Cities, Infrastructure, and Nature:
A Vision for Urbanism

The increasingly rapid pace and ever increasing scale of urban expansion occurring across the globe calls for a careful examination of the vision outlined by the U.N. for the cities of the future. One might seek to break down the challenge in this issue of Tvergastein - of understanding how cities are made - and begin the process by looking at how cities are defined, how cities work, and how they evolve in the complex processes understood as urbanization. Landscape architecture, a professional practice that is traditionally associated with the design of private gardens, open spaces, and civic parks like Central Park in New York, has been working towards these ends by expanding its field of operation to re-examine the way in which the basic functions and needs of the city are delivered through the various forms of infrastructure systems. The response to the challenge set by the U.N.'s vision from emerging theory and practice in this field is to suggest new means of delivering urban needs in the form of landscape infrastructure; inviting interdisciplinary collaboration to investigate and test out not only how cities are made, but also how existing cities can be remade to make them safer, resilient to environmental shock and social changes, and inclusive for all community members.

Defining the city

The processes of agglomeration and concentration of both capital and people that occurred during the industrial period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to shape cities like London and New York have strongly affected ideas of what a city is, and how it is defined. These traditional distinctions between urban centres and rural peripheries which were even clearer in ancient and medieval cities within defensive walls have played a central role in urban theory, planning practice, and policy. With the proliferation of automobile use and suburban development following the Second World War, this physically clear distinction began to evaporate as suburban development and large-scale industries began to swallow up the countryside surrounding the city. Rather than increasingly dense cities, now ubiquitous forms of sprawling urban development compose major urbanised regions make it difficult to determine where one city begins, and another ends.

Urbanists Neil Brenner and Christian Schmidt argue that the prevailing horizontal patterns of urbanization have rendered the old models of the city “obsolete as an analytical tool in social science”, as even the areas which fall well outside of traditional city cores have become integral parts of the urban fabric1. Every city across the world has become increasingly connected to the global economies and communications networks which facilitate the transportation of materials, goods, and people, and are subject to the larger patterns of both climate and culture to a degree rarely experienced in human history. This interconnection also works more closely within national and regional levels, as cities like Phoenix and Beijing rely on vast canal systems to bring in freshwater supplies for food production, drinking water, and industrial use. These discrete physical infrastructure systems make the reach of cities explicitly clear, yet the hidden connections between city and periphery are also as pervasive but more easily forgotten in the aisles of supermarkets and shopping malls. In this sense, the rural-urban dichotomy no longer provides an accurate framework to describe the increasingly decentralised urban regions found all across the globe, and the broad influence even dense cities carry over larger areas. With modern cities relying on vast systems of service and support networks to deliver the essential goods and materials required for daily life, the discussion moves to focus on infrastructure and its essential role behind the formation and transformation of the city.

The role of infrastructure

When considering either the dense core, or the expanded reach of urban regions, infrastructure can be understood as the network of systems and structures that enables a city to function by facilitating the provision of electricity, delivery of water, production of food, management of waste and transportation services, and also ensuring the safety of residents from the dangers provided by a multitude of natural forces. Whether in its early forms like the Roman Aqueducts or modern constructions like the three-gorges dam in China, the most dominant forms of infrastructures have tended to be engineered solutions which have acted to marshal and control the natural resources required. With the advent of the industrial revolution, civil engineers took the lead role in creating and implementing new forms of infrastructure which allowed cities to function and flourish to scales never before seen. Highway networks, electrical grids, sewage treatment, and many other types of infrastructure have become so ubiquitous they can easily be overlooked by most people busy conducting their daily business.

The success of engineering at solving critical urban issues of cities have also worked to provide some of the greatest developments in public health during the 19th and 20th centuries. The classic examples in hard engineering technologies of sewers, pipes and pumps delivered a solution to the cholera epidemics which had been plaguing the city of London with a significant toll on both human life and that of the river Thames. Controlling drinking and waste water by piping, pumping, and diverting resolved the deadly epidemics of cholera, not only saving lives but greatly improving the quality of life within the city formerly marred by smell and squalor of a river clogged with human waste. Many other technical advances made by the practical field of civil engineering have greatly improved the quality of life in cities, enabling communication, transport, and energy networks as well as waste treatment, and greatly improved sanitation.

This sort of early example in engineering technique in the industrial cities developed into a methodology which became standard practice to infrastructural development, and subsequently extended its influence on urban development as well. Reaching new heights in the era of mega-infrastructure projects from the national highway systems and hydro-electric projects like the Hoover Dam, this approach not only worked well at delivering basic city services like sanitation and electricity, but yielded enormous benefits in allowing for rapid expansion and economic development to occur. To slightly oversimplify the issue, these recent traditions have relied strongly on an approach which works to resist, control, and subvert natural forces with the goal of servicing the social needs of cities. However, as landscape architects and theorists Kelly Shannon and Bruno de Meulder point out, ‘the ever increasing reach of the urbanization, the scale and speed at which it occurs and the ubiquitous application of these technologies across different social and environmental conditions have led to a questioning of these traditional approaches.”

