Last month I gave talks at the University of Virginia School of Architecture alongside Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG and Cassim Shephard of Urban Omnibus; and the following week I headed to the Knowledge Architecture conference in San Francisco (KA-Connect) to tell the story of building this website. In creating the landscape urbanism website, we focused on building a community and encouraging collaboration and engagement by understanding the social aspect of sharing. One of my underlying beliefs is that landscape architects, planners, architects and designers need to continually improve our ability to talk about what we do, why we do it, and how we do it.

Below is the presentation, “The Story of Landscape Urbanism,” from the KA-Connect conference. For all of the talks from the conference, check out KA-Connects’ full list of Speaker Presentations. The talks include “The Story of Arup’s Thoughts,” by Carmen Whitelock, Head of Online Strategy at Arup; “Competing on More Than Design,”by Georgia Collins, Managing Director of DEGW, and “Innovation at SOM” by Nicholas Holt, Technical Director at SOM.

Stoss’ CityDeck, Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA

The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum announced winners of the 13th annual National Design Awards, a program established to promote excellence and innovation in design. The National Design Awards program “celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.” First launched in 2000, this marks the 12th year of the awards.

Stoss Landscape Urbanism received the Landscape Architecture honor. Pioneered by Chris Reed (Founder) and led in conjunction with associate principal Scott Bishop,

“Stoss operates at the intersection of landscape architecture and urban design – in an emerging field known as landscape urbanism. Stoss is a unique practice within the North American context: research-based, theoretically driven – and yet intensely interested in the representation and realization of landscape strategy.”

Reed describes the firm as “a practice vehicle for research and experimentation, for testing ideas about landscape and the city as they may be informed by the dynamics, scales, and extended durations of ecological and infrastructural systems.”

The lifetime achievement award went to Richard Saul Wurman, an prolific, curious designer, writer and philosopher ”spurred by the dance between curiosity and ignorance,” and seeking inexhaustibly “ways to make the complex clear.” From the creation of the TED conferences to authoring over 80 different books to his pioneering thinking on Information Anxiety, his work is an inspiration and model for all. As described by the award committee,

Mr. Wurman “Recognized at an early age that his ignorance is his greatest asset, [and he has made it his mission to sort through the abundance of information that is available on every topic, and design the techniques to make it understandable.”

The 2012 National Design Award recipients:

Lifetime Achievement: Richard Saul Wurman

Design Mind: Janine Benyus

Corporate and Institutional Achievement: Design that Matters

Architecture Design: Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects

Communication Design: Rebeca Mendez

Fashion Design: Thom Browne

Interaction Design: Evan Roth

Interior Design: Clive Wilkinson Architects

Landscape Architecture: Stoss Landscape Urbanism

Product Design: Scott Wilson

To learn more about each of the categories and winners, take a look at the full post by Cooper Hewitt. 

Not Business As Usual

“Not Business As Usual,” looks at how creative firms encourage innovation by advocating for creative experiences beyond the working environment. It’s easy to work more than 40 hours a week, but research suggests that this is neither sane nor productive for the individual or the business. Thus, creative professionals are experimenting with new ways to encourage exploration and idea generation — often by telling employees to get outside, wander, and take a break from the routine.

Risky? Yes. Worth the payoff? Several firms are starting to think so. In an upcoming event with SPUR in San Francisco, architects and landscape architects will investigate the value of experiences outside of daily office- and client-based routines. Amirah Shahid (SWA Group), Mark Schatz (Field Paoli); Nicholas May (Tom Eliot Fisch) and Lilian Asperin-Clyman (NBBJ) will share an experience that helped “shape their outlook, their designs, and even their careers.” Find out more about this event or join in while it’s happening Tuesday, May 1, 2012.

Processcapes Exhibition

Processcapes, a new exhibition also at SPUR, opens the following day on Wednesday, May 2, 2012. Curated by UC Berkeley’s Judith Stilgenbauer, the exhibition will feature design work by graduate students in Berkeley’s Landscape Architecture program and their explorations of “program-specific ways of combining time, process, ecology, and placemaking — ideas oftentimes considered to be divergent in the urban landscape.” It’s not enough for landscapes to be beautiful or memorable: they need to be performative and useful as well.

Image courtesy of Judith Stilgenbauer and UC Berkeley.

