The Humanity of Infrastructure: Landscape as Operative Ground

The ubiquity of contemporary infrastructure cannot be overstated; it silently conveys, inhibits, facilitates, mediates, and in so doing forms the foundation of humanity’s existence. As a result, infrastructure as we know it has become both culturally and physically peripheral, resigned to crumble and rot as it waits to be replaced. In recent years, landscape historians, urban theorists, and designers have turned their gaze once again to focus on the vast networks of infrastructure that underlie our cities and metropolises in order to begin to address the ever increasing pressures placed on contemporary cities and the innumerable biophysical systems with which they interface. The study of infrastructure as an industrial urban phenomenon, however, neglects millennia of infrastructural practice in the city, its periphery, and far beyond. It is necessary to recontextualize landscape, the common medium for human inhabitation, as infrastructure; a practice inexorably tied to the history of human civilization.

For the purpose of this discussion, infrastructure can be defined as those systems, works, and networks upon which the function of any system of human inhabitation is reliant. According to Bhatia, it has become apparent that “the natural environment is perhaps the only issue that affects all of humanity equally,” and a renewed “emphasis on the collective natural environment repositions the role of infrastructure as the foundational spatial format, as it allows for the interconnection between the human and environmental spheres. Landscape is Bhatia’s infrastructure. Landscape is inherently infrastructural: it mediates, produces, facilitates, and transports. As a network of infrastructural function and flow, landscape (here considered to be a result of human modification of an environment) becomes the operative platform of human existence; where landscape exists, so does infrastructure. Landscape is the medium through which culture, society, and the individual interact with biophysical, meteorological, and geological fluctuation or stasis. Landscape is a conduit, an exaggerator, a proliferator, an inhibitor, an enabler; herein lies its timeless operative capacity.

via The Humanity of Infrastructure: Landscape as Operative Ground, by Dane Carlson