Article
Urban Link
Expert Voices
Expert Voices 2022: Reimagining Infrastructure
January 19, 2022
To begin every new year, we publish a special issue of Urban Link for which we ask urban experts to reflect on a question of importance to cities. This year, we asked: How do you think urban infrastructure should be reimagined for the 21st century to build sustainable and equitable cities?
The responses we received challenge us to be bold—to fundamentally rethink the systems that shape society. We hope you find these responses as thought-provoking as we do.
—Eugénie Birch and Susan Wachter, Co-Directors, Penn IUR
Expert Voices 2022: Reimagining Infrastructure
The Need for Decisive Federal Action | Earl Blumenauer
Designing Nature-Based infrastructure at Scale | Matthijs Bouw
Building and Extending Prosperity | Henry Cisneros
America Needs a Great Infrastructure Reset | Richard Florida
Reimagining Place Attachment | Mark Alan Hughes
Planning for an Unknowable Future | Allison Lassiter
A Historic Opportunity | Marc Morial
Urban Water Solutions for 21st Century Cities | Howard Neukrug
Shifting Our Thinking on Infrastructure | Anne Bovaird Nevins
Reimagining through a Restorative Capital Lens | Lisa and Michael Nutter
Start with Bold Action | Laura Perna
Reimagining Philadelphia’s Infrastructure through a Lens of Racial Equity | Rebecca Rhynhart
Parks and Public Space for All | Mitchell Silver
The Future of Infrastructure is Green | Fritz Steiner
The Need for Decisive Federal Action
Earl Blumenauer
To build sustainable, equitable cities for all, we must study the painful lessons we’ve learned through the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the economic tumult that has come with both.
Historically, urban transportation investments have focused on cars and ignored the significant positive impacts of biking, walking, and public transportation—to the detriment of our environment and health. But by investing in better low-carbon transportation options, we can make our communities more accessible, healthier, and safer. We must also fund urban design and land use strategies to help us manage and minimize the impacts of rising sea levels and more frequent and extreme weather events, including floods and wildfires.
These changes will have benefits beyond climate. Researchers have found that people respond to their built environments, and that making our neighborhoods greener can improve mental health and reduce gun violence.
We must also recognize the serious health and economic disparities this pandemic has deepened. Individuals’ race, location, and wealth have serious consequences for health outcomes and access to care. We have a duty to fix these disparities, by lowering the cost of prescription drugs and expanding health coverage, priorities currently before Congress in the Build Back Better Act.
And lastly, to rebuild our Main Streets, we should remember that vital to any livable community are safe, family-wage jobs. Protecting our workers, raising wages, providing paid medical and family leave, and ensuring that minority-owned businesses are not locked out of relief resources are key pieces of that puzzle.
It's frustrating that a lack of financial resources is often used as an excuse for why we can’t do things. But our financial limitations are a reason to act. Americans already pay for failure in the form of high housing and transportation costs, health care burdens, and climate catastrophes. The federal government must stop nibbling around the edges and be inclusive, strategic, and proactive in the effort to create more sustainable and equitable communities.
Congressman Earl Blumenauer has served as the U.S. representative for Oregon's 3rd congressional district since 1996.
Designing Nature-Based Infrastructure at Scale
Matthijs Bouw
The climate crisis has only begun to expose the hubris with which contemporary cities were developed. We built over natural systems, using fossil fuels, concrete, and sand to unlock what was thought of as “economic value,” but which turned out to be mostly externalities. The areas that flooded during Hurricane Sandy are former marshes that have been drained or land that has been reclaimed, often using our own debris. Many of the deaths during Hurricane Ida occurred in the basement apartments of homes that had been built over former Kissena Creek. The areas that suffer most from urban heat are those where trees have made way for concrete, not only to facilitate cars, but also to save on maintenance costs. It is often the most marginalized communities that now find themselves at risk.
In the 21st century city, we will need to undo the damage and take the underlying natural systems into account. In its most simple form this might mean moving away from the coast and other risky areas, and removing concrete, knowing that, to quote the title of a new book, “water always wins.” However, because urban systems are complex, and knowing we have spent the better part of the last centuries messing up our natural systems, simply conserving or restoring our natural systems, while a good start, will not cut it. We need to build a new generation of infrastructure that harnesses the forces of nature to perform a multitude of ecosystem services and that can be integrated with the so-called grey infrastructure of our cities. Nature-based solutions, as they are called, are supported or inspired by nature and provide societal benefits, for example reducing the impacts of floods, redirecting sediment, cleaning water, providing cooling, allowing recreation, improving (mental) health, strengthening ecosystems, promoting biodiversity, providing green jobs, and increasing value. Designing these solutions at the necessary scale is the critical challenge for our cities. While we know they are more cost-efficient and adaptive in the face of climate induced uncertainty, they require new practices, from siloed to inclusive and collaborative, and new regulatory frameworks, from those aimed at conserving nature to those that allow “building with nature.”