How well are you combining your social media and your offline marketing and communications? Twitter chat today at 1 pm PST#AECSM #AEC

— AECideaX (@AECideaX) April 24, 2012

I decided to join in on the AECSM (Architecture, Engineering and Construction in Social Media) twitter chat today after seeing a tweet go by in my morning check-in on the twitter stream. Curious, I wanted to know more. A “twitter chat” is a place where firms, individuals, and bloggers can join in for a curated conversation about specific topics.

In this case, Amanda Walter of Walter Communications hosted a six-part question and answer session looking at how to combine online and offline media, marketing, and communications efforts within the AEC industries. By tagging each of the responses with a hashtag (in this case, #AECSM), the event can be tracked by entering the hashtag into your search bar on twitter.

By listening in–watching what others had to say, seeing who showed up, and clicking through on relevant links–and also by commenting myself, I found myself surprised by how much I learned so quickly. Here is a recap of the questions we chatted about–and some of the best responses:

Q1: How are you using offline marketing and communications to drive your online presence? 

Several people chimed in about the relationship between online and offline communications. Where does one start and stop? How much are you engaging online versus offline? Is there a best-practice strategy? It turns out that the two feed into each other, as BrandConstruct said:

#AECSM A1:We promote our our online presence on our business cards, proposals, email signature, and talking about it. — Brand Constructors (@BrandConstruct) April 24, 2012

Q2: How is your online presence driving traffic to your offline strategies?

A2: We can more easily tell what precisely piqued the lead’s interest. #aecsm — Shannah Hayley (@shannahhayley) April 24, 2012

Q3: How can in-person events tap into social media?

@AEC_SM A3: Live-tweeting an event is a great way to get people outside of the event engaged and participating. #AECSM — Laurie Meisel (@LaurieMeisel) April 24, 2012

A3 – I love when events have their own hashtag, so you can network & find contact info during and after event (easier than biz cards) #AECSM — Holly Berkley (@holly_berkley) April 24, 2012

A3. #hashtag for updates, twitter lists of participants, copies of presentations on slideshare, blog posts for more info… #AECSM — Patty Swisher (@pmswish) April 24, 2012

 Q4: In what way has social media changed your firm’s approach to PR?

A4: #aecsm Social Media has made us much more visible. That is the number one thing for now. And it makes it a more active task.. — Hawkins Architecture (@HawkinsArch) April 24, 2012

#AECSM A4: Lots of great responses from students and recruiting about our blogs, ideas, and online writing. — SWA Group (@SWAgroup) April 24, 2012

Q5: What tips do you have for using social media for market research?

YES!! RT @carolhagen: SM is an extension of PR that moves faster than lightning when the content is compelling. Engage Evangelists! #AECSM

— Eric D. Lussier (@EricDLussier) April 24, 2012

#AECSM A5 – People are curious and want to learn; be interesting and the ideas will travel.

— landscape urbanism (@landurbanism) April 24, 2012

MT @landurbanism – Social is not as much about traditional press releases & talking about yourself; it’s sharing & exchanging ideas#aecsm

— Shannah Hayley (@shannahhayley) April 24, 2012

Q6: What firms are integrating social media with mrktg &/or comms strategies well?

@waltercomms #AECSM Q6: I’ve been a fan of Balmori, CMG, Perkins+Will, Arup, and WRT’s “offsite” as places for idea exchange. — landscape urbanism (@landurbanism) April 24, 2012

A6 @populous does quite well. #aecsm — Eric D. Lussier (@EricDLussier) April 24, 2012

At the end of the conversation (which lasted for about 30 minutes, although I chimed in for 15 or so), Hawkins Architecture gave some interesting information about the reach of the conversation: 24,007 people viewed the tweets related to #AECSM over the course of an hour. Perhaps a reason in and of itself to join in — beyond the chance to learn.

And the other stat page –> Tweets about #aecsm have reached 24,007 people via @tweetreachapp ||ow.ly/auDpv

— Hawkins Architecture (@HawkinsArch) April 24, 2012

 Images from here and here.

Last night I caught Surviving Progress as part of the Environmental Film Festival at Yale running this week until April 15. The documentary is by Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks with interviews with geneticists, economists, primatologists, financial analysts, and scientists regarding “business as usual” and if our conceived and applied economic systems are sustainable. The premise of the film is that our brain circuitry, as a species, hasn’t evolved for over 50,000 years, and that our genetic make-up is based on short-term, “fight or flight” gratification, gain, and survival tactics that don’t take into account, say, living beyond the age of thirty-five and together in enormous, high-consumption communities with increasingly scarce resources—whether these are land, clean water and air, food, or fuel.

