Thomas Jefferson’s orthogonal delineation of townships and states in 1787.

America’s infrastructure has always hurtled toward the future at breakneck speed: ribbons of concrete shoot across the continent in endless, perfectly straight lines, coming together in metropolitan areas in gravity-defying twists and turns. After Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed the closing of the frontier and before the launching of the space program, these ribbons and loops offered a horizon of possibility.

Fifty years later, the term infrastructure still invokes possibility. Given that the 42,500 mile federal highway system is already deteriorating, requiring reconstruction of 2,000 miles of road per year, the term’s potential lays not so much in highways as in other infrastructures. If networked infrastructures tend to dominate the urban imagination and certainly play an ever significant role in this era of increasing surveillance, the Princeton Urban Imagination Center would like to focus attention on another urban paradox: slow infrastructure. Facets of this topic would include slow infrastructural arteries (parkways, cul-de-sacs), slow infrastructural sites (bodies of water, such as the slow but significant transformation due to global warming of the Upper Hudson Bay, south of the lowest tip of Manhattan), and slow infrastructural bureaucracies (urban innovations at the municipal level are often slowed by state legislation).

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Slow Infrastructure

The Federal-Aid Highway Act was enacted exactly fifty years ago, when Dwight Eisenhower signed it into law in 1956 from his hospital bed. Rumor has it that Eisenhower drew a three by three grid onto a piece of paper, handed it over to his staff, and told them to base the new highway system on it. The diagram was clearly more symbolic than literal. Even so, the Federal Highway system organized economics, politics, and defense with much the same impact as Thomas Jefferson’s orthogonal delineation of townships and states in 1787.

America’s infrastructure has always hurtled toward the future at breakneck speed: ribbons of concrete shoot across the continent in endless, perfectly straight lines, coming together in metropolitan areas in gravity-defying twists and turns. After Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed the closing of the frontier and before the launching of the space program, these ribbons and loops offered a horizon of possibility.

Fifty years later, the term infrastructure still invokes possibility. Given that the 42,500 mile federal highway system is already deteriorating, requiring reconstruction of 2,000 miles of road per year, the term’s potential lays not so much in highways as in other infrastructures. If networked infrastructures tend to dominate the urban imagination and certainly play an ever significant role in this era of increasing surveillance, the Princeton Urban Imagination Center would like to focus attention on another urban paradox: slow infrastructure. Facets of this topic would include slow infrastructural arteries (parkways, cul-de-sacs), slow infrastructural sites (bodies of water, such as the slow but significant transformation due to global warming of the Upper Hudson Bay, south of the lowest tip of Manhattan), and slow infrastructural bureaucracies (urban innovations at the municipal level are often slowed by state legislation).

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Infrastructure’s Domain: Architectural Manifestations of Techno-bureaucratic Systems

What impact do infrastructures have on architecture and urbanism? This conference of graduate student work will contextualize architecture and urbanism within infrastructure, tracking the ways that large technological and bureaucratic systems are made manifest.

Too often architecture and urbanism are analyzed apart from the larger systems of administration and technology that enmesh them. Infrastructure’s Domain will study the morphology of those systems—the forms and designs of fixed installations including industries, institutions, and distribution capabilities that serve society as a whole—to better theorize the spatial implications of infrastructure. How might we read architecture and urbanism within infrastructure’s domain?

A graduate student conference organized by Joy Knoblauch and Sara Stevens.

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PUIC Receives Grant for China Studio

The Princeton Urban Imagination Center has received a three-year grant of $20,000 per year from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) to support the China Studio. The grant from PIIRS will be supplemented by matching funds from a previous donation given to support the Center’s activities by Rob Stewart, a Princeton alumnus. One of the Center’s longest-standing programs, the China Studio sends a group of advanced graduate students from the School of Architecture to Shanghai and Suzhou each fall to study the unique urban conditions, architecture, and landscape of the region. As a two-way, cross-cultural exchange, the studio is a consistent source of creativity for the School of Architecture, with students returning from China to share new design ideas and new ways of looking at 21st century cities and regions. With the grant from PIIRS, the China Studio program can continue its mission for the next three years, engaging Princeton students with global issues facing cities worldwide.

