Infrastructure

Architecture 209X, Spring 2007

Words and Cities: The rhetoric and meaning of statistically improbable phrases

Nicholas De Monchaux

Qing Wang

Infrastructure

Infrastructure, a word is somehow hard to understand. If you look up in an English-Chinese dictionary, you probably will find a strange interpretation like this: basic and fundamental organization or structure. For most people, this explanation doesn’t help understanding what infrastructure means indeed. Now, we know infrastructure includes all the transportation, public facilities and communication system in the urban context. In a word, it is the network of the city like the vein of human body. We know how important the vein to the body, so we can same know how important the infrastructure to the city. The city needs grow relying on its network. After industrial revolution, and steam engine and the internal-combustion engine spurs the growth of city. The rail roads expand rapidly while the city becomes larger. To some extend, the history of modern city development is a history of the evolution of infrastructure. It determined the speed of the growth of city development. The technology enforced the evolution of infrastructure developing. Back to 19^th century, the industrialized products needs a high efficient transportation to deliver to the market far away. The rail roads and steamships realized this demands. As this change predominated the whole world, the globalization was formed. In the present, information technology accelerates this change into a much deeper level. The infrastructure connects everyone on the earth with cables or even invisible waves. The distribution of information blurs the boundary between urban and suburban, west and east. The city grows into their boundary and the suburban disappears. As a result of urbanization, the whole globe becomes a big city with the connection of infrastructure. Because of the characteristic of infrastructure, it is always changed by the technology development in different time. The current form of infrastructure is based on the automobiles. The roads system connected every cities and parking space occupied in the corner of every several blocks. It seems becoming the permanent structure of our city. It won’t be changed until another emerging technology changed the infrastructure, like internet and wireless technology. The advent of internet will change the appearance of our world once it matures.