Los Angeles, The Infrastructural City

[underground service alerts denoting fiber optic lines in telecom district, downtown Los Angeles] 

Edited by Kazys Varnelis

Published by ACTAR in collaboration with the Columbia GSAPP NetLab
and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

Funded in part by the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts and Architecture

Forthcoming in late 2007, the Infrastructural City is an edited collection of fifteen essays by architects, artists, and scholars mapping the nodes and lines of infrastructure shaping contemporary life in Los Angeles as well as other cities.

As a case study of contemporary infrastructure, Los Angeles is ideal. During the modern era, infrastructural intervention was the foremost strategic instrument of the master planner, the means by which the city’s dominance over nature would be assured and the chaos generated by the metropolis could be mitigated. Los Angeles was the greatest American example of such a modern city served by infrastructure, sustained by water and power from hundreds of miles away, its inhabitants commuting vast distances smoothly, riding from home to work to beach on the freeway grid while a hostile natural world was kept at bay through the operations of the city’s engineers. Only in Los Angeles could a city name its most romantic mountain drive after the head of its water department.

Today, however, Los Angeles’s infrastructure is in perpetual crisis, rarely responding to traditional plans. Instead, the city plays an endless catch-up game to keep the system at a steady state of near-breakdown. Infrastructure just barely works: traffic is always backed-up, the cell phone never connects, the sewer perpetually floods while water shortages and rolling blackouts give rhythm to life. Faced with this condition of permanent systems overload and the general futility of proposing new plans to a public fragmented into micro-constituencies, engineers now understand failure as natural and regard congestion as an integral part of the system. But if a populace determined to fight on for its own self-interest reigns in infrastructure’s natural tendency to grow, infrastructure has its revenge too: it is not the limitless possibilities of infrastructure but rather its limitations that increasingly determine our lives.

If infrastructural systems answer to a higher authority, it is to the cultural logic of late capitalism, an all-pervasive and theoretically unmappable economic system. In this networked world, increasingly organized by flows of objects and information, static structures avoid being superfluous only by joining that system to become temporary containers for the people, objects, and capital that flow in and out of them. Los Angeles: Infrastructural City sets out to take measure of infrastructure as a way of mapping the architect’s place in late capital and the city and remaining optimistic about the role of the field to understand it and affect change.