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Twenty-First Century Infrastructure

In collaboration with the Regional Plan Association the PUIC working group has been developing a research program for twenty-first century infrastructure since our 2005 conference on the American City. The “hard” infrastructure systems of the previous age—highways, dams, telephone, and rail lines-facilitated mobility and altered the American landscape in the service of that goal. New, “soft” technologies of the twenty-first century instead focus on accessibility, yet our definition of infrastructure remains the same. The American tendency to associate the term infrastructure with civil infrastructure and public works keeps us focused on twentieth-century models, preventing us from seeing the urgent need to rethink the very idea of infrastructure itself.

Radical changes in new technologies of media, engineering, communication, and information processing have begun to challenge our understanding of infrastructures and the cultures associated with them. Some of the constraints imposed by mobility have been overcome by new technologies in computing and media; others remain, as demonstrated by the growth of train networks, and the vast contemporary economy of transportation. This tension between new and old technologies, between new and old patterns of use, outlines one area of interest for CAUl’s research. How can new infrastructures integrate with traditional ones in the fluid, light, modernity in which we live? How might they affect our existing cities, our understanding of the public sphere, and the roles of future urbanists and architects?

Our research examines the implications of the coupling of hard and soft infrastructures for the potential development of new land use patterns and of new spatial and formal configurations at the macro-scale of the Megaregion, at the meso-scale of metropolitan areas, and at the micro-scale of urban buildings and spaces.

The urgency of the question of infrastructure stems not only from the aging of our “hard” infrastructure but also from the recognition that the “Megaregion” has become the norm as a new form of agglomeration, superseding metropolitan developments of the twentieth century.

Expanding upon Jean Gottman’s 1957 notion of the “Megapolis” as a continuous chain of metropolitan areas, the Megaregion describes the urban growth that currently takes place in extended networks of metropolitan regions linked by environmental systems, transportation networks, economies, and culture. Just as metropolitan regions grew from cities to become the geographical units of the twentieth-century economy, Megaregions, as agglomerations of metropolitan regions with integrated labor markets and infrastructures, are replacing the metropolis. The CAUl research program proposes the state of New Jersey, the geographic center of the Northeastern Megaregion, as an ideal laboratory for the investigation of the new twenty-first century infrastructures and the re-conceptualization and redevelopment of the nation’s extended networks of nineteenth-and twentieth-century “hard infrastructures.” Broad in scope but focused in intent, the trajectories of this research are directed both inward and outward. They include examinations of local sites within the Megaregion as well as other national and international locations that relate to it.

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CALL FOR PAPERS Infrastructure’s Domains

Infrastructure is undeniably political. Recent discussions about infrastructure—such as the widespread recognition of failing roads, bridges, water management, and power grids in the United States—demand a more developed understanding of infrastructure and its embeddedness in landscapes, aesthetic regimes, technologies, and governments. This conference aims to historicize and contextualize the relationship between architecture and infrastructure, as well as the ways that this relationship varies under public or private control.

In particular, the conference will probe the relationship between design and sovereignty in the spatial, sometimes architectural, manifestations of large bureaucratic and technological systems. At times, the design and aesthetics of infrastructure have been used to reinforce sovereignty, either forming territories through incompatible, proprietary systems or by easing the practice of governance. Similarly, the need to govern systems of infrastructure has led to new techniques of representation, from large-scale mapping to abstract functional diagrams. This conference will focus on the overlaps between infrastructure and representation, design, and aesthetics.

Infrastructure’s Domain will focus on the morphology of infrastructure—the forms and designs of fixed installations including industries, institutions, and distribution capabilities that serve society as a whole. More specifically, Infrastructure’s Domain will examine infrastructure from an architectural and urban perspective, asking: how do infrastructures affect cities? How can we learn to read architecture and urbanism within infrastructure’s domain?

Participants are invited to submit papers that address the following questions:

How has architecture responded to infrastructure? What has been the place of architecture in infrastructure’s domain and what role might it have in the future?

What techniques of representation have been instrumental in the design of infrastructure, and how has representation been used to manage, manipulate or market urban infrastructure?

In what ways have infrastructures, and the end-points or registers of their services, been aestheticized? How has design been used to domesticate technologies of infrastructure? When have technological infrastructures tried to mimic nature, or otherwise conceal their presence and power through design?