landscape infrastructure

Landscape is defined as a relationship between the physical land itself and the human activity embedded within its history, and can be both read, written, erased, and re-written. It works as an agent which meshes nature and culture together in a physically tangible hybrid, and can therefore be understood as something which is both socially relevant and ecologically potent when thinking about urban issues. It is also something which is inherently context dependent and defined by process and change rather than fixed plans or a premise of separation of the human and the natural. Landscape as a form of infrastructure works to recognize the fundamental importance of biophysical qualities and natural processes in the environment as well as the cultural history embedded in the land to provide the basis for design, construction, and operation of infrastructural systems over time. In this respect, landscape infrastructure is a flexible and dynamic system that can work symbiotically with abiotic, biotic, and social forces, and is established “on a culture of contingency and preparedness” to deliver services required of it.3

Aesop’s fable of the Oak and the Reeds provides a simple yet powerful analogy to the more traditional engineering led approach for infrastructure, and is suggestive of new strategies for the future. As the story goes, a strong and mighty oak tree had grown tall and stood firm during the storms which had occurred over the years. One day, stronger winds came and uprooted the giant tree, knocking it down to fall next to the reeds and grasses covering the ground surrounding it. The Oak asks them how it is that with such weak and feeble form they weathered the storm while the great strength of its trunk and branches proved incapable of surviving intact. The reeds and grasses reply:

The failure of the levies in New Orleans is a modern example of the tree in the old parable, where inflexible and rigid forms of infrastructure struggle to stand against the increasing winds of new and dynamic challenges brought on by factors such as climate change. American architect and theorist Thomas Fisher has labelled this category of engineered solutions as ‘fracture-critical’ design, defined by a lack of redundancy, a tendency to be highly inter-connected yet extremely sensitive to exponential forms of stress common in dynamic systems like weather and economy that ultimately lead to catastrophic failure5. While his writing covers a wide range of engineered structures from bridges to buildings, the critique is that each project undertaken to withstand rather than weather has a substantial risk of failure over the long term. In a sense, the techniques of making discrete buildings and structures to meet certain tolerances and bear certain loads has been extended to complex and interconnected networks of service providing systems. Rather than the rigid tree, landscape infrastructures are proposed here to stand in and take the place of the reeds in Aesop's fable, flexible in the face of unforeseen circumstances and expectant of extreme situations.

Making and remaking cities

Practical examples have begun to emerge which demonstrate how existing infrastructures can be remade to advocate for new approaches to building in similar classes of infrastructure as those found in New Orleans, which were designed to deal with floods and stormwater in a highly urbanized setting. Shown in picture 1B, the infrastructural project designed by Atelier Dreiseitl for the city-state of Singapore delivers on the promises of this theory by providing a new infrastructure based on the processes and patterns of a native floodplain landscape. By the end of 2012, the concrete Kallang Channel in Bishan Park (1A), which had replaced the original Kallang River during the 1970s, was ecologically restored to provide a new stormwater system that is designed to flood rather than just work to drain the water, and is capable of holding many times the volume of the previous system

Not only is this project contingent on the prospect of flooding, but its ecological sensitivity allows it to exceed the capacity of the former system not just in dealing with water volume, but in providing treatment of water quality through passive filtration and bio-remediation. At the same time, the infrastructure itself is opened to the public as a surface and space for people to interact with, and invites members of the greater ecological community back into the park. This project illustrates how urban form and social patterns of activity in cities can be successfully layered upon biophysical structures of the landscape to synthesize the urban and the natural while still providing essential services with robust, resilient, and multifunctional infrastructure.

The antithesis of this approach has been witnessed in many cities to varying degree, yet can be seen in crystallized form in Dubai, where the latest urban developments like the Palm Jumeira (shown in Figures 2a and 2b) impose a formal structure upon the landscape that inherits none of the history, culture, and has no relevance to the ecological parameters of the area. This type of development imposes a will for particular formal structures and models of urbanization rather than a willingness to examine the context in which the city itself is situated and develop appropriate strategies. While the purpose here is not to say that new kinds of settlements and landforms can't be developed, it is necessary to challenge the principles and practices they employ. It is extremely difficult to argue that the urbanization of Dubai, whether in the form of skyscrapers, low-rise sprawl, or palm-shaped islands of dredged sand, contribute to their surroundings rather than just require further strain upon its resources. The existence of the city as it is today, where just one single building like the Burj Dubai uses nearly one million litres of water per day, is a shining example of what is technically possible and at the same time raises dark questions of risks for its citizens which consume an average of 500L per day of water in a desert climate.6 The current infrastructural response has put in place natural gas power generation to power the desalinization process which supply 99% of the daily water needs, and then installed the pumping and distribution networks to deliver water across the city. Despite this, the depletion of ground water by underground aquifers across the UAE is triple the rate it is replenished at naturally.