Matthijs Bouw is Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture and Architecture, and the McHarg Center Fellow for Risk and Resilience, Weitzman School of Design; Penn IUR Faculty Fellow; and founder of the design and planning firm One Architecture & Urbanism.
Building and Extending Prosperity
Henry Cisneros
Infrastructure is not an end in itself. It is a means to the larger end of building a more prosperous nation and extending that prosperity to every demographic category and geographic region of the nation. Infrastructure is one of several tools available to the nation to create prosperity that empowers individuals, families, firms, and communities. In that way, infrastructure is on the same level as monetary policies, regulatory frameworks, social programs, education at all levels, and cultural values. Infrastructure provides the physical underpinnings that support an efficiently functioning and forward-looking nation.
As a nation whose prosperity depends so heavily on its metropolitan economies it follows that the infrastructure of our cities must be in good repair and sufficiently advanced to propel our metropolitan areas into the future. Looking ahead to the next decade urban infrastructure should be capable of supporting the recovery from the pandemic, fostering broad economic mobility and racial equity, enabling economic growth including from the industries of the future, incorporating new technologies, and supporting sustainable climate change strategies.
Over the next decade our metropolitan areas must facilitate the efficient movement of people and cargo within cities and between cities via non-polluting vehicles, mass transit on an expanded scale, next generation logistical systems, and modern airports and seaports. High-speed communications must be extended broadly and equitably to expedite the transformation of educational and health services. Water and wastewater systems must be modernized to assure clean water and to prepare for the special water challenges of drought in some regions and extreme-weather flooding and sea-level rise in others. Cities must increasingly substitute renewable power for fossil-fuel generation and install user-friendly distributive power and conservation infrastructure. Thoughtful design of urban physical facilities, such as open spaces, schools, decentralized service centers, sport complexes, art centers, hospitals and clinics, libraries and assembly halls can create cities that are more livable and walkable, imbuing the spirit of urban villages at a human scale.
But we must be mindful that as we build the urban infrastructure of the future we also design infrastructure decision-making structures and consultative governance that incorporates “ground-up” planning and prioritizing. It is at the ground level—in our communities, cities, and metropolitan areas—where the essential dynamics of life play out, where equitable outcomes are produced, where community goals are set, and where the best understanding of urban needs exists. As we go forward, the infrastructure decisions of our Congressional and federal agencies must involve consultative organizations both national and local and must integrate unprecedented levels of communication and cooperation in order to assure that our infrastructure fulfills its potential as the means to attain our national aspirations.
Henry Cisneros served as the served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1997 and as Mayor of San Antonio, Texas from 1981 to 1989.
America Needs a Great Infrastructure Reset
Richard Florida
America has been building the wrong infrastructure for far too long. For the better part of a century, we’ve invested in an infrastructure of highways, roads, and bridges which underwrites outward development and subsidizes sprawl with all its negative consequences for energy use, pollution, climate, and the environment. All of this made some sense with the old industrial economy, as suburbanization helped to power demand for houses, cars, and consumer durables.
But it is out of sync with the needs of the emergent knowledge economy which is powered by the clustering of talent, ideas, and other economic assets. To build a successful 21st century economy, we need a Great Infrastructure Reset—from an infrastructure that subsidizes sprawl to one that promotes the clustering required to spur innovation, productivity, and good jobs and connects communities and people.
With their new $1 billion plus infrastructure legislation, the Biden Administration, led on this issue by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, has pushed for more spending on things that would lead to more connected and compact development like transit, railroads, high speed rail, even tearing down highways, repurposing old rail lines, and rebuilding main streets, and doing all of it with an eye toward combatting the long legacy of racial segregation and striving to build more inclusive and sustainable communities.
Still, there are powerful forces pulling in the opposite direction, calling for more spending on roads, highways, and bridges. And, of course, the pandemic has reinforced the forces of spreading and sprawl, as people have headed outward in search of more space and more affordable housing and shown a preference for cars over transit.
Completing America’s Great Infrastructure Reset looks to be a continuing uphill battle, as America’s future as a more dynamic, inclusive, and sustainable nation continues to hang in the balance.
Richard Florida is University Professor at the University of Toronto and Penn IUR Fellow. He is author of The Rise of the Creative Class, The Great Reset, and The New Urban Crisis.