How have private systems functioned as shared—perhaps even public—infrastructure?

How have infrastructure systems made manifest or concealed inequality?

Do complex technological infrastructures imply a technocracy, and are experts necessary for their regulation and planning? When have designers developed this expertise, and when have they been excluded for lack of expertise? What is government’s responsibility for oversight?

How have specific urban environments responded to their transportation, information, or sanitary infrastructures?

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words with the title and participant’s name clearly identified along with a one-page CV to urbanism@princeton.edu. Please send documents as .doc or .rtf files with abstract and CV in a single file by July 31, 2009.

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Princeton Faculty Publishes “On the Water / Palisade Bay”

On the Water / Palisade Bay is the collaborative initiative of a group of engineers, architects, landscape architects, planners, and students to imagine a “soft infrastructure” for the New York – New Jersey Upper Bay by developing interconnected infrastructures and landscapes which rethink the thresholds of water, land, and city. It presents a new coastal planning strategy which not only mitigates potential damage from storms but also provides new ground for recreation, ecologies, agriculture, and urban development. With climate change and sea level rise acting as catalysts for this work, a quantitative analysis of dynamic systems serves as the foundation for this new soft infrastructure which both enriches the ecology of the urban estuary and creates a vibrant culture on the water.

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PUIC Director Speaks at the 2009 “Meeting of the Minds” Summit in NYC

PUIC Director Mario Gandelsonas delivered an address on Soft Infrastructure as part of the Meeting of the Minds 2009 leadership summit in New York City. Convened by the Urban Age Institute and presented by Toyota, the event brought together more than 130 leaders from commercial, non-profit and public sector organizations to discuss the growth, development and governance of American cities. Other conference presenters included Janette Sadik Khan of the NYC-DOT, Tom Cochran of the US Conference of Mayors and PUIC Advisor Tom Wright, from the Regional Plan Association and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.

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PUIC Receives Global Collaborative Research Grant

The Center for Architecture, Urbanism, and Infrastructure  is the recipient of a grant from Princeton University’s Global Collaborative Research Fund. The award provides three years of support for a joint working group between the PUIC and the IEA (Institut d’Etudes Avancées in Paris). The PUIC and the IEA will serve as institutional anchors for the working group, whose focus will be twenty-first century urbanism and infrastructure in Europe, North America, and Asia.

The challenges facing the global city in the twenty-first century exist across national boundaries; likewise the expertise needed to solve them crosses institutional and disciplinary boundaries. The working group will bring together researchers focused on these problems and will foster collaboration on urgent issues of contemporary urbanism and infrastructure, presenting the work of Princeton faculty and graduate students in an international forum. The networking and discussion produced by the working group will enhance the standing of Princeton’s scholars abroad while simultaneously enriching the intellectual environment in their home departments. Additionally, leveraging the PUIC’s existing connections with China, this project will position the PUIC as a pivot between Asian and European networks.

Twenty-First Century Infrastructure


The grant allows the center to pursue a research project on Twenty-First Century Infrastructure to explore alternative ways of thinking about urban infrastructure in the new century. Today, the city is everywhere and nowhere. In an era of urbanization and globalization, cities and metropolitan regions around the globe are increasingly marked by the spatial effects of the distributed networks of communication, resources, finance, and migration that characterize contemporary life. Preeminently spatial, the emergence of a global urban culture has had complicated aesthetic, economic, physical, political, and social effects. To explore these issues, scholars from the PUIC, the Institute d’Etudes Avancées in Paris, and China will present their research in a series of seminars and working sessions on selected topics such as Transportation, Energy, Digital Infrastructure, Water and Landscape, and Design. The PUIC research agenda recognizes the need for an expertise that is able to bridge national, institutional and disciplinary boundaries in order to confront the problems facing global cities and regions. The project brings together diverse scholarship to better understand how urban infrastructure can respond to the challenges of a new century.

The Global Collaborative Research Fund will support a coordinated collective research exchange, which would manifest itself as a series of seminars, workshops, conferences, web and print publications, and public dialogues. Here in Princeton, the Center would offer a regular inter-faculty seminar (including advanced graduate students and outside visitors) on urban topics that would enable faculty to share their research and expertise. The Center is currently planning the first seminar on Transportation to be held in Princeton in Fall 2009.