The film is based on a book by Ronald Wright called A Short History of Progress. Wright posits that we are caught in “progress traps”—similar to the ones chronicled by Jared Diamond in Collapse—and that the falls of Rome, Easter Island, and the Mayan and Anasazi civilizations may be linked to an obsessive belief in “more” equating with goodness and progress. The film picks up where Wright’s book ends, turning its lens on the roads to extinction we deliriously pursue on auto-pilot: growing middle classes with spending power; increasing demands for comforts and luxuries; the self-serving myths of the self-made man as enlightened redeemer propagated by a zealous idolatry of advanced capitalism and its accompanying deforestation, mining, and overpopulation; and finally, my hobby-horse, the pursuits to meet the very real demand of individual and immediate needs (food, shelter, clothing) at the cost of a community, state or nation’s long-term health and wealth. One of the problems that the movie asserts is when this scenario inverts and these individuals are not those living hand-to-mouth and dying by the millions across the globe from the ills of poverty, but those few who claim the property titles of most of the land, make most of the money, sashay in the highest echelons of society and hold key political offices, and take the highest risks to make even more money regardless of consequences—that is, when a democracy becomes an oligarchy. As one commentator mentioned: “When those at the bottom are starving, those in power lose legitimacy.” Does any of this sound familiar? Global economic downturn? Bail out the banks? Occupy Wall Street?

So, what will we do???? Run for the hills? Move all New Yorkers to Kansas? Bio-engineer our survival??? One-child policies???? Move into outer space??? (If this last sounds starry-eyed, I would be too: it comes from Stephen Hawking whose automated voice accompanies footage of being tossed about an anti-gravity chamber by a bunch of astronauts—hello! Toss ME, Mr. Armstrong!) Several speakers in the film talk about expanding the “moral horizon” of economic systems—linking economics and ecology with ethics. Perhaps this sounds high-minded, but in a discussion that followed the screening with co-director Harold Crooks and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar at Yale who holds joint appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Divinity School, Tucker mentioned that a slew of world leaders and economists held a conference at the UN (see here too) just last week to determine new indices for reorienting economies to meet the needs of the majority—and not add to the coffers of the already engorged one-percent (Google “Gross National Happiness + Bhutan” and you’ll find a flurry of links). In today’s New York Times op-ed piece, David Brooks describes a rift between the agendas of two economies, divided along US party lines, that is similar to the ones articulated and proposed in Surviving Progress. Economy I is the privatized, unregulated, and brutally efficient bull market; Economy II is slower, without a do-or-die breathlessness, that produces less money but more jobs, and meets the needs of more American people. Can Economy I subsidize Economy II? That might be cool. We’ll see. As Jane Goodall offers, when our backs are to the wall, we are pretty creative problem-solvers. Can we create a global ethics? Can we meet the needs of the very poor and shrink the consumption patterns of the very rich?

While the movie assumes that we indeed are confronting a global ecological crisis and certainly there are those who do not see a kind of “peak” oil calamity at hand, the ideas the speakers discuss are funny, compelling, complex, and also contentious. There is much talk about “controlling” our future and DNA, and the salvation of rationalist models to meet the needs and desires of almost seven billion people on a finite Earth. But as China and the former USSR demonstrated in the twentieth century, this isn’t how life works. Economics is not rational—as I love to carp, and yet I haven’t heard many address this seriously. Economics is based on the ever-shifting and quixotic platform that is human discourse and environmental conditions. These aren’t externalities, but the actual stuff of being alive: love, water, curiosity, thrills, interest in newness, nostalgia for oldness, resentment, greed, and all the other benign, malignant, apathetic, compassionate and autonomous factors that make up people and planetary systems.

Is it possible that temporary, short-term tactics are exactly what will navigate us out of the mire? Can a string of these pressure points and responses create a more equitable global society? One such example came in last night’s “short” shown before the feature about a man named Jack Sim, a.k.a. Mr. Toilet, who advocates for and builds compost lavatories in impoverished communities.

