Aging infrastructure in first ring suburbs.

Infrastructure is kind of a hot topic right now.  The American Society of Civil Engineers released its 2009 Report Card for Infrastructure, giving the nation a cumulative grade of “D”.   Obama has been pushing for infrastructure improvements as a way to improve the economy while any mayor with a half baked, “shovel ready” project salivates at the thought of freely flowing federal funds.  One of the questions asked at the monthly CQRGC Healthy Places meeting was about suburban vs urban infrastructure investment. Specifically, they were interested in the investment split between the first ring suburb of Gwinnett County and the urban core of Fulton County. The speaker, Paul Moore from Glatting Jackson, answered the question with an example that I had particular experience with – the Parisian suburb riots of 2005-06.

During my last year of undergraduate Architecture at Georgia Tech, I studied abroad for 10 months in Paris. I lived in the northern portion of the 18th arrondisement, which is better known for the artist’s district Montmartre and the graceful cathedral of Sacre Coeur. For me, it was also nervously close to ‘les banlieues’, or suburbs of Paris. Despite their proximity to downtown, the neighborhoods are separated from historic Paris by a literal ring of disinvested rail tracks that remain under utilized in order to remain available for military use in case of the city’s attack. And while I can’t vouch for the relevance of this motive, I can say that the elevated rail line does a great job at separating the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’ in the city.

Peaceful Protests.

In fact, the phrase ‘les banlieues’ is now recognized as a euphemism in the French press to describe low income housing projects that the government practically forced immigrant communities into during the 1970s and 80s. Petty crime has also increased in France, with much of it blamed on juvenile delinquency fostered within the banlieues, as a result the ensuing areas are perceived as being unsafe places to live. During the early 1990s, tougher law enforcement and immigration control measures were enacted, and partly as a reaction to those increased penalties without a perceived increased in assistance, the area imploded with riots in the Fall of 2005.

Now, some might say that Buford Highway would never come to such extremes, but a quick pass at the area:

• Its aging infrastructure that was never built to be adaptable, a key tenant for sustainability. Atlanta had similar growth issues during the 1950s.

• However, at that point, Atlanta had the tax revenues to support re-investment. Currently, Gwinnett County is experiencing decreasing  tax revenues each year.

• The changing demographic of the Buford Highway strip, is startling similar to the immigrant based Paris suburbs.

With the current mortgage crisis, economic downtown, and rising prices, its not out of reach to think that we might have similar problems in our own back yard. As these first ring suburbs age, and traditional disenfranchised communities growing larger, this purely infrastructural issue can spill over and really start affecting communities.

 

the structure of vagueness

To waste time before school starts to kick in, I’m reading TransUrbanism, and thus naturally jumped right to the first chapter with Lars’ name in the byline, ‘The Structure of Vagueness’. He actually starts off with the same historical architecture references that he uses in our studio proposal (Transurbanism published in 2002, studio proposal written in 2008, respectively). But at least now I understand the pretense better, the references being Antonio Gaudi (Sagrada Familia) and Frei Otto (Institute for Lightweight Structures).

Apparently, they both deal with ‘materials that can process forces by transformation’.

He experimented with this idea through a studio at Columbia that used the “wool water technique” to ‘calculate the shape of city patterns’ with a merging and bifurcating geometry. (I’m sure all my CP friends/professors would flip right about now – what? using threads to determine the lay out cities?!). I’ll post some scans showing the results of this process later, but basically, what emerges is a not a highly formalized, axial based grid like Paris, Rome or DC, but a “vague order” (with still connecting street blocks, thank goodness) that more resembles an Olmstead-ish Ansley Park. Lars’ names this new experiment “soft rigidity” instead of the “frozen rigidity” of angular geometry past. Thus the voids become the definition of space, rather than the strict and forceful axial roadways.

This is not really a novel idea. Maybe in architecture used to form buildings, but forming a city structure around public space isn’t a new concept. But then he goes on to mess with the architect’s historical penchant for unprogrammed ‘open space’. We all know, through many, many, many poor examples in urban planning, that unplanned, unprogrammed open spaces go vacant, eventually to become derelict and menaces to their surroundings. But the article here seems to suggest that if we just rename this space, we’ll solve the social, political, economic, and psycological problems humans encounter while moving through and trying to operate in it. He suggests,

We must replace the passive flexibility of neutrality with an active flexibility of vagueness.

Uh huh. The theory goes that if neutrality merely allows for formal and informal conduct, vagueness actually relates them. In a vague building, this is named structural Situationism, purposely allowing for derives (woohoo Libero!) as structural properties. If events/spaces/structure is precisely unplanned, that is now ok, because “the structure will engage itself in the ways decisions are made”. The theory opposes Mies’ empty openness and encourages solid vagueness.

Right.

 

Old Argonne

Here’s an image of the southern view down Argonne Ave, from 1940-ish. Imagine the Krispy Kreme on the right and a litter filled, dirt patch of a lot on your left and that’s how it looks today. Too bad they knocked down those cute little houses to put up such an ill-used park.