Tag: infrastructure

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Carmageddon and Failing Los Angeles Infrastructure

On July 16th, the unthinkable happened in Los Angeles. Arguably the busiest stretch of freeway in America closed. For 53 hours, 10 lanes from the 10 to the 101 freeway, adjacent to the beach communities of Santa Monica and Venice, remained impassable for all users. Overextended in its capacity, the 405 freeway required partial demolition of the Mulholland Bridge at the Sepulveda Pass, making room for a single, added HOV lane. For one weekend, from Friday night to Monday morning, locals and tourists alike were forced to re-map and re-navigate the city, without its 405 thoroughfare.

Proclaimed Carmageddon by the news media, the closure of the 405 freeway was over-hyped. Flashing signs warned of the pending construction on every roadway, inside and outside city limits, well over a month before the closure’s occurrence. The citizens of Los Angeles were poised to expect nothing less than a complete city shutdown.

Instead the 405 closure produced an unexpected surprise; Angelenos avoided utilizing the infrastructure that defines the identity of the city with its traffic jams and commuting nightmares. The anticipated heavy traffic and chaos unpredictably resulted in a weekend free of sigalerts and traffic warnings. All traffic maps glowed a bright green hue, indicating calm roadways. Instead of hopping in their cars, people were biking on nearby trails, attending local festivals, and exploring their own backyards. The freeway closure was an awakening for Angelenos who generally take their mobility and city for granted. Local neighborhood events flourished and small businesses saw a surge in commerce. The 405 closure highlighted the ability of Angelenos to enjoy their surrounding neighborhoods and to simply stay home.

Los Angeles is a city long familiar with the limits and trappings of static freeway infrastructure. As far back as 1924, traffic was highlighted as a civic issue. In a landmark document called the Major Traffic Street Plan,[1] prepared by city planners Frederick Law Olmstead, Harlan Bartholomew, and Charles Cheney; parkways (now know as freeways) were circumscribed on the sprawling landscape in response to escalating congestion issues. Since the creation of the modern freeway network in the 1950’s and 1960’s, traffic has thus become a staple in the everyday life an Angeleno.

As a conurbation with over 160 miles of freeway and 6,500 miles of street.[2] Los Angeles is feeling the pinch of freeway reconstruction and expansion at scale beyond most American cities. In a 2009 report, The American Society of Civil Engineers highlighted the failing infrastructure in Los Angeles including our roads and bridges, making conditions seem dire for our growing city.[3] As the slow road to recovering and rebuilding our network of mobility begins, perhaps the best lesson learned from Carmageddon is that our roads do not define us. Instead we as citizens and users define the city of Los Angeles. By our actions, we have the ability to shift the debate of traffic and roads to one of community.

Notes

[1] Bartholomew, H, C.H. Cheney, and F. L Olmstead. Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles. Los Angeles: 1924. Print.

[2] Web. 17 Aug 2011. <http://www.ladottransit.com>

[3] 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, 2009. Web. 17 Aug 2011.

Jessica Varner is an architect, editor, writer, and guest contributor to the PUIC blog. Founder of the publications studio SmallerLarge, Ms. Varner works in the realm of architecture, print, and multimedia communication to bring awareness to the role architecture, cities, and infrastructure have in shaping our environment. Prior edited titles include *Paul Rudolph: Writing on Architecture* and *Retrospecta 06/07* with the Yale School of Architecture. Her most recent edited title with *Michael Maltzan No More Play*, was produced by Hatje Cantz. Ms. Varner received a B.A. from University of Nebraska and Master of Architecture degree from Yale University.

Photograph by Carl Chu.

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Infrastructure in the 21st Century

While the introduction of the car produced radical changes in the urban structure, the introduction of the new technologies is causing a similar shift in the role of the car as the dominant means of transportation in the US.  In fact, the car is incompatible with the perceptual demands of telemediatization. On the other hand, public transportation, such as the train and the airplane, are rapidly adapting to these new demands. The incompatibility of driving and telemediatization presupposes the need for forms of transportation that allow the mobile twenty-first-century individual to maintain contact.[1] The transportation needs of the mobile, telemediated individual will certainly promote in the middle and long term a fundamental restructuring of the cities themselves.[2]

— Mario Gandelsonas, “Slow Infrastructure”, 2009.

Mario Gandelsonas, the director of the Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure, wrote an article in 2009 on the impact of new media on the car-based low-density urbanism that characterizes the contemporary American City. New media has changed our behavior, and we increasingly become accustomed to the accessibility and immediacy of everything. Gandelsonas argues that the  new accessibility and immediacy will have a profound effect in the American car based mobility infrastructure and will require new urban models that take into account the role of new media.

From the chart above we see the confirmation of his hypothesis regarding the incompetence of the car-based infrastructure in facilitating our technology-based lives. The effect of the new media, the recent increase in the price of oil, the recession, and the rise in unemployment have flattened the growth of Vehicles Miles Travelled since 2005, with the absolute growth decreasing from 60,000,000 miles per year in 1986 to 20,000,000 today.

Notes

[1] The dangers of driving while using cell phones for calls or for texting is increasingly leading states to prohibit cell phone use by drivers.  Similarly, some teenagers prefer to be driven by parents so they can keep texting their friends, or prefer to text friends in the car with them to avoid being overheard. See  Laura M. Holsen, “Text Generation Gap: UR 2 Old (JK)”, *New York Times*,  March 9, 2008.

[2] See America 2050, Regional Plan Association: a National plan for the year 2050.  “As metropolitan regions continued to expand throughout the second half of the 20th century their boundaries began to blur, creating a new scale of geography now known as the megaregion”.

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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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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.