Infrastructure, Forrest

When I first hear the word "infrastructure," visions of galvanized steel, asphalt, and rubber wires immediately flash into my mind. Subsequent categorization of this vision may fit the generalized cultural understanding: mundane objects in our built environment that service our lives: roads, power lines, water tanks--the engineered rather than the designed. The cliche of not seeing the forest through the trees applies; these objects comprise a larger "underlying framework or features of a system or organization," as defined by dictionary.com. Bill McKibben elegantly articulates this point by tracing the breadth and scope of how electricity reaches the New Yorker's electrical socket. From oil mining in Brazil to huge hydraulic projects in Canada, the delivery of electricity to New York City becomes an elaborate and multivariable system at the whim of many influences.

Anthony Sutcliffe further elucidates the complexity of an infrastructural system in his research on the mechanization of street transportation. The core of his argument is that not only do these external influences affect infrastructural decisions / changes, the infrastructural decisions / changes also affect the external influences. His most lucid example is the streetcar infrastructure and rent values, namely that building streetcar infrastructure allows a city geographical growth, lowering density and, subsequently, property values. Resorting back to infrastructure's definition as the "framework of a system or organization", then the streetcar network functions much like the telephone pole in the broader context of the city. If "infrastructure" is defined as more than a streetcar rail, why should "infrastructure" be less than the whole streetcar network and the economics that drive its expansion? The potential changes of scale in infrastructure surely prompted Buckminster Fuller's suggestion of a global power grid. According to this definition, a city itself comprises an infrastructural system, with streetcars being but components, just as Clinton's Executive Order EO 13010 establishes an infrastructure for defending critical infrastructures. In this regard, our current definition of infrastructure with respect to cities should understand that even infrastructures as complex systems, each influencing one another with various (and variously scaled) results.