MEDITERRANEAN UNION

THE AMBIGUOUS POLITICS OF INFRASTRUCTURE
Forthcoming in the special issue on Politics in December in Architectural Review

On the night of December 31st 2005, hours before the New Year, negotiations between Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart over natural gas supply broke down. The next morning, 4°C and raining in Brussels, the European Union discovered what it means to be tethered to Russia via an umbilical cord of energy. At 10:00am, Russian gas giant Gazprom shut down its pipeline to the Ukraine and in the process threatened Europe’s entire supply, rendering a chronic energy dependency utterly exposed. This brazen act of infrastructural and energy warfare continues to reorganise the geopolitical landscape of the European continent to this day.

When we use the term infrastructure, we typically refer to those fixed structures that facilitate the operation of society. Bundles of cables, metro systems and energy grids form complex support networks for everything from communication and mass transit to power generation and freight. A functioning society and economy is highly dependent on its infrastructure, which is why military strategists describe infrastructure as a ‘control point’. A ‘control point’ is exactly what it sounds like; a highly prized part that allows one to dominate the whole.

As designers, our understanding of infrastructure is victim to two main mis-perceptions. Firstly, we focus on the physical artefacts – the architecturally spectacular stations, terminals and ports that glorify mobility in the era of mass tourism. In doing this, we forget the complex urban interdependencies that these systems share. Secondly, and this is not unrelated, we fail to come to terms with the political charge these objects draw from their context. After all, the political import of infrastructure does not reside in the thing itself – it is only political in so far as it is installed within a broader set of conditions.

This being the case, we need to expand our discussion beyond the confines of the individual asset and try to foreground the complex socio-technical assemblage of which the physical object forms only a single part. We might do this by re-framing the entire debate on infrastructure around the more general term – ‘access’. By extending our infrastructural remit beyond artefacts (roads, sewers, pipes) to take in all those support apparatus that sustain our life world (including biological systems) we are forced to draw the world and its natural resources into our calculations. Since, as Peter Sloterdijk suggests, when access to breathable air has entered into the realm of ‘all those things that can be put at risk’ by our technical interference, it is reasonable that we absorb the environment itself into an infrastructural category.

Sloterdijk suggests that the 20^th century began in a primal scene in Ypres, France on April 22^nd 1915 when a “German gas regiment launched the first large scale operations using chlorine gas as their means of combat” (Terror from the Air, Semiotexte 2009) The ‘environment’ is invented in the trenches of the First World War. It can only be perceived when we move from a model of war that makes the enemies body a target towards a model of war that deprives them of their life world. The concept comes to life as its operation breaks down. Our idea of an environment, of a life-world that sustains us does not exist until it is jeopardised. While it is nothing but an invisible support apparatus it cannot even exist as a concept – it remains in the unperceivable realm of background phenomena.

The first attack was at 6pm. Soldiers lay on the ground, choking, frothing at the mouth, eyes bulging. By 7pm a 6 kilometre wide breach had been opened in the French Canadian front. This is the embryonic moment in the industrialisation of killing, when the direct objective of military operations shifts from targeting the body of the opponent towards the annihilation of the life bearing capacity of their world. If our atmosphere is infrastructural then perhaps one can no longer use the figure of the ‘point’ to denote the locus of control. If the location of our vulnerability is diffused, then both defence and security will be similarly distributed. The post 9-11 climate is humid with ambient anxiety.

This raises the question as to what isn’t infrastructure. The answer to this would be to say that the property of something being infrastructural or not, does not properly belong to the object itself, it emerges through the relation said object has with other objects. If this relationship is a dependent one, in which one object relies on the other for its functioning, then we might say that the second object plays the role of infrastructure. However if the relation between the objects is characterised by autonomy – that is to say independence – then we could not say that the object operates infrastructurally.

If we take the European dependence on Russian natural gas as an example, we can see that there is nothing intrinsically infrastructural about the resource or even the pipelines. The dependencies do not belong to the objects in themselves but to a broader socio-technical assemblage. The components of this assemblage include the inertia of social practices and technologies that have developed around the use of natural gas. These historically sedimented processes secure the centrality of gas to a broad ensemble of energy driven demands such as heating, cooking, transportation and aviation. If these demands are satisfied in other ways, say through the use of alternative fuels, then the dependency is cut and the assemblage re-forms around another infrastructural support. These emergent constellations of dependency are historically conditioned, but this conditioning is open ended. There will developmental tendencies that constrain transformation – say the investment in certain technologies over long periods of time (internal combustion engines/coal power stations etc) but given the right sort of duration even these hardened durabilities begin to appear fluid. Witness the huge Chinese investment in solar power.