Reimagining Place Attachment
Mark Alan Hughes
Our most important collective decisions are being fundamentally challenged by rapidly increasing uncertainty in the parameters we use to make those decisions. Every aspect of our lives is changing with the climate. For urban infrastructure, this is a challenge that requires us to redefine place attachment itself as a basis for social stability. Place attachment implicates everything from conventional financing horizons, to how we conserve our collective memory, the provision of resilience, the guarantee and use of property rights, and many other dimensions. The social stability we base on place attachment includes political cohesion, system continuity (e.g., food, water, power), knowledge transfer, and many other domains.
Urban infrastructure is the primary mechanism for managing social stability under a largely unexamined assumption of place attachment. We invest in urban infrastructure to provide parcels and streets and pipes and wires and antennas and zoning and transit and schools and parks and entrepots and much more in order to generate a stable return on human development in a specific place. A century of sophisticated optimizations in infrastructure investments designed to operate over many decades within a narrow range of possible futures has created an enormous risk of cascading failure across critically interrelated systems. These complex interdependencies make it extremely difficult to de-risk a single system, reinforcing the power of incumbents and inertia.
While continuing to adapt and unwind our existing urban infrastructure in incremental ways where possible, we also need to redefine place attachment as we design and build future urban infrastructure. The rustbelt-sunbelt migration that peaked in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States foreshadows some of the disruption we may face with climate-related migration in the 2030s and 2040s. Cities that once dominated the U.S. lost a quarter to a third of their peak populations in the second half of the 20th century, with devastating effects including impacts on every form of urban infrastructure.
The difference between then and now, however, is that climate-related migration won't be a painful disequilibrium that can be countered by smart development policies in comeback cities with new-style mayors. As population moves, in the U.S. for example, inward from inundating coasts and northward from rising temperatures, many metropolitan areas will face the prospect of losing far more than a fraction of their populations.
Like seed banks for the agricultural sciences and digitized manuscripts for the humanities, next-generation urban infrastructures needs to recognize the possibility of some very bad scenarios and to create redeployable versions of our personal and property records, our spatial relationships, our past and future prosperity. This requires us to examine and acknowledge what about, for example, Philadelphia can only exist between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers and what might be redeployable.
Urban infrastructure is financed on a collective basis because of the capacity recognized by markets in the potential of large settlements. Is it possible to organize collective action (e.g., a bond issue question on a Philadelphia ballot) to finance intentional infrastructure for adaptation and retreat over the kind of 20- to 40-year horizons we now use for transportation and utility investments? Could that infrastructure be designed at a regional scale the way we now do highways? Could the benefits and avoided costs be so large that we could successfully weaken place attachment in order to preserve our attachment to each other?
Mark Alan Hughes is Faculty Director, Penn's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy; Professor of Practice, City and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow.
Planning for an Unknowable Future
Allison Lassiter
The urban infrastructures of the last one hundred years are rigid, static, and highly centralized. These infrastructures were designed to be “fail-safe.” To withstand risk. They were built under the assumption that the external world would remain unchanged, however. As a result, rather than avoiding risk, they were blind to modern risks.
Indeed, many of our contemporary infrastructures are failing. Seeking to build fail-safe systems was hubris.
There are two imperatives for future infrastructure investment decisions:
- We must build infrastructures that are safe-to-fail, rather than those that seek to be fail-safe (as suggested by landscape architect Jack Ahern). We can do this by creating redundancies and back-ups so that systems can withstand wider ranges of conditions, many of which are currently unknowable. We can also create larger infrastructure networks to spread risk further. Building for failure will make systems stronger.
- We must design new infrastructures that are modular and decentralized so failures can be easily isolated and repaired, and systems can be adjusted and re-sized. Water pipes and electrical grids can operate as large, decentralized networks that can be expanded or contracted. Sea walls can be constructed to be built higher later, as needed. Many emerging technologies support decentralized and adaptable infrastructures-we need to take advantage of them.
Creating systems that are flexible, modular, and safe-to-fail has the potential to reduce costs and improve reliability, despite the unknowability of the next one hundred years. The substantial infrastructure investments that will be made under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs (IIJA) Act have the potential to repeat old patterns or transform American infrastructures into modern, resilient systems.
Allison Lassiter is Assistant Professor, City and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design, and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow.
A Historic Opportunity
Marc Morial
The last two years have seen desperate parents facing year-long waiting lists for childcare and abrupt shutdowns due to understaffing, school children studying in parking lots because they have no home internet access, senior citizens skipping medications because they can’t afford their prescriptions, and millions of homes and businesses stranded without electricity because storms knocked out an inadequate and shoddily-maintained power grid.
