UCLA

In the first decade of the 2000s, three coinciding conditions instigated attention from architects, urban designers, and landscape architects towards infrastructure as an untapped site for the reinvention of the public realm: a series of tragic and highly visible infrastructure failures; an economic recession which simultaneously left tens of thousands of creative professionals unemployed and spurred a new generation of public works programs; and a shift in the disciplinary discourse away from the pessimism and cynicism of the 1980s and 90s towards collaborative, productive alternatives. Resulting competitions proved creative infrastructure reinvention projects possible, though successfully implemented versions remained scarce.

One site in Los Angeles, the 101 Freeway north of downtown (known as the "trench"), has been the location of four such proposals since 1988, including Steel Cloud by Asymptote, winner of the West Coast Gateway competition, and Morphosis's 101 Pedestrian Bridge. Though award-winning projects by globally distinguished firms, both failed to be implemented. By comparison, another project similarly challenged to reinvent divisive lines of mobility through visionary design, Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss/Manfredi, has proven instrumental in providing new public space that connects the city to the water, increases the area's ecological contribution, and capitalizes on infrastructure's spatial, material, and financial possibilities. The two failed cases were analyzed in six categories -- objectives, politics, stakeholders, context, finances, and discourse -- and through ten conditions derived from policy scholarship known to improve implementation success. The findings from an equivalent analysis of the success case were used to cross-examine the failures. The results revealed ways the likelihood of project implementation might be improved, including the disciplinary hybridity unique to landscape and infrastructural urbanism.

Those rather pragmatic findings are framed within an intellectual argument that seeks to reclaim infrastructure as public space. Having lost its collective role when, first, it was relegated to engineering through demands of modernization and, second, its "public" was sanitized and limited, this new discourse requires loosening infrastructure's myopic definitions and rigidly controlled uses. By conceptualizing infrastructure as part of the production of public space it reclaims that marginalized territory for design intervention, alternative occupation, and political appropriation.