Institute For The Future

The Future of Infrastructure

A couple weeks ago I mentioned my long standing fascination with the history of architecture, and in particular my interest in how spatial design affects behavior. Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine on 'Infrastructure' was therefore an unexpected delight. With articles on the proposed high-speed train in California, the design of prisons, proposals to revitalize the downtown of Paris, and the growth of data centers, the Times Magazine was in superlative form.

I find discussions of Infrastructure intriguing because of how the topic resides at the intersection of a wide range of disparate spheres of everyday life. Social, biological, political, economic, and cultural concerns are all embodied in the decisions society makes when we, for example, decide that in order to qualify for government funding, any high speed train that travels between Los Angeles and San Francisco cannot take a second more than 3 hours. Minute changes in the proposed path of the train often have unintended consequences, as Jon Gertner writes in Getting Up to Speed, "it’s difficult to separate engineering concerns from economic and political issues. It’s as if the relationship between these competing forces forms a set of interrelated mathematical equations; change one variable and you have to rework the entire calculus."

When we make choices about how to build technologies, we are making choices with social consequences. In his piece on a new prison in Leoben, Austria, Bill Lewis points to the historical antecedents of prison design, and in doing so he explicitly references design's position at the crossroads of technologies and human:

 

"Among the first people to try to blend ideology, morality and design principles into a carefully planned building were the Quakers of Pennsylvania, whose late-18th-century model was characteristically spare, consisting primarily of cells where convicts were to be kept in strict isolation, that they might better explore their own souls and find a way to God."

 

The tendency to treating technologies as inert components of our everyday ecosystems has the net effect of preventing us from making the kinds of decisions needed to address the seemingly intractable problems of, for example, designing a more intelligent prison system. If, as a result of the discussions of the type developed in the Infrastructure issue of the Times Magazine, designing for the future of cities, railroads, and prisons can begin to render explicit the cascading impact of the choices we make for what we build, and why, we might begin to make smarter choices for a more sustainable, productive, and equitable tomorrow.