Towards an Adaptable Infrastructure?

I am hardly working on a series of posts, including that on Kate Orff. The video below can be related to the forthcoming post on Kate Orff insofar as it deals with the current condition of New York State's infrastructure (about the question of infrastructure: if you have a chance, I recommend to read Quaderns' issue 262 on Para-Infrastructure, among many other papers, magazines, essays on this question of re-calibrating infrastructure).

This superstorm Sandy revealed the obsolescence and vulnerability of New York State's infrastructural model (see a selection of papers, articles: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). I will not go deeper in this question as I am working on this aforementioned post related to Kate Orff. In few words, I will posit that concepts of response, change, adaptation, non-linear, softness, differentiation, mitigation, vulnerability, problem-addressing, scalability, self-sustained, self-reliance, mutability, adaptability…, pose new hypotheses in terms of re-calibrating landscape infrastructure. Sandy — but also Irene, Katrina, Xynthia (in France),  and other natural disasters not related to climate changes such as Tohoku Earthquake/Tsunami, to limit to these examples — has revealed that humans and infrastructures are not only interconnected as well as reliant upon landscape.

In this video, Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, argues that climate change will have a serious impact in New York State's infrastructural system. 'Critical structure' as she termed: bridges, sewage systems, but also public health and agriculture.

With a clear evidence: coastal and waterborne zones are concerned with natural disasters, global warming consequences. Unpreparedness will become more and more critical.

This, of course, raises loads of questions: What do these natural disasters and these global-warming-related natural shifts teach us about our relation with landscape, our approach to implementing and our uncertain futures? How can we problem-address these mutable, unpredictable issues?

In the framework of The Taubman College Symposium organized by Etienne Turpin, Seth Denizen and Paulo Tavares propose a first path,

Scaling our designs and desires to the geologic would require us to assemble responsively with the non-human scale of geo-forces in play on this planet.

In a simplest word, making a geologic turn as a possible way to re-articulate infrastructures, communities, and imaginations in relation with landscape.

credit video: A Crisis Foretold: Studies Warned New York Infrastructure Critically Threatened by Climate Change, originally appeared on The Democracy Now.

Source: The Democracy Now!