>All is not lost. The US digital culture can still produce great stuff like
>this:
I prefer stuff like this. This guy just went from Los Angeles to New York. He just became Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation:
http://www.c-lab.columbia.edu/0162.html
Systems Gone Wild: Infrastructure After Modernity by Kazys Varnelis
For a time, it seemed that US President Barack Obama's first move was going to be to take a page from the WPA and invest heavily in the nation's infrastructure. Played up heavily in the media, investment in infrastructure was to inject massive amounts of capital in the economy and create jobs while simultaneously investing in the nation's future.
But when the House Appropriations Committee introduced its version of the Obama administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan of 2009 - a document that reflects the Obama administration's intents - infrastructure was downplayed, receiving only a fraction of the proposed $800+ billion. That figure is less than what was proposed for digitizing health care records.
The document paints a gloomy picture. Included is the equivalent of less than one year's worth of funding for the Federal Highway Administration (a drop in the bucket, along with $2 billion of some $50 billion needed to modernize existing transit systems), $1.1 billion to improve intercity rail(the Northeast Corridor alone needs over $10 billion of improvements) and $3 billion out of $41 billion for airport infrastructure (the backlogs listed are all from the House document). Instead of a vigorously rebuilt infrastructural future, we are just treading water.1
So what happened? To understand our present predicament - and Obama's strategic retreat from infrastructure - we need to go back, before even the WPA, for a brief history of infrastructure.
Cities grew tremendously in the hundred years between 1860 and 1960, and infrastructure was the foundation for that growth. Trains, streetcar lines, streets and highways allowed inhabitants to rush around with relative ease. As infrastructure filled past capacity and congestion became bad, the public had faith that the experts would solve the problems by constructing new infrastructure - always more capacious and more technologically advanced.
Infrastructure was idealized by modernist architects. Take Vers une Architecture, for example, in which Corbusier extolled the societal transformations that would take place if only the people were to listen to the architect and the engineer. It was, after all, a matter of architecture or revolution. For modernists, a plan and the capacity of a clear idea would bring order to the chaos of the metropolis. In implementing the plan, modern architecture relied on infrastructure above all else.
A city's modernity became nearly equivalent to its infrastructure, as evident in Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris, the ultra-real technological landscapes of Tony Garnier's Cite Industrielle, or the wild, electric fantasies of Antonio Sant'Elia's Citta Nuova. Modern architecture would be nothing but pastiche without engineering to support it - merely new clothes for an old body. The engineer, Le Corbusier concluded, 'puts us in accord with natural law.' Only after the engineer laid down a foundation could the architect start to create beauty through form.
Infrastructure captured the popular imagination as well, particularly in America. There, it was the means by which Americans tamed the frontier, harnessing untamable nature to transform it into paradise for man. Infrastructure was America's first modernism: Americans accepted modernism in their bridges and dams before they accepted it in buildings. With the massive burst of infrastructure building under Roosevelt's New Deal, Americans came to believe that functionalism and technology would lead them to economic prosperity. This reconstructive power of infrastructure is what Obama suggested he might replay with his plan when it was first announced. No doubt many architects warmed to the idea of a reinvigoration of modern ideals, just as the profession seemed to have taken a fatal blow from the economic collapse.
But in the end, Obama didn't turn to infrastructure. By its own admission, his plan underfunds critical infrastructure greatly. It may yet be that Obama sees this only as a temporary stimulus, and will fund infrastructure in its turn through the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank (this stimulus plan was explicitly dedicated to helping 'shovel-ready' projects and these have largely been funded already). But perhaps there are deeper reasons.
Between 2004 and 2008, I led a team of researchers investigating changing conditions of infrastructure in Los Angeles, producing The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles as a result. Los Angeles, for us, was a case study. A particularly interesting city, but one that proved the rule regarding infrastructure rather than the exception.2 Our conclusions were, first and foremost, that a WPA-style infrastructural push is impossible today.
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