The presentations by Marco Veneri and Pushpa Arabindoo focused respectively on urban agriculture and roads as elements of urban infrastructure capable of metabolically reconfiguring the ecological conditions of cities. Marco Veneri’s presentation on urban farming in London and Madrid discussed the strategic aims of temporary urban farming projects in terms of their contribution to trajectories of urban change, the divergent visions of those running them, and the unexpected outcomes and varying ideas of temporality that emerge through their operation.
Arabindoo’s work on the Outer Ring Road (ORR) in Chennai, India, starts by acknowledging its damaging effect on important if visually unspectacular wetland ecologies surrounding the city, that had been portrayed as wastelands as justification for their infrastructural development. However, she goes on to suggest that rather than erasing the structure, an ecological approach should engage with its potential for new kinds of metabolic processes, such as the movement of water, waste, and the production of human and non-human habitat. The research connected particularly around themes of temporality and intention, how green(ing of) infrastructure complicates clear definitions of time and intentionality in urban planning.
Both pointed to the ways that the grand, linear interventions of transport infrastructures disrupt urban ecologies and spatial configurations, but in doing so create possibilities for new flows and spaces of experimentation, as was also evident during the afternoon walk passing alongside and around canals, rail lines and the Périphérique ring road. The overlaps and conversations played out along the following themes, although these are my own interpretation. Direct quotes are in green.
The two presentations connected in their questioning of temporariness and permanence in relation to the relationship of infrastructures and ecologies. How long is temporary, and is there such a thing as permanent when all infrastructures are eventually surpassed or reconfigured by changing values, as now for example with a view to decarbonisation? Urban farming is often employed as a ‘meanwhile use’ of defunct or abandoned infrastructures awaiting this reconfiguration. However, as Marco Veneri points out, these temporary situations can be very long-lasting and often exceed the timelines initially foreseen.
It is important to clarify that food production itself is seen here as infrastructure. Global food systems are close to collapse in many ways. Bringing food production into cities brings social and environmental benefits, supporting green infrastructure (when defined as ecological systems bringing social value to cities). “Restructuring food systems goes hand in hand with restructuring society” (MV). There is clearly a strong basis for the intensification of food production in cities. But how does the re-internalisation of this infrastructure into cities shape the way they unfold in time?
Infrastructure tends to bring an imaginary of permanence, acting as the stable backdrop for the ‘events’ that form our everyday experience. However, the notion of ‘green’ infrastructure already challenges the ‘temporary’ in the sense that it is defined by the life of the plants that are its basis, and constantly evolving as they grow and change. So whilst a space of green infrastructure may become ‘permanent’ from a subjective point of view (in that its location in the city is stable) its exact configuration will always be in flux as plants move, grow and change. Farming is an annual cycle: it may exist in one location over a long period but it has an end point every year. However, there is an importance in long-term investment in skills, networks, and even the health of the soil itself. So already within urban agriculture there are intersecting temporalities of the annual plant cycle as a yearly temporary infrastructure, durable social and ecological conditions, and physical structures with a degree of permanence, but that are nonetheless also subject to reconfiguration and maintenance over time. Meanwhile use projects are events, constantly living in traces of durational infrastructure.
So instead of drawing a line between temporary and permanent as defined states of being, we could think about rates of change for different kinds of infrastructure. Veneri points out that the definition of temporary might have more to do with the intention of of urban agricultural projects, than its actual duration. So how to masterplan around the temporary? Transitional urbanism is described in the London Plan as a strategy towards a common goal. “We can see that meanwhile use is just a parenthesis towards a monorhythmic, linear conception of time and space, where the point we are heading towards is growth, but growth is economic and real estate development” (MV).
For Arabindoo, a similar multi-level temporality is evident in the material manifestation of different timescales as they play out in and around the ORR. The infrastructure has different activations and potentialities according to the seasons. In the wet season, its pipelines and culverts, intended for water management, could become an irrigation system. In the dry season, when the land around it is accessible, it gives access to areas rich in sand and clay, leading to pop-up brick and concrete production structures. An engagement with these temporally-varying materialities might help go beyond an aesthetic reading of infrastructure towards much more metabolic, dynamic views of these kinds of structures and their production of varying configurations of place. This also connected to Céline Baumann’s discussion, in the Public Ecologies **talk, of seasonality as a somewhat ignored dimension of urban ecology – the way trees drop their fruit at a certain time of year and disrupt the smoothness of the urban surface, for example. Acknowledging this kind of unruliness and its effect on our ways of using the public offers the possibility for a deeper engagement with the vibrancy of green infrastructure, beyond its deployment as a static, almost technical feature of environmental management.
Eamon Drumm, in the conversation, pointed to the temporality of longue durée and conservation as an ecological practice. Connecting to Arabindoo’s reading of the ORR, we could think about Paris’ Boulevard périphérique (which featured in the walk) as a place of heritage and memory, but also as a disruption offering ecological possibilities. If we talk about things in terms of carbon quantification, it is much more sustainable to find new ways of life in and through the infrastructure than to try to bury and hide it. There is a huge environmental cost to erasing infrastructure, even if it is itself seen as an environmental mistake. Is the grand infrastructural intervention depassé as a mode of city-making?
