Infrastructure ,Bin Wang

Infrastructure was born with cities. Or, it was born before cities.

If city, say, is a human body, then infrastructures are blood vessels (roads, bridges, internet, etc). Without these vessels, blood and power can not been transported to the city organs, hence the city has no possibility to work normally.

What’s more, infrastructure also include the blood making organs (mines, power stations, etc), sometimes the most powerful architecture in the world. When I try to imagine there are millions of mines deep down underground, some are roughly the size and shape of a sixty-story or more skyscraper, and those huge industrial towers more then 120 feet tall, I feel like there is another world under our nose as well as underneath our feet.

Infrastructures are even un-visible. For example, the satellite signals are everywhere. The earthquake happened in Taiwan several months ago made the undersea cable broken, so I lost the on-line contact with my family and friends in China. It’s so amazing that the infrastructure connected between China and American actually happened undersea and in the sky. A picture appears in my head is an earth wrapped by all kinds of cables, (visible and un-visible) which we called “globalism”.

Globalism made the earth small and easily to communicate. However, it also made the earth more fragile. Since every parts of the world are connected so tightly, it easily to imagine what will happen if some connections lost the function.

The development of cities hence relies on the healthy and convenient infrastructure. Actually the cities are changed with the development of infrastructure. It is no surprise to know that “planning may thus be seen as, to some degree, a product of the urban transport revolution.” (Street Transport in the second Half of the Nineteenth Century: Mechanization Delayed?) Probably every transforms of the cities witness a revolution of the infrastructure. The new technology competes with the old ones, providing advantages and conquering disadvantages, then fixes (sometimes totally changes) the system, just like the renew of human organs. Afterwards the cities run better and wait for the next revolution. That is the way we come from and will go to the future. What we only need to ask is “What is the next step?”