by Timothy Carter
Excerpts from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131122-smarter-cities-smarter-future/all
About the author: Timothy Carter is Director of the Center for Urban Ecology at Butler University, Indianapolis, US.
Infrastructure is not exactly the sexiest word in architecture. There are no
“starchitects” proudly boasting about their pipe designs or subsurface drainage
systems. By its very definition – the underlying structures that support our
systems – infrastructure is inherently hidden from us, and therefore often
overlooked. But without it our current cities couldn’t possibly exist. Without
finding ways to improve it, our future cities will struggle to survive.
In the more distant past, construction has been a driven by localised issues
such as sanitation, flooding or fire. The reaction has been to engineer systems
(under the powers of centralised, state-led planning and public funding) that
solve a single problem at a particular time. Little thought has been given to
future conditions.
But, rather than being reactive, future infrastructure designs will need to
be anticipatory and proactive to be truly sustainable. Much like an ecosystem,
these will contain many small-scale, networked elements that serve a multitude
of uses, rather than one single guiding purpose for their existence. Urban
community garden plots, for example, not only provide food for urban dwellers,
but serve as stormwater management systems, allowing water and waste to be
recycled at the smallest scale with real-time sensors telling the centralised
system how much less will have to be processed downstream.
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