The presentations also both addressed the drivers behind the making and reconfiguring of infrastructures. What groups and power dynamics push green infrastructures towards which goals, and what unforeseen ends do they lead toward? With regards to ‘meanwhile use’, temporary urban farming projects tended to have two impulses: their organisers are driven by goals of ‘interdependence, care, self-determination’, according to Marco Veneri; but the external support they receive imagined them as a tool in reaching a strategic urban development vision usually constrained by profit motives. Veneri argues that, although these internal politics can be in conflict with their co-option into wider urban strategies, temporary food-growing projects multiply possible outcomes, blurring the stated goals of urban regeneration and creating a ‘radical openness’ in their real unfolding. Veneri refers to ‘scenario planning’, using narratives unfolding in time as a way to frame multiple possible outcomes from experimentation.
Urban farming though can often be initiated with other aims than food-growing as a primary goal. There is a history of projects initiated by artists, aiming at a ‘relational aesthetics’ of social connection as a primary material underpinned by the activity itself. When communities are engaged in this kind of project, questions of authorship are raised. This is the same though with the way meanwhile use is defined as a ‘project’, usually meaning it is initiated by a professional practice of some kind, usually in collaboration with constructors, developers and so on. Perhaps, as was suggested in the discussion, infrastructure itself is defined by the fact of having a coordination between professional operation and vernacular use.
Temporary urban farming projects often inhabit difficult sites, the afterthoughts of large regeneration strategies - around rail infrastructure for example, where housing development is less desirable. Veneri refers to Peter Bishop’s notion of ‘zones of tolerance’ (Bishop 2015) where agency is left to users within an awkward space that developers can ignore, for a while at least. In this sense, experiments in temporary green infrastructure become possible where there is a lack of aim at the scale of urban planning. The existence of these ‘aimless’ spaces can be observed in the context of shrinking infrastructures, such as London’s King’s Cross – where the disappearance of coal and postal infrastructures left space for both highly planned urban development but also meanwhile uses such as the Skip Garden – or as result of poor planning and land use, where space has been overlooked within the determining of uses.
Arabindoo’s discussion of the ORR also aimed to highlight multiple possible outcomes of infrastructure, through the ‘fiction’ of speculative design. Firstly, she points out that the ORR had the ‘unintended’ (if foreseeable) consequence of disrupting hydrological systems in the landscape it crosses, leading to large and deadly floods. Recognising this intervention it makes in the landscape and its metabolic processes, though, can lead to the conception of (re)uses that go beyond the highway’s narrow intention as an infrastructure for car travel and work with its capacity to also reconfigure other kinds of flow, for example by moving water to create new wetland habitats during monsoon season. In a sense, this echoes Veneri’s observation of a disjuncture, between the kinds of narrow and explicit aims defined within top-down urban planning and the multiplication of unforeseen possibilities that come in the actual deployment and operation of infrastructure systems.
Arabindoo talked of rethinking and reinventing infrastructures as biophysical processes that grow and are not finite, rather than as one-off technical solutions to discrete problems. Infrastructural thinking, she argues, is ecological thinking, as it goes beyond a simple ‘disruption’ or the possibility of talking about the impact of one ‘thing’ or being on another, and necessitates a view of holistic and boundless processes of exchange and production created by infrastructure ecologies. This connects to talking about the ‘aim’ of infrastructural thinking from a scholarly perspective: “what can we do with infrastructure beyond critique?” she asks. “How can design processes find something that can be more mutually constitutive between infrastructures and their surrounding natures?” (PA). Recognising infrastructure and nature as joint major determinants of urban development and appropriating infrastructure as landscape in order to go past the duality between the two. Then thinking about designing ecological systems as metabolic infrastructures that do the work of circulating and transforming materials:
“You need to reinvent infrastructure as a live ecological system, and for that it needs to become an indeterminate form… Instead of infrastructure being designed and conceived as a very finite object it becomes an indeterminate interface of hard technological systems and soft biophysical processes by design” (PA). For this, she calls for ‘unknowing’ infrastructure (including its initial aims and purpose) in order to be able to observe entanglements and go beyond dualistic distinctions of object and environment.
Both presentations point to productive engagements with the disruptions of built form brought by linear transport infrastructures that are now seen as unsustainable. Ecologies can grow and move in a multitude of orientations vis-à-vis infrastructural linearities – non-human growth and movement can take place across, above, below, beside, and inside the concrete structures of transport infrastructure for example. Different kinds of flow and presence are possible in each of these relations. It is therefore wrong to imagine that the (air)space of the Périphérique for example is completely devoid of ecology, and this only happens around it - birds, air, insects also move along it, while other animals may cross it. The following discussion, though, raised a tension between highlighting ecological opportunities, in what may have been seen as ‘mistakes’ from the past, and then a possibility of co-opting this into an argument for unsustainable infrastructures – in other words, the danger of ‘greenwashing’.