Intelligent Infrastructure

Zip Cars, Invisible Networks, and Urban Transformation

T. F. Tierney

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813939421
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

While many of its traditional elements, such as roads and utilities, do not change, urban infrastructure is undergoing a fascinating and necessary transformation in the wake of new information and communication technologies. This volume brings together many of the most important new voices in the fields impacting modern urban infrastructure to explore this revolutionary change in the city.

Increasingly, it is connective systems rather than built forms that bind a city together. Intelligent infrastructure confers upon a city previously unimagined levels of adaptability, with mobile telephony serving to organize people and events on the move and in real time. Beginning with a consideration of invisible networks—the sociohistorical systems that contribute to and constitute urbanity—the essays collected here examine a variety of actual tools, from handheld devices to autonomous vehicles, within a fully networked built environment: the smart city.

This book argues that knowledge of both the visible and invisible components--information, energy, sustainability, transportation, housing, and social practices--are critical to understanding the urban environment. The dynamic and diverse cast of contributors includes Mitchell Schwarzer, Frederic Stout, Anthony Townsend, Carlo Ratti of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, Mitchell Joachim of Terreform ONE, and many other innovators who are changing the urban landscape.

Part I

Soft Systems

Today, the study of infrastructure has become the focus of much scholarly investigation, and it continues to raise new questions in the wake of technological advances. Soft systems consider the sociohistorical, philosophical, and material context of infrastructure to understand the broader shifts of the discipline, how it affects society, and how society impacts infrastructure over time. This section offers a close examination of the background forces that are contributing to new versions of personal and public relations, as well as a theoretical discussion of culture and urbanity.

The Conceptual Roots of Infrastructure

Mitchell Schwarzer

Cities and architecture cannot be divorced from their infrastructure. If villages arose around water sources and strongholds, their expansion into towns happened through channels that distributed water for agriculture and human needs and walls that secured their perimeters. Larger human settlements owe their existence to pivots in routes through the landscape, a crossroads, ferry, or bridge that acted as node for a transportation and trading network. Layovers, transfers, and inspections generated space needs for buildings. Forts, one of the earliest types of enhanced building, or architecture, exerted militarily a city’s power over a hinterland. Shrines and palaces owe their existence to infrastructure, too. Like forts, palaces were a means of empowering a ruler’s control over territory, this time through tribute and loyalty obligations amid displays of scale, wealth, and aesthetics. Temples, cathedrals, and mosques were elaborated places of gathering and pilgrimage, where sacred stories, laws, and rituals were enacted and then disseminated further afield. Throughout history, infrastructure enabled the densities and certainties that made cities possible and the intensities that brought about architecture.

While we can trace rudimentary aqueous, military, transportation, and communications infrastructures from antiquity, the word infrastructure did not exist until modern times. It was first used by the French around the turn of the nineteenth century and furthered by them through the mid-twentieth century. It was not popularized in English until the “infrastructure crisis” of the 1980s, when American society abruptly became concerned with deteriorating roads, bridges, and public works. Since then, infrastructure has epitomized our networked economy and society, interconnected via steadily higher volumes of ground, air, and shipping traffic as well as cable, fiber, and satellite telecommunications.

In order to gain a sense of the word’s conceptual evolution, it is important to distinguish how infrastructure has been projected in time: as it describes a set of concurrent objects or events, and as it is retroactively applied to objects and events from the past that were not understood in their own time as “infrastructure.” Thus history books regale us with tales of the magnificent road infrastructure of the Inca Empire or the remarkable canal infrastructure of the Sui dynasty in China, extensions of the word to places and periods where the concept was not in use. Or as urban historian Frank J. Costa tells us: “the Roman model of city building was the first instruction in the science of creating a viable infrastructure.”¹ Roman roads and its postal system were infrastructures of communication and law.² Roman baths and aqueducts were water supply infrastructures. While there is no doubt that ancient societies possessed aspects of what we now regard as infrastructure, as far as we know, the Incas, Chinese, and Romans had not conceptualized such developments. In using the word infrastructure to describe their transport and water systems, historians associate the modern concept and premodern practices, and imbue those practices at times with certain significances unknown at the time.