Also on this week’s schedule, among others, are Colin Beavan, ‘No Impact Man,’ The Island President, and Big Boys Gone Bananas!* following Bananas!* This is not Woody Allen’s 1971 farce, but Fredrik Gertten’s exposé of an employee-driven court case against Dole and Dow Chemicals on the use of pesticides on banana plantations. Speaking of food production, I intend to go to tonight’s screening of Eating Alabama—I don’t hold a deep desire to grind my own corn meal, or, at least, not as often as I like to eat corn bread, but a chicken and some bees are a homestead fantasy for sure.

From the festival’s website:

“The Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY) has become the premiere student-run festival for environmental films. The 4th annual EFFY showcases the arts through incisive, cutting edge films that raise awareness of environmental and related social issues. We aim to facilitate meaningful discourse and spark action and innovation throughout the Yale community and beyond.”

Plus, these are FREE screenings! Check out the links and previews—and if you’re in the New Haven area, say hello, or keep a look-out for local showings.

Why landscape as “moving image”?

When I wrote the syllabus, I had to start thinking about how to title the course—how to talk about film, how to talk about video in the context of landscape. Because I can’t really title the course Landscape and Film, because film is related to a medium: the strip of celluloid. When I try to title it landscape and video, well that doesn’t encapsulate it either. So it’s limited. Anything we say about film and video is limited to exemplify or explore this relation between landscape and these media—one digital and one analog. That’s when I came across landscape as moving image, because landscape is dynamic and it also moves us as users. As users we get affected by the effects of both film/video and landscape. But still it’s not a perfect title, because when I call it landscape as moving image, I’m kind of disregarding the aural dimension that is so important. I understand the limitations on how to provide a title that makes this relation between landscape and sensory media, even though at the bottom line they have so many things in common.

What does this relation, between sensory experience and media, mean for landscape architecture now?

First landscape, as a culturally constructed reality, is always mediated—through technology and artistic production, such as painting, photography, mapping, etching, and survey. For example, if we think about the panorama, the Renaissance perspective, the astrolabe, and the way dynamic systems were translated into measured knowledge, we can begin to understand how media and technology have always had implications on landscape design. So what are the consequences of looking through a video camera, looking through this apparatus that appeared one hundred years ago?

Well, we just had a filmmaker Robert Todd visit the class and he said, “When we look at movies, maybe 2 percent of the screen is occupied by characters and 98 percent is occupied by landscape.” There’s an intellectual construct that many filmmakers have highlighted, but it’s still not articulated properly to make landscape the main figure. That’s the void that I think we can contribute to somehow. Not as film theoreticians or historians, but as designers—to shift priorities of the gaze and to recognize landscape as one of the main characters.

Also, there’s an emergent need for producing videos for competitions. The power of technology and communication really forces us to think how we can contribute to this medium culturally, and for that we need knowledge, references of what has been done in the past. Whatever you do has to have a consequence for generations to come to continue that evolution. And I think we’re not doing a great job on that—issues of communicating our projects, our ideas beyond drawings has to be addressed. We have to know historically how this medium has evolved, in terms of narrative, in terms of adding to culture.

Inspired by Thomas Cole’s painting The Titan’s Goblet (1833), Peter Hutton documents natural phenomena in the Hudson River Valley in his film In Titan’s Goblet (1991).

What do you believe video expresses about landscape architecture that no other medium can?

Landscape and moving image have so many things in common. Both have time scales and ideas of narrative, sequence, framing, and deep space. However, they mean different things, and that’s what the class is now trying to figure out. And I think here we enter into the realm of subjectivity. Narrative in film and landscape are almost paradox. Because once we think about narrative in film, we automatically think about story and characters, and once we have characters, most of the audience drops landscape as the background. The center of attention never shifts. Like I said, the question for me is: is there a way to shift this mode of perception?

I think, too, the idea of tracking and understanding natural phenomena is another way video can operate with landscape. Phenomena happen over time; we need time to understand these transformations, like heat, humidity, reflexivity, moisture, weather and weathering, and so on. We need to have a nice beer at the esplanade and look at the sky and look at the weather, look at the fog— how it dissipates, how it disappears. How many times we are at the seacoast, having a nice dinner, and understand this process. But for that we need to stop, you need to really slow down, and this is the only way to see these things. We try to capture the atmospheric qualities of our landscapes and instrumentalize them in our designs. We try to do diagrams of how these things change, but we only see part of it. And these phenomena are immersive: you have to be part of them. They have sound. They have a corporeal manifestation that is easily addressed in film/video.

