What is infrastructure? For much of the twentieth century, the answer to this question was guided by the ideology of functionalist urbanism, a school of thought that said that all "healthy" cities served four major needs – work, housing, recreation, and transportation. Today, we no longer take this view for granted, for it is a perspective that makes no provisions for community, identity, or history. At the same time, we still lack an alternative model for visualizing the city that can deal adequately with the public health and quality-of-life issues that the early functionalists sought to address. Arguably, our capacity to balance urban development with ecological and social need has only worsened in recent decades, and this exhibition asks whether the trend can be reversed.
Specifically, this show documents a series of contemporary experiments in planning, architecture, and design that seek to treat the city and its environment in holistic terms – not just as an assembly of buildings, roadways, bridges, pipes, and tunnels (although each of these is important), but as a complex social, political, and ecological nexus that sustains life in the broadest sense.
Infrastructure cannot be divorced from the infrastructure of democracy, from the environment at large, and many of the contributions to this exhibition seek to highlight the important role that community, communication, participation, and the sharing of knowledge can play in informing our understanding of the urban fabric.