Beyond expansion of those things we count as infrastructure (or not), the conversation about infrastructure must be framed so as to highlight the feedback between different systems. Infrastructure always exists in an entangled web of changing relations; climate can affect mobility, mobility can affect exchange of information, exchange of information affects economies and creativity. Further, when technologies are upgraded and dependencies shift, the network’s optimisation, fragility, robustness or resilience to shock shifts too. This dynamic terrain contingently modulates mobility as well as access to it – herein resides the political ambiguity. For it is in the ‘structuring of access’ – that is, in either its affordance or withdrawal that we begin to feel the political consequences of making decisions that divide.  Access ‘for all‘ is always a mystification, a soothing abstraction sung to assuage the anxiety caused by inequality.

Since the political economy of infrastructure is shaped by complex regulatory and financial structures and because its effect on socio-economic dynamics can be so profound, it necessitates a conversation across disciplinary boundaries. In order to get any traction on this dense matrix of issues, first we need to structure an opportunity for the right sort of conversation to take place.  The tendency of academics to fan out into increasingly narrow and specialised cul-de-sacs of knowledge has leeched both the relevance and consequence of any research with ambition to transcend the limited confines of peer-review.  This is the impetus behind the Master of Advanced Architecture; Urban Design at the University of Technology Sydney. The MAA UD was established to provide a forum for experimental research on complex urban environments. It is appropriate that this forum is hosted in a design school – architects and urban designers are uniquely placed to sponsor these conversations since they think spatially and understand how to work across different scales. This being the case, the MAA UD is organised around contemporary challenges posed by urbanisation. The particularity of these problems draws the specific expertise of different disciplines around them.

This year’s studio began with a seemingly innocent question: what if we could catch a train from Beirut to Tel Aviv? The simplicity of the questions belies its potential to refuse a certain debate, to move beyond the endless road maps, deadlocks and impotent initiatives that plague the region. Lebanon is a positive model of a failed state. Like a broken mirror, its capital Beirut reflects the seemingly permanent state of political impasse with a series of spatial ones. It is an unresolved city for an unresolved region. Its urban fabric is a patchwork of internally cohesive zones that meet in discontinuous seams where scarification and underdevelopment rub up against petrodollars and hedonism. The site for the project is the extension to the Beirut Central District. This piece of reclaimed land that juts out into the sea is filled with the exhumed remains of war, architecture as landfill for more architecture, like a closed metabolic loop at the scale of an entire city – the urban environment consumes itself.

The brief for the studio arrived from Paris on 13 July 2008 when French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed an economic and political union of the littoral nations of the Mediterranean Sea along the lines of the EU – including the suggestion of a coastal high speed rail (HSR) line. This ambitious infrastructure network could link the Maghreb to the Levant and the Aegean coast while continuing through the Balkans to southern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula, thus forming a single continuous loop encircling the Mediterranean basin from the Bosporus to Gibraltar.

Even bearing in mind Sarkozy’s geopolitical ambition and nostalgia for empire – the idea of a Mediterranean Union is a startling one in that it could connect twenty one separate states, four time zones, seven major seas and integrate the economies of Asia, Africa and Europe. The combined population of the littoral states is half a billion people. We began by researching the distribution of various forms of infrastructure around the basin which confirmed the extreme unevenness of development.

A HSR line running along the Mediterranean littoral is a seemingly impossible idea based in visionary assumptions.  After all, it would need to pass through a region mired by instability and fractured by impenetrable borders. Functioning like a conveyor at the scale of continents, it would redistribute flows of people, warping the space-time fabric of an entire region – linking long disputed territories and as yet unformed nations. It would string together a seemingly impossible series of names: Gaza, Barcelona, Beirut, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Cairo. In doing so it would open a conduit between the differential pressures of North Africa and Europe – all this in the context of EU policy that increasingly conceives of Southern Europe as a bulwark against refugees.

The political question we asked ourselves is the following one: what are the emancipatory potentials of infrastructure?

This question takes place in the context of the extreme disparities between north and south, between developed and undeveloped. As head of urban development at Solidere, Angus Gavin recently noted in regards to the Middle East (though the comments are also applicable to the developing world) we face two possible scenarios. The optimistic scenario is that we begin to see more economic growth, a stabilisation of the birth rate, the development of a vibrant commercial and creative culture, better access to resources, a broader distribution of wealth, job creation and the formation of a dynamic yet cohesive civil society.

