Infrastructures for Change Workshop 2009
Exactly one year after President-Elect Barack Obama's Election Night speech in Grant Park, Archeworks will host a workshop that will examine the process of change in our collective environments. This workshop will bring together design practitioners and theorists, engineers, environmental scientists and ecologists, policy makers, and public health specialists, with the goal of increasing our knowledge of alternative infrastructure solutions to improve the livability and sustainability of the American City.
Substantial new investments in infrastructure are being made nationally, regionally and locally. It is incumbent on design and engineering professionals to conceive and propose alternative recommendations so these investments will increase the livability and sustainability of the American city. Increased spending on infrastructure is good news for both the economy and design/engineering/construction professionals; however, if it simply means more of the same 20th Century solutions that have in many cases had devastating social and environmental effects on cities, we will experience the same and unforeseen negative consequences. At this crucial juncture at the beginning of the 21st century, the Infrastructures for Change Workshop will explore key principles underpinning alternative and sustainable cities of the future.
The Infrastructures for Change Workshop is organized around the premise that we currently build the majority of our cities to have adversarial relationships to the natural resources that sustain life. We design and engineer the majority of our buildings and infrastructures to pollute the air, eradicate biodiversity, displace resources, and either taint our water or literally flush it down the drain without replenishing the source. Much of what constitutes “waste” in our current environment is in fact rich in embedded energy and virtual water. At a time in history when the world is experiencing radical changes in climate, unprecedented urban population growth, and natural resource inequality and depletion, designers, engineers and builders need to holistically re-envision how our cities are designed in order to remedy existing counterproductive urban design models.
These urban problems mark unprecedented opportunities for re-evaluation: to conceive and build new types of ecological architecture and infrastructure, and envision new forms of leadership to orchestrate the implementation of these new systems. The Infrastructures for Change Workshop is about finding ways to collaborate in public/private partnership and act now to tackle climate change before the world reaches a critical tipping point beyond which dangerous climate change and resource depletion will become unstoppable. |
