Foundations 19 – Infrastructure Space

How does Infrastructure Space affect the building materials industry? “One thing that industries and companies could look at is the changing expectations that the various publics have of the built environment.” Jason Young, Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Tennessee

To kick off the workshop, some highly provocative and useful ex- amples of intangible types of infrastructure were presented. The participants found that behavioral patterns can also be seen as a sort of infrastructure. “You usually don’t think about these things as infrastructure,” says Young, “but when this soft infrastructure occurs in conjunction with the physical and material world, the combination can have very definite effects. And sometimes you also have to pay attention to the seemingly unimportant parts of a system if you want to understand the enormous potential of that system.” Today we are seeing a broad shift toward the intangible. “Maybe time has replaced space in the logistical sense,” says Young. “If you consider the city and urbanism as micro-processes, that changes your notions of space and the physical environment.” The topic of collectivity raised a great many questions. What about society, people’s daily lives? What forms of involvement and partic- ipation are there? One must see infrastructure as a form of collec- tive intelligence, says Young. “As architects and designers, we tend to offer permanent solutions for non-permanent problems,” he quoted a speaker from the metropolitan scale workshop. “Maybe we need to be more aware of the limits of this approach. Condi- tions like these here in Detroit change – and it would be wrong to think that a solution that makes sense today will automatically make sense in the future, which is so difficult to foresee.”

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