Lecture Monday November 9, 4:15pm
North Dakota State University, Renaissance Hall, 5th Floor

Pierre Bélanger - Redefining Infrastructure
Landscape Architect, Associate Professor, Harvard University

Image source: Pierre Bélanger/Landscape Journal

Cities are sustained by infrastructure. Highways, airports, power plants and landfills largely figure as the dominant effigies of contemporary urbanism. The sheer size of these elements renders their understanding as a single system practically impossible, yet their operations depend precisely on their continuity to support urban and industrial economies. Often found underground, or on the periphery of cities, the presence of infrastructure remains largely invisible until the precise moment at which it breaks down or fails. Floods, blackouts and shortages serve as a few reminders of the limited capacity and fragility of this large operating system that unilaterally depends on technological control and micro-management for its sustenance. As the invisible background of modern society, the smooth functioning of infrastructure has literally naturalized the contemporary processes of urbanization- urbanism itself - where less than a century ago, a basic level of collective, essential services barely existed. Rarely, do we stop to interrogate the functioning, let alone the meaning of this urban superstructure. Yet recent events - such as the sudden collapse of highway bridges, the rise and fall of water levels, the surge in foreign oil prices, the spike in food prices or the drop in capital markets to name a few - are instigating a critical review of the basic foundation that the North American economy, and its culture, depend on.

Emerging from current economic exigencies and ecological imperatives, this essay addresses this shift in greater depth by re-examining the origins and precepts of infrastructure in North America as well as the patterns of urbanization from which it emerged. Informed by contemporary demands on infrastructure, the main motive of the presentation is to understand how the collective requirement for infrastructure - the basic system of essential services that support a city, a region or a nation - emerged from public necessity in crisis and conflict during the 19th and 20th centuries, and how new urban pressures are requiring a thorough rethinking, restrategizing and reinvestment in this vast field of

Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He teaches graduate courses on landscape and infrastructure in the interrelated fields of planning, design and engineering.