Me, Myself and Infrastructure
I attended this exhibit while in Chicago last week. I really appreciated seeing the link between engineering, the life cycle of microchip manufacturing represented in a map, how the information infrastructure is embedded in smart road networks, and the link between communication infrastructure and waste.
Me, Myself and Infrastructure: Private Lives and Public Works in America asks some tough questions and provokes people to reflect on how they shape the infrastructure by using it and how it shapes us as a society. What I did not see was how society can better shape the infrastructure at the design stage since it is we in society who have to live with and interact in the big system once it is created. Imagine had we been able to keep transit as a priori in big cities, we may not have the air quality issues we have now, less tax dollars would have gone to pavement and the shapes and structures in our cities may have had a very different form and orientation.
The exhibit was surrounded by some wonderful infrastructure textes:
- The behaviour and values of individuals shape infrastructure: the location of pedestrian crosswalks, the taste of drinking water, the durability of a bridge. At the same time, infrastructure shapes everyone’s lives - the ability to drive anywhere anytime, take half-hour showers, and discard computers after a couple of years.
- Each cell phone owner shapes infrastructure through participation in the institutions that determine public policy. Your lifestyle determines the future of the nation. Hello?
- Each house and tree stands because someone has decided to build it or let it be. The relationship between built and natural determines the essential cost of technologies, from highways to espresso makers to the monitors glowing on millions of desks. Balancing the benefits and costs is the complex task facing civil engineers and you.
- Long-lasting infrastructure is, by definition, adaptable because societies change more rapidly than their ability to rebuild their highways and sewer systems. Understanding permanence means understanding the past in order to shape the future.
These textes refer to path dependency, infrastructural amnesia, and determinism. They also try to make obvious the invisible material systems that keeps us living, loving, consuming, operating and moving in our urban habitats.
A book accompanies the exhibit which I have as bed time reading along with Quicksilver! Tough late night competition!
coolest. exhibition. ever.
so jealous.
Comment by mtl3p — September 6, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
I am trying to find out more on this one!
http://www.asce.org/150/infrastructure/ion.html
Comment by Administrator — September 7, 2007 @ 1:55 am