So how can we be opportunistic with video? 

First as a sketching tool for observation and registering perception. This can lead us to new understandings, to new principles of design through phenomena. Secondly, as a communication tool for our projects. And thirdly, to find new constituencies of design.

The park was created after a 1997 NSW Government decision to transform former industrial sites into public open spaces. From the 1920’s through 1993, the site had been used by BP Australia for fuel storage and distribution. (Take a look at what the park location looked like before).

The purpose of the park is to bridge the divide between providing public waterfront access and reserving part of the waterfront (0.9 ha) for future maritime use to maintain working harbors in Sydney.

McGregor Coxall, the landscape architect, weaved a beautiful narrative between the past present and future, and it will be fascinating to watch this site weather over time. The 2.5 ha of public open space on the site are primarily for passive recreation for the primarily residential neighborhood with walking trails, stairways, and interpretive signage. Active pre-existing ball fields to the north link BP Park to the Waverton community.

When I traveled to Sydney in 2009, I had a chance to explore the park first-hand and see the results of the landscape architect’s plans and subtle interventions.

Signage throughout the site highlights the previous industrial history and past functionality of the site. Materials range from ultra smooth and modern to rough and rugged; from crisp, new materials like the smooth concrete slabs and airy aluminum catwalks, to old-stone and industrial remnants from the park’s previous life and the exposed sandstone geology.

Integration of the old with the new is most evident in the many staircases that help pedestrians navigate the site. Building walls were removed, forcing a mash-up of two staircases combined into one; as one, they are odd-looking and in quirky misalignment, though this imperfection is surprisingly appealing. Stumbling across new or different juxtapositions, as an aesthetic, is repeated throughout the site, in staircases that navigate bends in the path in a unique way. To the south, there is a new amphitheater-esque staircase placed with utmost authority only to accommodate for a small sandstone outcropping that juts out from the surrounding topography.

My explorations of this park took place as after-work crowds were beginning to stroll, walk dogs, and practice bocce. Given its location and size nestled into a cliff, its prime motivation is to serve the surrounding community though the signage does make it potentially worth the trip for educational groups.

BP Park brings a rich narrative to the waterfront community through the use of materials, providing access to various topographic levels, and highlighting the geologic and botanic history throughout the site.

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Charly Nelson is a photographer and designer with a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, School of Design. She works in San Francisco as a writer and designer and continues to explore international landscape architecture in theory, practice, and photography.

Poster Series Image from Harvard; click to enlarge.

This weekend, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design is hosting a 2-day symposium on Landscape Infrastructure: Systems & Strategies for Contemporary Urbanization. From the website: 

“The two-day symposium will explore the future of infrastructure and urbanization beyond the dogma of civil engineering and transportation planning. Presentations and panel discussions focus on the growing agency of ecology to propose responsive strategies that address the predominant challenges facing urban economies today including climate dynamics, carbon and nitrogen accumulation, population mobilities, and resource economies.”

The symposium begins tonight, Friday, at 6:30 PM and continues all day tomorrow. Featuring speakers from the Army Corps of Engineers to Landscape Architects, Architects, Scientists, and beyond (see full list here), the symposium aims to investigate the technological infrastructure that sustains urban life. An expanded description:

“Urban life is sustained by technological infrastructure. Highways, harbours, airports, power lines, landfills and mines largely figure as the dominant effigies of contemporary urbanization. The sheer size of these elements renders their understanding as a single system practically impossible, yet their operations depend precisely on their continuity to support the flow of capital and cultural mobility. Often found underground, or beyond the periphery of cities, the presence of urban infrastructure remains largely invisible until the precise moment at which it fails or breaks down. Floods, blackouts and shortages serve as a few reminders of the limited capacity and fragility of this large operating structure that unilaterally depends on constant control and micro-management for its sustenance.

“As the invisible background of contemporary society, the smooth functioning of infrastructure has literally naturalized the processes of urbanization whereas less than a century ago, a basic level of collective, essential services barely existed. Rarely, do we stop to interrogate the functioning, let alone the effects – geospatially, metabolically, or semiotically – of this Taylorist, technological superstructure. Yet recent events – from the sudden collapse of highway bridges, the rise and fall of water levels, the growing hazards of coastal storms and coastal eutrophication, the accumulating effects of carbon emissions, the surge in foreign oil prices and spike in food prices, the drop in credit markets, to the increase in population mobility and dispersal – are instigating a critical review of the basic foundation upon which urban economies depend on.

