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by Ryan Yibin Qiu Infrastructural networks shape the way that we think about place. All landscapes influenced by man are haunted by the ghosts of networks past. The networks of the past comprise a visible and everyday heritage that people can adapt and to which they can respond. Railways, canals, sewers and industrial routeways can be reappraised, repurposed and reused to meet emerging and future needs.
Too often, these places are dismissed. The Demos pamphlet Resilient places (see link below) argues that the heritage infrastructure of the public realm can play an important part in addressing challenges of today.
Infrastructure govern the way that we connect to our physical environment and how places within it connect with one another. In a world in which financial and material resources are short, this pamphlet examines detailed examples of how communities, businesses and local government have come together to make use of heritage infrastructure, and looks at lessons that they might hold more generally.
The repost is divided into six parts:A heritage of resilience
Civic creativity
A participative landscape
A working landscape
Implications for policy and practice
Recommendations for making the most of heritage infrastructure
Stewart Brand provides one useful way of approaching the issue of how places learn and adapt. In his pace layered cross-section of civilisation the components move at importantly different rates. Brand explains:
Fashion changes quickly, Commerce less quickly, Infrastructure slower than that, then Governance, then Culture, and the slowest is Nature. The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain. The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power... The robustness of pace layering is how cities learn: because cities lay particular emphasis on the faster elements, that is how they ‘teach’ society at large.
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