Landscape As Infrastructure

According to a national report on brownfields redevelopment titled Recycling America’s Land (USCM 2006), more than 400,000 sites with real or perceived environmental hazards dot the American landscape today. That legacy is estimated to be worth more than $2 trillion in devalued property. Underlying this legacy is a major network of post-war infrastructures—airports, harbours, roads, sewers, bridges, dikes, dams, power corridors, terminals, treatment plants—that is now suffering major decay from lack of repair and maintenance (ASCE 2008, Infrastructure Canada 2007–2008, Choate and Walter 1983). In revisiting a series of milestone events in the history of North America, this paper draws a cross-section through phases of industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to track how the necessity for infrastructure accidentally emerged from crisis and failure. A series of patterns and shifts are identified to expose the paradoxical, sometimes toxic relationship between pre-industrial landscape conditions and modern industrial systems. The underlying objective of this essay is to redefine the conventional meaning of modern infrastructure by amplifying the biophysical landscape that it has historically suppressed, and to reformulate landscape as a sophisticated, instrumental system of essential resources, services, and agents that generate and support urban economies. Three contemporary streams of development including urban ecologies, bio-industries, and waste economies are explored briefly to discuss future fields of practice.

[1]  P. Sutter.  “A Retreat from Profit”: Colonization, the Appalachian Trail, and the Social Roots of Benton MacKaye's Wilderness Advocacy , 1999, Environmental History.

[2]  D. Cosgrove.  Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination , 2001 .

[3]  Peter Annin,et al.  The Great Lakes Water Wars , 2006 .

[4]  William G. Vanderbok.  The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century , 2005 .

[5]  Anne Graham,et al.  The living city , 2009 .

[6]  Sarah Reich,et al.  The Economics of Low-Impact Development: A Literature Review , 2007 .

[7]  John Kenneth Galbraith.  The New Industrial State , 1967 .

[8]  Globalization and deindustrialization: A city Abandoned , 1996 .

[9]  Michael Hough.  THE URBAN LANDSCAPE - THE HIDDEN FRONTIER* , 1988 .

[10]  Paul Hawken,et al.  The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability , 2010 .

[11]  Richard Sṫites.  Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution , 1988 .

[12]  G. P. Stone,et al.  Urban Zoning and Land Use Theory. , 1965 .

[13]  Pat Choate,et al.  America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure , 1983 .

[14]  Alan Berger,et al.  Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America , 2006 .

[15]  D. Murphey,et al.  The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century , 2006 .

[16]  Eric Carlsen,et al.  The Economics of Recycling , 1973 .

[17]  G. Savage.  Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York the Last Two Hundred Years , 2002 .

[18]  Joel Garreau,et al.  The Nine Nations of North America , 1981 .

[19]  Peter George,et al.  Biodiesel: Growing a New Energy Economy , 2005 .

[20]  Niall Kirkwood,et al.  Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape , 2003 .

[21]  S. Sassen,et al.  Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. , 1999 .

[22]  Robert Bruegmann.  Sprawl: A Compact History , 2005 .

[23]  John A. Hoornbeek.  The Promises and Pitfalls of Devolution: Water Pollution Policies in the American States , 2005 .

[24]  Paul A. Bosela,et al.  Love Canal Tragedy , 2007 .