ABSTRACT
During the last decade or so, infrastructure has been successfully reclaimed by urban design as a structuring device capable of dealing with the current complex spatial condition, characterized by rural-urban hybridity, accelerating horizontal urbanization, neoliberal economic regimes, and rising environmental concerns. As an alternative to the inability of both modern(ist) design modes and traditional urban form “to produce meaningful, socially just, and environmentally healthful cities” (Waldheim 2013, 13), new -isms, such as landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism, are exploring new paths for the discipline by designing infrastructure systems as resilient frameworks guiding urban development within the context of ever-changing and fragile (ecological) processes. Indeed, as Pierre Bélanger reflects on postwar engineering, “(i)n the wake of over-planning, over-regulation and over-engineering of the past century,” future design has to be oriented toward “the re-coupling, re-configuration, and re-calibration of these processes” through “the re-design of infrastructure” (Bélanger 2013, 24-25). As a common denominator of discourses breaking with functionalist, top-down planning and, more pragmatically, as one of the last resorts allowing public authorities to give structure to haphazard settlement (Shannon and Smets 2010, 9), infrastructure has emerged not only as the glue holding disperse urbanization together, but also as the object around which new visions about urbanization could be assembled in order to formulate novel grounds for the discipline.
