A series of (somewhat) tangentially related post/items/articles I’ve been meaning to mention here:

1. Security Theater – mammoth

There are always tensions between openness and security, and cities like DC have plenty of examples of this – everything from bollards anchored in 6 feet of subterranean concrete to jersey barriers strewn in front of building entrances.  Given these tensions, there are questions about how much is necessary, and how that which is necessary can be better designed:

Though Perlin’s project explores the former possibility, the latter fascinates me, as it reminds me of the concept of “security theater”, coined by Bruce Schneier to describe the ways in which the public apparatus of security (at airports, government buildings, schools, transit stations, etc.) exists primarily not to provide security, as those measures are demonstrably ineffective, but to provide a fearful public with the illusion of security.

This tension has serious consequences for how we use space…

2. Death of a Lie – DCist

The Capitol Visitors Center was built, amongst many reasons, to help enhance security for visitors to the halls of Congress.  It’s also meant the death of traditions:

Before the advent of the CVC, a visit to the Capitol meant a tour for taxpaying citizens guided by hapless interns who would straight up lie to them. Just bald-faced, outrageous, entirely untrue claims about the nation’s history and its legislative process.

Is nothing sacred? Security kills even the most benign and stupid traditions.

3. Regional Security – CSG + COG

At the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s 11/12 forum to discuss the Greater Washington 2050 plan, one attendee asked about the inherent contradiction between the agglomerations and concentrations inherent to urbanism and the desire for various federal agencies to have uber-secure campuses – or at least ones that put on that particular show in the theater.

DC’s Planning Director, Harriet Tregoning, mentioned the inherent tension between the openness of urbanism and the desired security, but also noted there were some design considerations that need to be taken into account.

All the more reason to push for the elimination of unnecessary security theater – as the built forms that result likely aren’t all that desirable.

4. Secure + Connected Infrastructure – mammoth

Mammoth again notes the challenges of updating our infrastructure, both to provide redundancy and security, as well as enhance development and feed the economy.

I do greatly appreciate the thrust of one of those student projects, ‘The Diversity Machine and Resilient Network’², which argues that, though Beirut’s “urban fabric… lacks consolidation… optimization or efficiency”, this is not a weakness, but a strength: “it is precisely the ‘redundancy’ of the distributed social infrastructure and relative autonomy of the neighbourhoods that lends the city its resilience.” Though made more specifically in reference to urban form and less in reference to infrastructure, this point reminds me of two things.

First, as faslanyc noted in the comments on a previous post, the impact of an infrastructure on the territory in which it resides should be evaluated not just by its scale, but also for its degree of distribution and connectivity…

Second, and directly related to that first advantage, I’m also reminded of the article Fracture Critical, which ran recently in Places and draws an interesting parallel between two ways of designing specific infrastructures, fracture-critical and fracture-resistant, and ways of designing larger systems. […] Given that the consequences of a networked super-project being fractured would be enormous, I suspect that there’s a place for being cautious about the design of such projects, even while recognizing their value.

Lots to digest here – the notion of how we perceive ‘infrastructure’ is key.  I suspect the urbanist sees it as the backbone on which a city can grow – as we see vestiges of that growth in the urban forms and fabric from various generations of housing stock, transportation facilities, etc…

5. Parcel by Parcel

It also raises the issue I noted with some of the proposed Eco City Beautiful infrastructure – how does one visually convey the vision of urban development around a core infrastructure system without dictating architecture and urbanism?  How do you convey the kind of organic growth of a city – parcel by parcel, building by building?  Mammoth again:

I’d like to think that learning to work infrastructurally (to use Lahoud’s language¹) means working more flexibly (despite rhetoric which differs sharply from modernist rhetoric, the two designs presented appear to be close kin of modernist residential housing collectives and contemporary superblocks, as both take a large piece of land and develop urban fabric wholesale upon it), less directly (designing the infrastructure upon which the city grows, with an awareness of how the shaping of the infrastructure will affect the growth of the city, but not presuming to design the city itself) and accepting a degree of loss of control over the aesthetics of the resulting city fabric (which presents a host of drawing problems — how do you draw something which you are not presuming to design and still manage to communicate the importance of the work you’ve done in designing the scaffolding? — but still seems to me to be a humility worth developing).

“Accepting a degree of loss of control” is a nice way to put it.  Kostoff described the key attribute of cities as “energized crowding,” a kind of social context that can’t fully be designed.

6. But, what about scale? – mammoth + NYT + Infrastructurist

Louis Uchitelle argues that we’ve got a superproject void in the US these days – Infrastructurist responds with an impressive list of projects, if only a little disjointed – and mammoth notes the missing connective tissue:

That said, Infrastructurist doesn’t really respond to Uchitelle’s points about the relationship between scale and economic effect, as Uchitelle is arguing not just that that contemporary infrastructure projects are smaller, but that there’s something fundamentally different about the economic effect of a very large project, like the ARC Tunnel, which, while physically impressive, operates in a relatively small geographic territory, and a superproject, which connects formerly disconnected territories (as the interstate highway system did), aggregating markets. The obvious contemporary corollary to the interstate is high speed rail, but Uchitelle also rightly notes that the Obama administration project which is closest to a superproject, defined not just by impressive physical impact, but also by economic effect and ability to facilitate new connections, is the proposed integrated health care computer network.

While the idea of high speed rail has the potential for that kind of connectivity and transformation of markets, what’s missing is the systemic planning.  Looking at DC as a analogous situation, the city and region have benefited immensely from a system planned as a system – and built out in full.  Piecemeal construction on a line by line basis has been less than successful in other cities, and that pattern could hold for intercity rail, too.

7. Paying for it – The Transport Politic + Streetsblog

One place that has taken a system-oriented approach is Denver, and TTP notes the pain they’re dealing with for their foresight.

Perhaps good long term decisions like those in Denver could be vindicated with a little help from a National Infrastructure Bank?