The pessimistic scenario is economic stagnation, accelerated population growth, lack of job creation, concentration of wealth and social stress leading to increased conflict, violence and finally extremism.

Critic Adam Jasper takes a more eschatological view. Why should western liberalism be understood as the only possible precursor to social prosperity? He asks; “What would a Saudi utopia look like, one that is not directed to a western audience? “ In the Occupied Territories, a rampant birth rate might suggest that the only weapons left are demographic ones. Similarly, the Israeli high-tech security economy suggests that an intimate relation between violence and prosperity is not only possible but desirable. Gaza as innovation environment? [see previous post]

Whether horrific to liberal sensitivity or otherwise, the city is the arena for the contest between all these possibilities -. In this contest, infrastructure forms an ambiguous weapon. It is ambiguous because both in its procurement and its effect it is highly dependent on the assemblage in which it is installed. If we are to understand infrastructure as the structuring of access, then some very simple questions immediately arise: access for whom, to what and by what means?

VEHICLES OF MEMORY from NNiasari on Vimeo.

These general questions repeat themselves in countless specific forms: Can a private bus operator be sued for violating civil rights if it fails to service poorer neighbourhoods as happened in Los Angeles in 1996? How does a marketing company in Dubai make public transport appealing to middle class users and not just migrant workers? Why does an Israeli mobile phone company force Palestinians to switch to international roaming as they pass between villages? What sort of tax breaks and wage incentives lure offshore IT companies to business parks in Chennai? Why can Sydney motorist’s wormhole their way under the congestion for an additional four dollars each way?

Every time an entire regional economy in Spain is at the mercy of an easyjet route (or when a biometric scan speeds your movement through Heathrow) we are faced with proof that the physical infrastructure (buses, trains, airports, scanners) are only one component in a much larger and more complex set of conditions that works to regulate and reorganise access. These are the contemporary political realities that we must respond to. Infrastructure depends on innumerable registers. Innovation with infrastructure thus entails being familiar with everything from PPP formats, risk management structures, revenue models and design. For finally, it is in the design, that is to say in the layout, distribution, organisation and planning of infrastructure that the complex political challenges of uneven development rise unavoidably to the surface.

In response to this scenario, this year’s studio set out to propose a master plan for the Beirut terminal of this HSR line and its associated urban fabric as a way of provoking new discussions around the idea of access.

‘The Diversity Machine and Resilient Network’ by Martin Abbott, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Georgia Herbert and Alexandra Wright begins with the idea that Beirut’s existing urban fabric is highly decentralised because of the impact of conflict. The immobility imposed by a divided city and 15 years of civil war led to the development of a patchwork of small neighbourhoods that  are relatively autonomous with regards to the provision of most of the social infrastructure necessary for daily life. Some of the neighbourhoods studied reflect (at least in their organisation) many of the basic principles of urban sustainability currently being promoted in highly centralised cities like Sydney such as provision of necessary services within a 10 minute pedestrian radius. The result of this organisation is an urban fabric that lacks consolidation and that (from the point of view of modernist planning) lacks optimisation or efficiency. Rather than see this as a weakness however, this project argues that it is precisely the ‘redundancy’ of the distributed social infrastructure and relative autonomy of the neighbourhoods that lends the city its resilience. This thinking is further backed up by mathematical research into the properties of distributed networks by people like Duncan Watts, Eugene Thacker and Alexander Galloway who suggest that robustness is related to decentralisation.

Careful mapping by the students suggests that the instability of war has led to the development of an urban fabric that is able to re-organise itself around disruptions – the city has absorbed the DNA of conflict into its material organisation. Their conclusion promises to move urban discourse about infrastructure away from a focus on efficiency and optimisation towards a broad conception of sustainability and resilience in which the redundancy or slack in an urban network is seen as a positive attribute – not something to be minimised.

The second example from the studio is a project for a high-density extension to the city by Erik Escalante-Mendoza and Alina McConnochie. They argue that much of the recent development in the Middle East is caught between excessive difference and excessive repetition. The spectacle of emblematic towers jostling for attention in Dubai makes any individual variation entirely superficial and thus unrecognisable. When it becomes the motivating force behind design, ‘individuality’ destroys the possibility of difference as such. Conversely, in the mere repetition of traditional fabric we face the opposite problem, a system that is not pliable enough to cope with the demands of high-density living or modern public transport infrastructure. Is there something possible in the space between both these models?

Since the bearing capacity of current generation public transport infrastructure is understood to imply a bandwidth of urban density of between 8 – 15 storeys, this project sets out to develop sets of related mini-tower typologies that group and nest in collective clusters. These clusters are organised around larger tower types that are in turn arranged around transport nodes. These collective assemblages form a series of differentiated neighbourhoods based on the interdependence of mobility networks.

