Post-industrial to Post-infrastructural: Turning Towards Systems Over Parcels as Sites of Urban Change

Keywords: historical geography, infrastructure, port, river, rail, road, urban, metropolitan statistical area, transportation, United States, planning, applied geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 64

Abstract

Urban areas evolve, yet like an organism, build upon a base of previous developments. Boundaries are maintained even when uses shift or when whole populations are ousted. Patterns are slow to alter. Once platted, a system of individual parcel ownership ensures very little change with the exception of major disasters or property taken by eminent domain. Like a palimpsest, the base material is reused, altered, but still bears the visible traces of its earlier form.

In American metros, there is no more durable structuring device than transportation infrastructure. The bones of a city are in the originating transportation network, usually built out at an economic boom time, and determined by the most efficient transportation technology then available—port, river, rail, or road. These four transportation infrastructures have determined the bones of US metro areas. They then also must determine the ways in which a city can iterate towards new goals of walkability, density, and low carbon urbanism. Our practice-based group believes that focusing on atrophying and abandoned transportation networks and their infrastructures, rather than the much-discussed post-industrial factory or brownfield sites will prove more productive in evolving current urban patterns towards more sustainable ones.

To understand how that transition might happen, we looked at 21 US urban areas whose economies will likely continue to grow. The presentation will share methods on how the metros were classed into four types, and what this lens can offer urban and regional planners working in these future vanguards of American urbanism.