Poster Series Image from Harvard; click to enlarge.

“Emerging from current economic exigencies and environmental imperatives, this symposium engages these challenges by re-examining the precepts of infrastructure - the basic system of essential services that support a city, a region, a nation, a continent- as well as the patterns of urbanization from which they originated. Responding to the overexertion of civil engineering and the inertia of urban planning vis-à-vis the pace and complexity of urbanization at the turn of the 21st century, the symposium challenges the technocratic role of engineers, transportation planners and policy makers who have profoundly shaped the urban environment that we move through and live in today. Drawing from the growing agency of contemporary urbanists – ecologists, geographers, historians, designers, conservationists and social groups – who are rethinking the predominance of centralized infrastructures, guest speakers employ a telescopic vantage to bring forth alternative models, methods and measures across a range of scales, that seek to decouple the Fordist economies of scale from the paradigm of economic growth.

“By revealing the multi-dimensional complexities, externalities and cross-dependencies within the infrastructures of waste and water, energy and mobility, food and fuel, guest speakers further examine how the landscape of technological hardware and biophysical software can be cultivated as both a system and a strategy for contemporary urbanism that is flexible, contingent, and multidimensional. Through contemporary projects and cutting edge research, the underlying objective of the symposium is to unearth and unlock the potential of emerging synergies and high-performance strategies that span the critical divide between ecology and economy underlying patterns of urbanization in the 21st century.”

To learn more about the symposium and the speakers, check out the website details.

As part of the launch of the inaugural publication by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, the students and team behind GROUND UP are hosting a panel discussion investigating landscapes of uncertainty.

Featuring Ila Berman, the Director of Architecture at CCA, Douglas Burnham, Principal of envelope AD, Scott Cataffa, Principal at CMG, and Sha Hwang, Design Technologist, Movity-Trulia; the panel and conversation will look at new innovations and trends in landscape architecture, design, and design practice, as well as the influence of technology and data on the current shape of design.

I’m excited to be moderating the panel discussion with these talented practitioners, and our conversation will look at several themes emerging in landscape today: what does it mean to design in uncertain economic and environmental conditions? Do we ever have complete information? How is our practice changing, and how can we continue to design for innovation, both within our walls and outside in our work?

The presentations and panel conversation begins at 7 PM in Wurster Hall, 112 Auditorium, Wednesday, March 21, 2012. The GROUND UP journal launches later this Spring.

Infrastructural Optimism?

A good portion of what’s taught in basic planning history courses has nothing to do with when CIAM published La Charte d’Athenes or Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department issued the Standard Zoning Enabling Act. Instead, the earlier days of such courses are largely occupied by learning to put up with other people’s expression of strong feelings on the subject of “Daniel Burnham: Yes or No?” About a month into my own planning education, I’d heard the one about make-no-little-plans more times than I care to remember.

So it is with some temerity that I approach the present subject: “infrastructural optimism,” the domain of UCLA lecturer and cityLAB “senior research associate” Linda Samuels. It was my good fortune to stumble across an “infrastructural optimism” lecture in late-February. Samuels, it should be noted to her credit, delivered the lecture without once mentioning Our Daniel; as I sat down to write out my response to her lecture, however, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to deliver a repeat performance.

It’s best we get the full quotation out in the open now, ensuring that everyone’s on the same page going forward: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood” (there’s a bit more, if you’re really interested). The actual title of Samuels’s presentation can’t hurt, either: “Infrastructural Optimism, or whatever happened to the Steel Cloud?”

Some readers may be wondering what this has to do with this, but please bear with me, as I’m very slowly getting there. First, a definition of sorts: “infrastructural optimism” manages to somehow merge incredible superficial clarity (“Right, optimism about infrastructure or optimism reflected in infrastructure, I get it…”) with a frustrating opacity (“…but wait, what does that mean in practice?”). Cue Linda Samuels in Places magazine:

“Throughout American history, large-scale public works have represented our collective optimism. The Interstate highways unify the country not only by connecting it coast to coast but also by elevating speed and mobility to the status of national entitlement. Similarly, we expect our networks of local streets to serve us functionally, formally and symbolically — to establish a sense of order and hierarchy, to orient us within cities and operate as spaces for social connection… Infrastructure reconstruction can also inspire transformation. In this fuller role, infrastructure can work to link the collective and the individual through built form, becoming a formidable tool of urban reinvention.”