If we take light rail as an example, the reservoir of potential users that a station can draw on increases exponentially if it is surrounded by a well-conditioned pedestrian environment (since the operation of any transport system is dependent on those factors that make it easier to access). The urban fabric and the network must therefore be considered as two intimately linked infrastructures that reciprocally determine each other. If in the context of the Middle East or any other hot dry climate, designing a cool and well-shaded space for pedestrians so affects the success or failure of transport infrastructure, then the urban fabric must be designed in terms of its potential to actualise the potential of the networks in which it is enmeshed.

This project asks the following question: what if the manipulation of the climate in the public sphere was used to drive the formation of the building envelope from the outside in, as it were. Rather than understand the transfer of energy as it passes in and out of the interior and across the threshold of the envelope as the sole driver of design, this project proposes new forms of urban development that are designed around the passive conditioning of the pedestrian environment. If the principle of minimal negative impact currently frames issues of amenity with regards to envelope design, this project suggests that we can harness computational techniques and performance evaluation to move towards a model of maximum positive impact. In doing so we shift the debate about sustainability away from an idea of individual insulation towards one of a collective and distributed climatological infrastructure. Of course the idea of an envelope as public infrastructure is an old one – architectural elements like porticos and colonnades attest to this. What is new however is the ability to produce precise climatic effects through the collective manipulation of a high density urban fabric.  In doing so, this project sets out to accomplish nothing less than a new vision for urban development organised around collective typologies and climatic manipulation.

As Alejandro Zaera-Polo points out in his essay, ‘The Politics of the Envelope’ (Volume, issue 17 – see also AR110, p44), the impact of these new technical possibilities is currently doing much more than reorganising architecture, it is reorganising politics. In order to directly drive the design of a building envelope from the point of view of its impact on the public sphere, we would firstly need to create a concrete model of collective benefit and then re-orient discourse towards it. The types of representational structures we traditionally associate with this sort of decision-making may no longer be the ones best able to deliver it. The bi-polar ideological logic of left and right is buckling under the pressure of issue-based politics; of interest groups and networks of lobbyists that temporarily assemble around what Bruno Latour describes as ‘forums’. These forums reshape parliamentary democracy around the particularity of specific events and not around general ideological categories such as labour/liberal or conservative/socialist.  In leaving behind any pretence to universality these political shifts raise the question of who is allowed to participate in these forums and who is excluded. That is, they raise the question of access.

If politics means making decisions that divide, then nothing divides quite like the kilometres of concrete and steel that make up a freeway or rail line. By understanding infrastructure as the ‘structuring of access’ we foreground the way it unevenly redistributes opportunity (and cost) in accordance with power. As such it forms a crucible for political activity. If we take the Mediterranean Union HSR line as an example, it might just be another vector of colonial expansion into a resource rich region – a tendril of influence extending like the old ottoman rail lines or Roman viae.

The fight over infrastructural development and access to it is the fight for all the apparatus that sustain the functioning of urban life. In this power struggle, there can be no concept of innocence – least of all for architects and urban designers. If an earlier generation kept its hands clean, conscience clear and fingers crossed by casting a longing glance back to Venice, Rome and even later Las Vegas as exemplars of urbanism, a new generation is ditching nostalgic attachments and getting its hands dirty in places like Shenzhen, Johannesburg, Beirut, Caracas and Abu Dhabi. Contemporary cities throw into doubt romantic assumptions about ‘proper’ urban form; instead they become experimental sites and laboratories for the future of an increasingly urbanised planet. Like an early warning system, they emit signals about infrastructure and density – about crisis and citizenship.

Urban design must phase change, taking education with it, if it is to wrench back the agency it has lost and keep pace with the explosive urbanisation of the developing world. Unfortunately, when it comes to China or the Middle East for that matter, Australian architectural discourse seems to be dialectically constrained by blind disdain or feverish desire. If we are serious however, we need to suspend reflexive condemnation, retain our critical faculties, leave home and listen carefully The globalisation of the architectural profession has meant that architects often find themselves working in foreign and unfamiliar conditions that seem to lack the forms of social and political stability that we take for granted. The unprecedented amount of development taking place in Asia and the Middle East means that the largest growth market for architecture is also the most historically unstable. These new realities effect a mutation within the profession; it must become adept at operating in more uncertain climates and develop tactics for negotiating their complexities.

Adrian Lahoud
Course Director, Master of Advanced Architecture, Urban Design
University of Technology Sydney