Shifts in the complexity of infrastructural design and the rise of public awareness and agency, from the micro to the macro scale, have changed conditions for construction and design, bringing design to the fore. Marcel Smets, professor of urbanism at KU Leuven, former State Architect of Flanders, Belgium and author with Kelly Shannon of “The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure,” spoke to Jessica Bridger about the rise of the designer, and why escalators might be better than cable cars.
What is the relationship between huge elements of infrastructure and the human scale, and how must design mediate?
As the great urbanist Manuel Sola Morales used to say, design is important at the scale of the kilometer and at the scale of the centimeter. That summarizes what infrastructure is about – whichever kind of infrastructure we are looking at, be it at a regional scale or the scale of a city, it affects people in a very personal way. How it transforms, inhibits or enlarges their mobility, for example, or in the way that its physical intervention impacts their daily lives – it is always at the scale of the individual. I think that if we are not designing infrastructure at both the scale of the kilometer and the centimeter, then we risk missing the real issues.
Has the way that we construct and conceive of infrastructure changed as a result of apparent increased awareness of its consequences?
In recent decades we have seen the results of actions that come from the bottom-up in the form of action groups of all kinds, reacting against a wide range of projects across the globe. We have seen this effect grow as people have become more educated and aware of how to change the world around them and how to stop things they don’t like. Large infrastructure projects in the 1950s and 1960s in western Europe and North America were the concern of – and controlled by – technocrats and politicians who imposed huge projects on society, supposedly for the good of all and the progress of modernity.
It is now almost impossible to realize a large piece of infrastructure without discussing it with all the stakeholders involved, because consensus is now required for such projects.
Typically we think of engineers as the authors of infrastructure projects. If we think of stakeholder engagement or the idea of the human interface, is this changing into something we associate with design?
Engineers used to design all pieces of infrastructure – for example, the US Army Corps of Engineers or the French Administration Ponts et Chausées designing highways. Typically you could do a university diploma called civil engineering that led to the design of infrastructure. The field was viewed as one of technical criteria in combination with economical criteria, and of course without really looking at the effects on the city. Or, if considered at all, the effects were only considered in terms of creating greater accessibility in a global, regional and national network, hence the tendency to bring motorways as close as possible to urban cores and so on.
Now things have shifted to a position where that method has become unacceptable. Even more, the complexity of current infrastructure projects has become much too difficult for the engineers. They are simply not trained for it. This is why designers, architects and landscape architects have increasingly become the central protagonists in the creation and design of infrastructure. These professions are good at solving multiple problems at the same time. Design is about solving spatial problems within difficult programs and the ambitions of the client – and not just clients like the government, but also clients from the bottom up. By necessity, designers have become much more important in the creation of infrastructure. This started when big engineering companies began including a landscape architect within their group to make themselves more credible, but now the landscape architects, the architects and the designers are leading these projects and groups, especially during the design phase.
Where is this happening?
When I was the state architect for the government of Flanders, I saw a lot of competition presentations for infrastructure projects, and in all of the groups it was always the designers who were the spokesmen. Of course the technical and economic members of the teams had to do their work, but the ones who had to “win” the pitch for the group were the designers. This is relatively new and has arisen over the past ten or fifteen years.
Marcel Smets is a professor of urbanism at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He has been active in the area of history and theory with monographs about Huib Hoste and Charles Buls, as well as reviews about the development of the concept of green suburbs in Belgium and the country’s recovery after 1914. He has written articles of architectural criticism for publications such as Archis, Topos, Lotus, and Casabella, and has served as a jury member for many competitions. He was a founding member of ILAUD and visiting professor at both the University of Thessalonka and Harvard University’s GSD. He has also sat on the scientific commission of EUROPAN since its inception.
He was the chief developer of the widely publicized and highly praised transformation of the area around Leuven station, and for town planning projects which include Antwerp city center, Hoeilaart, Turnhout, Rouen, Genoa, and Conegliano. Currently, Smets’s research focuses principally on landscape and infrastructure.
Christoph Gielen is a photographer who specializes in exploring the intersection of art and environmental politics. Gielen’s award-winning work has been featured at TEDtalks and at the BMW Guggenheim lab, extensively published, and exhibited internationally.
All images in this article are part of his book:
Ciphers
Ed.: Christoph Gielen
with contributions by Galina Tachieva, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Susannah Sayler, Johann Frederik Hartle and Edward Morris.
96 pages, 95 images
hardcover, 29.5 x 25.5 cm
Jovis Publishers, 2013
How else has infrastructure changed? Can infrastructure ever be more than just a delivery system, and have designers influenced a kind of “value added” proposition for infrastructure design?
The economic and financial crisis that we are living in has had consequences for public expenditure. If we look at the things public budgets can pay for now, they tend to only be necessities – not things judged to be superfluous. Infrastructure is often seen as an absolute necessity. For example, if there are limited funds for beautification, or parks, plazas, or landscapes, because they are seen as superfluous – regardless of whether they truly are or not – designers are realizing that if there is only money for infrastructure then why not make the infrastructure also a park or a public space? The attitude is “why not make city life better through the infrastructure?” and this idea of combination helps to get designers more involved. This might not be new – for example, Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace in Boston is a network of parks as infrastructure – but the trend is certainly increasing.
What is an example of a recent project where the design and infrastructural elements have come together in a way that you find exemplary, in a way that improves the urban environment?
The Veronica Rudge Green Prize for Urban Design was just awarded by Harvard University to two projects: the Metro do Porto in Portugal and to the MetroCable cable car project in Medellín, Colombia. But it is the escalators in Medellín, which connect the favelas to the ground level, that are really the one of the finest projects to be realized recently. They connect the favelas with the metro system, and the city with the favela, strengthening community connections. At the landings between escalator sections other programs such as schools or libraries, provide program elements to anchor the circulation. The escalators seem to make a better urban environment than the cable cars, where the point-to-point system with stations is not as continually active as the escalators, which function almost like footpaths. Projects like these have had a profound effect in Medellín, where drug and gang activity has been driven out through changes in mobility systems. That is amazing. p
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