As a case study for fracture-critical design, if any one of these components experiences even a temporary disruption, the affected areas of the city will not only be inhospitable but deadly as exterior temperatures alone reach 50 degrees Celsius during the daytime. While back-up generators and reservoirs might solve problems temporarily, if subjected to more serious disruptions such as change in the economic climate or depletion of remaining groundwater, the expensive operating capacity of the cities infrastructure will be exposed to catastrophic failure. As Pierre Belanger notes, “for all its accuracy and precision, civil engineering is actually handicapped by an exclusive reliance on efficiency at the expense of other, equally important social, spatial, ecological factors”[8]. It seems then, that Dubai provides justification for looking beyond what is technically possible, for a more prudent urban plan.

Examples for another approach to building new cities has emerged in China with the work of landscape architect Kongjian Yu and his firm Turenscape, which has been working with the Chinese government on many projects including the development of a new city for 100,000 people called the Wulijie eco-town, in central China. Shown in Figure 3a, the plan for the new 10km² development is based on “integrating various natural and cultural processes to frame the city and provide diverse ecosystem services for residents. Integration and connectivity of natural, biological and cultural processes are central to the project.”9 In this case of designing a completely new city, it is the landscape itself which directs the approach to urbanism to deliver not only public space and urban form, but a more cost-effective, resilient, and robust infrastructure that serves and secures the city itself. Rather than basing strategies on complex mechanical technology, the infrastructure is determined by careful reflection on the context of the surroundings.

This approach of using landscape itself as a form of urbanism has also recently been applied by Turenscape for the land use plans of Beijing, and through analysis in the coastal urban area of Taizhou. Like the plan for Wulijie, the analysis for new infrastructure across Taizhou aims to capitalize on natural assets of the landscape while addressing the very serious threats of flooding for which the area is prone to during monsoon season. Rather than separate the water from the city as a means of controlling risks and providing services, the proposal creates networks of canals throughout the entire urban fabric which guide the river to flood the city, expecting the monsoon waters to come but directing, rather than controlling them. On a regional scale, the identification of patterns of development and flows of water can lead to inventive solutions that work to address multiple problems. In this case, averting the risks of flooding can be accompanied by providing the opportunity to treat water and improve water quality for drinking while recharging underground aquifers which have been under great pressures of over-use and contamination across China10. Not only does this form of landscape infrastructure greatly exceed the functional capacity of traditional methods, it also works across scales to recognize the amorphous forms that modern city-regions have taken, making them safer, more sustainable, resilient and inclusive for cultural and ecological communities.

From projects to policy

The vision put forward by the United Nations should be clear about the problems of thinking about cities as well defined entities, and paint a better picture of the modern city-regions where nature and culture are intertwined both within, and well beyond the city. Designing infrastructure solutions that move towards the goals outlined by the U.N. should foster new methodologies and approaches to problem solving rather than imposing a set of specific techniques and technologies. Whether one works as a landscape architect, policy advisor, or project manager, this paper has put forward an argument for considering how landscape can be used as a framework, both theoretically and practically. The project in building and re-building cities can benefit from using landscape as a means for developing ecological and social sensitivity to their context. In the case of the landscape infrastructure projects mentioned, landscape has framed a methodology for investigation followed by collaborative and creative problem solving that fully engaged the skills of engineers, designers, and builders. What may be especially interesting for readers of Tvergastein is to question how landscape infrastructure projects such as those covered here might work to inform the development of policy and planning frameworks to new or changing cities where guidance for such visions doesn't yet exist.

References

1. Brenner, Neil and Christian Shmid. 2011. “Planetary Urbanization” in Urban Constellations, 10-14. Accessed December 20, 2015 http://www.soziologie.arch.ethz.ch/_DATA/274/Brenner_Schmid-Planetary_Urbanization-2011.pdf
2. de Meulder, Bruno and Kelly Shannon. 2014. “Emerging Practices and Age Old Traditions.” In Water Urbanisms East 2014, edited by Bruno de Meulder & Kelly Shannon. Chicago: Park Books. Page 4.
3. Belanger, Pierre. 2010. “Redefining Infrastructure,” in Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers. Page 345.
4. Aesop. The Oak and the Reeds (Internet Classics Archive at M.I.T., 2009), Accessed 20 Dec. 2015 http://classics.mit.edu/Aesop/fab.2.2.html
5. Fisher, Thomas. 2009. “Fracture Critical,” in Places Journal, October 2009. Accessed 20 Dec. 2015 https://placesjournal.org/article/fracture-critical/
6. Solomon, Erika. 2016. “As Tiny UAE's Water Tab Grows, Resources Run Dry” in Reuters. Last modified January 2, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-water-feature-idUSTRE65K3MK20100621
7. Alsharhan, Abdulrahman S. and Zein S. Rizk. 2003. “Water Resources in the United Arab Emirates.” in Water Resources Perspectives: Evaluation, Management and Policy, edited by A.S. Alsharhan and W.W. Wood. Pages 245-64
8. Belanger, Pierre. 2013. “Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism Beyond Engineering”, Accessed 28 Nov. 2015
https://www.academia.edu/7642504/Landscape_Infrastructure_Urbanism_beyond_Engineering
9. Yu, Kongjian. 2014. “Chinas Water Crisis – Projects Leading Policy: Water Urbanism Across Scales.” in Water Urbanisms East 2014, edited by Bruno de Meulder & Kelly Shannon. Chicago: Park Books. Page 23