Vitruvius Marcus Pollio’s De Architectura, written in the first century bce, contains a discussion on street layout with respect to the winds but shows no awareness of the interrelationship of regional road networks and urban development. It includes a chapter on aqueducts, wells, and cisterns, but here again Vitruvius writes on construction and material details, and not of ideas that link such devices into systems that enable urbanization beyond prior bounds. This is not to say that the Romans were averse to intellectualizing concepts when it suited their aims. Although infrastructure eluded their grasp, at least philosophically, De Architectura opens with copious definitions of architectural education and the principles of architecture. The Roman appropriation and handling of the Greek word architecture purposefully differentiated it from building, setting the basis for architecture’s later evolution in early modern and modern times as a profession, art, and arena of knowledge.

Today, a taking stock of modern infrastructure is called for. This article begins that effort, analyzing categorizations and conceptualizations from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the period after the Second World War and with added attention to its relationship to architecture. In the words of scientists, social scientists, military strategists, historians, architects, and landscape architects, infrastructure has been used to describe extended built constructions composed of nodes of command and control and networks of elaborate configuration. It has been imported into scientific, arts, and humanistic discussions to explain the dependence of individual works upon larger and often unseen systemic backgrounds. In both concrete instances and abstract speculations, infrastructure has brought about new ways of shaping society: a scaling of interbuilding systems to the region, nation, and globe; a partial or full mechanization/automation of those systems; the creation of a sociopolitical dimension alongside technical matters; and an advance over time from the movement of batches of material to flows of chemical substances (like oil or gas) and electrons (for both power and information).³ Any inquiry into the concept of infrastructure must also attend to its peculiarities: static devices facilitating movement; aging systems promoting progress; global networks producing localized autonomy; and, finally, a simultaneous invisibility, necessity, and disruptiveness, machines humming beneath our feet while we walk about barely recognizing their extent.

Early Uses

Infrastructure is made up of the Latin words infra (below/under) and structura (construction/organization). Its linguistic development occurred principally within French (and other Romance languages), an outgrowth of the new discipline of engineering that got underway after the establishment of the École nationale des pont et chaussées (School of Bridges and Highways) in 1747. Nineteenth-century French engineering texts mention works of infrastructure alongside those of superstructure, mainly with reference to railways and roads; infrastructure was the right-of-way of rockwork or masonry work that supported iron rails and wooden ties; superstructure was the structure built atop, sometimes also comprising the rails, and other times the trains and other equipment. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, infrastructure was translated from French into English as “groundwork,” “foundation,” or “roadbed.”⁴

The French concept of infrastructure has come to mean both transportation networks and underlying building elements: roads, rail lines, and airports that underlie urbanization; the supportive aspects of a building such as plumbing and sanitation or foundation—what in English are meant by internal systems and substructure. Yet the French concept of infrastructure also takes in a broader range of meanings, including those installations and equipment necessary for life in the modern world; the makeup of the earth’s crust or lithosphere; and a borrowing from Karl Marx’s idea, expressed in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), that cultural institutions and political ideology (the Superstructure) are determined by economic factors including the division of labor and distribution of income and the control and valuation of land and property (the Base, or Infrastructure).⁵ In 1978, anthropologist Maurice Godelier’s article “Infrastructures, Societies, and History” succinctly ordered these various meanings into three tiers that ascend from nature to technology to industry. Infrastructure describes the process by which human society develops from rudimentary circumstances to civilization: first, ecological and geographical parameters; second, the material and intellectual means by which nature is transformed into society; and, third, the relations of production by which modern industrial society proceeds.⁶

