Landscape As Infrastructure

Abstract According to a national report on brownfields redevelopment titled Recycling America's Land (USCM 2006), more than 400,000 sites with real or perceived environmental hazards dot the American landscape today. That legacy is estimated to be worth more than $2 trillion in devalued property. Underlying this legacy is a major network of post-war infrastructures—airports, harbours, roads, sewers, bridges, dikes, dams, power corridors, terminals, treatment plants—that is now suffering major decay from lack of repair and maintenance (ASCE 2008, Infrastructure Canada 2007–2008, Choate and Walter 1983). In revisiting a series of milestone events in the history of North America, this paper draws a cross-section through phases of industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to track how the necessity for infrastructure accidentally emerged from crisis and failure. A series of patterns and shifts are identified to expose the paradoxical, sometimes toxic relationship between pre-industrial landscape conditions and modern industrial systems. The underlying objective of this essay is to redefine the conventional meaning of modern infrastructure by amplifying the biophysical landscape that it has historically suppressed, and to reformulate landscape as a sophisticated, instrumental system of essential resources, services, and agents that generate and support urban economies. Three contemporary streams of development including urban ecologies, bio-industries, and waste economies are explored briefly to discuss future fields of practice.