Scaling Infrastructure
The Spring 2014 Scaling Infrastructure conference is CAU’s second and final infrastructure conference of our biennial theme that will convene political leaders, infrastructural engineers, design professionals and academicians to discuss groundbreaking ideas on infrastructure. Faced with new economic, political, and environmental challenges, the question of appropriate infrastructural investments and design scales is critical to the future of urbanized territories. The technical and political realities, design possibilities, and social and economic concerns for shaping sustainable infrastructural futures in American and International contexts will be addressed.
A new wave of interest has formed around the idea of resilience and redundancy, or scaling down infrastructure in customized ways to ensure systemic failure does not occur when urban areas are struck by unforeseen events, from economic to environmental catastrophes. In our age of sea level rise, monumental infrastructures may protect cities from flooding or risk of catastrophe from storms, but as we have seen in too many cases, monumental defense barriers can fail with drastic and calamitous results. Vast barrier systems and other single sources of protection require equally large amounts of concentrated innovation, funding, and governance to ensure their long-term success. But what happens when these forces are impossible to align? Similarly, new forms of urbanization demanded in American and International contexts are far different from twentieth century centralization models. What type of infrastructure is appropriate for remote areas where connecting to a main line of transit, energy, water, or logistical supply chain is impossible? Are new technologies changing the need for high-density populations to support infrastructural investments? What new scales of infrastructural research and thinking are going to propel urban form in the future? Is innovation in energy and transportation infrastructures that are flexible, adaptable, and scalable down to individual preferences a near reality?
Scaling Infrastructure program available here
Keynote
Scaling Infastructure
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, City of Chicago
Q&A with Professor Judith Layzer
Recalibrating Infrastructure
Recalibrating Infrastructure will explore the idea of “recalibrating” or scaling-back infrastructure in the context of shrinking cities that face serious declines in population, housing stock, fiscal resources and often political capacity. Speakers will address the new challenge of recalibrating their infrastructure networks, constructed last century for a population often two to three times as large as that presently living in the city. Removing infrastructure would seem a natural solution. Yet a recent study found that “substantial cost savings from decommissioning vacant infrastructure” would not occur, and that mixtures of better management, new technologies, and new design concepts were preferable. Difficult decisions lie ahead, and urbanists will play a key role. Speakers include: Lawrie Robertson, Buro Happold Mayor Dayne Walling, City of Flint Sonja Beeck, Chezweitz Moderator: Nancy Levinson, Places Respondent: Lorena Bello, MIT.
Resilient Infrastructure
Resilient Infrastructure will be organized around the topic of “resilience,” and the newest ideas evolving out of how risk and disaster can be mitigated through redundancy and new scales of infrastructural engineering and design. This panel will address how current technologies are beginning to connect information and resources through organizations and networks. By comparing both top‐down and bottom up approaches, the discussion will address how developing regions are collecting data to monitor changes in the environment. Multi‐scale networks and infrastructural responses can then be designed and built to respond to these connections, which will be at the forefront of how we learn to address and be more prepared to face future challenges. Speakers include: Richard Serino, FEMA Richard Hindle, LSU Alfredo Brillembourg, Urban-Think Tank Adam Klaptocz, SenseFly Moderator: Nancy Levinson, Places Respondent: James Wescoat, MIT.
Micro Infrastructure
This panel will explore the next wave of infrastructures for extremely contrasting urbanizing territories through the idea of micro-infrastructure. How small can we imagine infrastructure, and how does this change the way we think about cities, urbanization, location choice, landscape resources, and design? The idea of “microgrids” will be presented for developing world contexts and urbanizing territories that do not currently have the ability to connect to centralized, existing sources of infrastructural energy or water. The idea of “autonomous infrastructure” will be discussed in relation to future visions for mobility and energy needs of horizontal city forms, where the automobile is the predominant form of transportation. Speakers include: Ken Laberteaux, Toyota Research Institute North America Daniel Sperling, UC Davis Paola Viganò, Studio '09 Scott Kennedy, Masdar Institute Moderator: Jinhua Zhao, DUSP MIT Respondent: Mary Anne Ocampo, MIT.