10/2010

Underline: The Culver Viaduct

Proposal by John McGill (hosted by Urban Omnibus)

Infrastructure as Urban Opportunity
As infrastructure in our cities reaches and exceeds the end of designed life spans, the necessary upgrades, repair, and replacements to these aging systems require significant public investment. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, some $2.2 trillion of investment will be needed to address US infrastructure needs in the next five years alone. At the same time, urban park development increasingly involves cooperation with, and concessions to, the private sector to offset the need for public investment. Vacant land suitable and available for new public space and other essential local amenities is, for obvious reasons, hard to come by. It is therefore no surprise that last summer’s opening of the High Line’s first segment was so highly anticipated and widely discussed: infrastructure is increasingly seen as a locus of opportunity.

The seemingly inaccessible and useless spaces of urban infrastructure have a value beyond their (often awkward) adjacency to newly viable real estate: they are already inscribed with highly specific relationships to surrounding urban fabric, and as intervention sites can therefore mediate between radically different scales, speeds, and programs.

To see more and to read the complete article and design proposal click on Urban Onmibus.