Urban infrastructures and the necessity of changing their definition and planning Landscape infrastructure; a new concept for urban infrastructures in 21st centur

Document Type : Research Article

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Abstract

During centuries, modern cities and societies were sustained upon technological infrastructures. Our cities depend on these networks in a way that we can’t imagine them without highways or railroad networks, airports, municipal water and sewer systems, telephone, electricity and most recently internet or communication networks. Today these infrastructural networks have a vital role just the same as sun, plants and fresh air for us. These infrastructures affected our cities and our relation with our environs more than any other achievements in the industrial era.
From late 20th century by entering post-industrial era in developed countries, by the emergence of ecological hazards which led to the rise of environmental concerns since 1970s, the crises and erosion in the engineered infrastructure networks since the first decades of 21st century, beside the disability of modern technological infrastructures to response to new multi-dimensional needs of post- industrial societies, coming into focus the necessity of redefinition in the current approaches to infrastructures. By revisiting the concept, features and crises in the field of urban infrastructures, this essay puts into question the expected aspects of post-industrial infrastructures. Also by historical- interpretation study on the notion of landscape this paper examines the capacity of landscaping approach in planning and managing infrastructures in the 21st century.
Finally, analyzing these two concepts showed that the solution to overcome the industrial infrastructures toward post-industrial one is to employ the more multi-dimensional and holistic approaches. Approaches that allow the multi-faceted integration between infrastructure and ecological, social and economical aspects of cities and point the end to the more than a century of civil engineering authority that shaped rigid and mono-dimensional infrastructures in the modern era. It noted also that the discipline of landscape which simultaneously with the great changes in modern philosophy, passed conceptual revolution, due to its inherent traits of being mediance and trajection that is not reduced to the objectivity and mono-dimensionality, allows us to overcome the object-oriented approaches in planning urban infrastructures. Thus the result of this short recall of two notions of infrastructure and landscape shows that the utilization of landscaping approach in planning the infrastructures is one of the solutions allows us to pass the inflexibility and solidity of modern engineered infrastructures.

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References

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The Monthly Scientific Journal of Bagh-e Nazar
Volume 13, Issue 43
January 2017
Pages 5-18

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