During the first half of the twentieth century, infrastructure crept into English in two principal ways. Engineering texts began to employ the French meaning of railbeds or roadbeds. Less frequently, French scholars writing in (or translated into) English grappled with the word’s elemental implications—that which lies beneath something else and enables it—in philosophical or historical speculations. In 1921, in one of the earliest of such appearances of the word in an English text, the French philosopher of mathematics Maximilien Winter wielded infrastructure to conclude an article on the ensemble of theories that constitute the functional calculus. For the penultimate sentence, Winter wrote that “we cannot deny that mathematical physics retains an essentially theoretical and philosophical character: its main purpose is not to further the progress of industry but rather to make known the infrastructure of the universe.”⁷ Here infrastructure refers generally to our concepts of understanding the entirety of things and specifically to those mathematical equations that decipher the universe’s structural details, grappling with the continuous infinity of unknowns comprised in any and all of its intervals. Infrastructure constitutes lineaments through the unknown, the routes or structure that lies beneath or between familiar things and whose delineation may explain or establish them.

This speculative framework recalls old metaphysical questions. The ancient Greeks were preoccupied with the difference between appearance and reality, the manifold particulars we apprehend immediately with our senses and the deeper truth that can only be approached through an engagement with eternals or ideals. Following Plato’s discourse on ideal solids, Democritus proposed a theory of matter in which everything visible and divisible is made up of invisible atoms, themselves indivisible and constituting the fundamental building blocks of the universe. It took over twenty-five hundred years for modern science to prove the existence of atoms through observation and, concurrently, to recalibrate the divide between appearance and reality into one of layers of traceable reality. J. J. Thompson’s discovery of the negatively charged electron in 1897 was followed by Ernest Rutherford’s evidence that atoms have positively charged nuclei in 1911; two years later, Niels Bohr proposed the planetary model of atomic structure. The ensuing development of quantum mechanics gave proof to the idea that an unpredictable microscopic landscape girds the macroscopic universe, an infrastructure of exotic particles, forces, and fields whose identities as fluctuations are responsible for the universe’s non-uniform structure of galaxies, stars, planets, nonlife and life forms.

Nor was physics the only science that sought its bearings by investigating underlying realms. In 1936, the seismologist Inge Lehmann discovered that the center of the earth was made up of a two-part (solid and liquid) inner core, launching a line of geological inquiry that would lead to the delineation of the earth’s layers and eventually, in the 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics that describes the lithosphere (or crust) upon which we reside as a terrain of interlocking plates set in perpetual, dynamic formation. While the first biological cell was discovered by the natural philosopher Robert Hooke in 1665, it took until the 1950s for the biologist James Watson and the physicist Francis Crick to discover DNA, the microscopic molecule containing genetic instructions that guide evolution and produce the macroscopic forms of life. In modern times, the fields of physics, geology, and biology have all undergone paradigm shifts by delineating previously unknown, underlying realms.

Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychology rests, likewise, upon a layering of appearances and realities: in this case, the strata of the unconscious and preconscious mind that exist beneath conscious awareness and have great bearing upon it. In 1949, French psychologist René Zazzo’s English-language article “Sociometry and Psychology” expanded the psychic development of an individual within history and culture and employed the concept of infrastructure as an external layer of consciousness. A person’s cultural milieu, made up of the “material infrastructure of civilization,” was the background for their individuality.⁸ Infrastructure consists, then, of a set of foundational influences both internal, or beneath awareness, and external, or via the sensations of consciousness. This example of the use of infrastructure in psychology, akin to Winter’s usage in philosophical mathematics, demonstrates how the term, originally associated as structure beneath structure was becoming flexible in its geometries and abil...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Infrastructural Intelligence—Connective Systems for a Postcarbon City
• Part I. Soft Systems
• Part II. Mashed Systems
• Part III. Hard Systems
• Conclusion: Networked Urbanism and Everyday Mobility in the City
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index