Samuels points to Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park, which occupies a former brownfield site, as an example of “how a program of remediation can be repurposed into a program of art” and rekindle the spirit of “infrastructural optimism.

Infrastructure is Never Just Infrastructure

Infrastructure, in other words, is never just infrastructure; Samuels calls it “our most ubiquitous yet underused public space.” As such, it should be both the subject and expression of public conversation, that “representation of our collective optimism” she calls out in Places. There are places where Samuels sees this working at the moment – the Weiss/Manfredi-designed Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, for instance, is a case study in “how a program of remediation can be repurposed into a program of art” – and places where she doesn’t – the I-10 in New Orleans, which “came to embody the city’s failure” after Hurricane Katrina.

There are, then, some promising signs that infrastructural optimism is making at least a partial comeback. Samuels cites as a few such signs recent broad changes in the design discourse (including the coming-out of landscape urbanism) which suggest post-modernism is on its way out, and a number of more specific projects that “actually tackle problems rather than simply pointing the finger.” We’re not there yet (remember that “D” grade the American Society of Civil Engineers gave American infrastructure?), but at least in a few places we’re headed in the right direction.

So what does this mean for planners? Well, I promised you Burnham, and Burnham you’ll get. What I fail to add to this blog in terms of practical planning experience (unless and until the landscape urbanists decide to try their hand at planning the most efficient way to stock warehouses in atypical industries, in which case I’m your man), I can somewhat make up for with a firsthand understanding of what it’s like to study city planning right now. And right now, the core of what seems to be the young-planner-in-training’s understanding of and appreciation for Burnham hinges on the “make no small plans” line. Given that we’re all students, there’s a baseline level of at least some optimism about the future of the planning profession, but the form that optimism takes seems to shift depending on what a given student thinks of that famous line from Burnham.

The Burnhamophilic optimistic planner opts for the big plan, seeking to capitalize on whatever momentum is available at a given point in time to push through a catalytic vision that will define a given jurisdiction’s approach to the built environment for years to come. The Burnhamophobic optimistic planner, on the other hand, sees pocket parks and guerilla gardens everywhere, but shies away from the visionary comprehensive plan that isn’t likely to come anywhere close to being realized.

Naturally, this is hardly a new dichotomy: a quick search is enough to turn up the suggestion of a similar split in the APA Journal’s Summer 1984 issue, and even then the argument is described as one that “has peppered the planning literature for several decades.” But in the context of Samuels’s argument for “infrastructural optimism,” it throws up some questions about the potential for a future of “planning optimism” to go along with it.

Calling young planners “Burnhamophilic” or “Burnhamophobic” is silly, perhaps even cute; the tension suggested by those terms, however, is neither. Writing here a few weeks ago, I referred to the present as “a great opportunity for new, young planners and designers to shape the environment in which we’ll work—for the rest of our careers—and shouldn’t be wasted.” I haven’t changed my mind: I remain a committed optimist. But mine is a carefully-bounded optimism, tempered by a concern about young planners’ inability to look beyond this age-old dichotomy.

The problem is that this isn’t simply a difference of ideology or something as intangible as that; it’s a difference that defines how the planning profession is and should be practiced. While debates about practice are generally healthy, this one is beginning to seem chronic and somehow immune to the periodic bursts of professional agreement that could help to usher in a new era of unified “planning optimism” that incorporated the very best of both “sides.”

During the question-and-answer session that closed Linda Samuels’s lecture on infrastructural optimism, she spoke about her recent and ongoing research: how to operationalize infrastructural optimism and “tilt the scales toward success.” Lord knows, that’s precisely what planners need to do as well – but unless a new generation of planners can call a truce on defining just what “success” means, we’re going to keep riding those scales like a seesaw, unable to make the city into what both Burnham and Samuels would hope for it to be: “a representation of our collective optimism.”

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A native of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Peter Chomko got his start in planning rethinking the spatial organization of the atypical warehouse environments (those of an arts-and-education nonprofit and a corporate library services outsourcing firm) where he worked. He is presently a Master of City Planning (2013) candidate at the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Design, with a concentration in community and economic development.