Childhood asthma linked to poor air quality causes 13.8 million missed days of school annually. A water main breaks every two minutes, losing enough treated water each day to fill over 9,000 swimming pools. We’re the only developed country in the world that doesn’t mandate paid family leave, and our failure to invest in childcare costs us $57 billion a year.
Black Americans have borne the brunt of this neglect. Income inequality grew at a faster rate during the Trump era than during any of the last five administrations. The typical Black family holds about $12.50 in wealth for every $100 held by the typical white family. The Black unemployment rate remains nearly twice the rate for whites, and Black women are the least recovered from pandemic job losses.
The National Urban League’s Main Street Marshal Plan—much of which has been incorporated into President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Build Back Better legislation—represents a historic opportunity to transform our economy while enhancing racial equity.
The post-World War II Marshall Plan spurred the fastest period of growth in European history. Industrial and agricultural production skyrocketed. The poverty and starvation of the immediate postwar years disappeared, and Western Europe embarked upon an unprecedented two decades of growth that saw standards of living increase dramatically. We have not only the opportunity but the moral obligation to replicate that success in the 21st-century United States.
Marc Morial is President and CEO, National Urban League and Penn IUR Advisory Board member. He previously served as Mayor of New Orleans and as Louisiana State Senator.
Urban Water Solutions for 21st Century Cities
Howard Neukrug
Just as the science of climate mitigation is mostly centered on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, climate adaptation is largely focused on how we choose to manage our land and water. Further, while climate change is still a vague and almost intangible concept to many Americans, droughts, floods, extreme storms, pollution, water-borne disease, and fires are all-too-tangible. Loss of property and life have become the newest metrics of climate change. How our urban centers respond to climate change threats will determine which of our cities grow and prosper into the 22nd century, and which cities, states, and countries will fail. The economic, social, and environmental impacts of our decisions today will reverberate for years to come.
Water is life. Fortunately, within the water sector, there is much progress to report. For example, the City of Berlin has successfully reduced its per capita water use to under 30 gallons per day (compared with Philadelphia at 125 gallons). As the sector looks for “new water sources,” water conservation becomes one of three pillars of creating “New Water”—the other two being desalinization (which is growing worldwide as the costs of desalinization decline) and water reuse (reclaiming wastewater from cities and industry). Progress is also being made on other fronts, such as: smart water systems (think AI, digitization, and modeling); green infrastructure; net zero energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from water facilities.
The Water Center at UPenn focuses on addressing urban water system challenges using a multi-disciplinary lens of public health, engineering, science, economics, resiliency, equity, sustainability, and justice. All these considerations are critical as we determine how to organize, collaborate, and manage the needs of many community stakeholders.
Want to see the world continue to progress into the 22nd century? We will all need to work together to solve our water challenges. Starting yesterday.
Howard Neukrug is Executive Director of The Water Center at the University of Pennsylvania; Professor of Practice, Department of Earth and Environmental Science, School of Arts and Sciences; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow. He is the former Commissioner and CEO of Philadelphia Water.
Shifting Our Thinking on Infrastructure
Anne Bovaird Nevins
As Philadelphia’s economic development corporation, PIDC has spent more than 60 years operating as a public-private partnership driving job growth and economic expansion in the City of Philadelphia. Over those decades, there have been numerous efforts to fund and build new urban infrastructure across our country, including projects that damaged existing communities and displaced residents and families in Philadelphia and many other cities. Today, we must shift our thinking about the word “infrastructure.”
As PIDC focuses on taking a leadership role in an equitable recovery in Philadelphia from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are looking at the future of our city through three critical, and intersecting, lenses: Racial Equity, Climate Resilience and Environmental Sustainability, and the Future of Work.
When seen through these three lenses, I believe that we must redefine how we think about infrastructure for the future of cities like Philadelphia. Investing in infrastructure should be investing in how we create pathways to opportunities for all of our residents, and particularly those who face additional barriers due to racial discrimination and poverty.
Investing in urban infrastructure as a pathway to opportunity should mean that all children get to learn in safe, healthy schools with access to modern technology; that all residents should have access to fast, secure broadband to facilitate communication, learning, and work; that all neighborhoods should be served for affordable, accessible means of transportation to connect to quality jobs in existing and new industry sectors; and that the city as a whole has the means to adapt to our changing climate, build resilience to protect its people and assets, and contribute to a more sustainable future for our world.
Anne Bovaird Nevins is President of PIDC, Philadelphia’s economic development corporation, and Penn IUR Fellow.
Reimagining through a Restorative Capital Lens
Lisa and Michael Nutter
We are a forward-looking nation. Too many of us believe that understanding and learning from the past means going backwards. But, as we embark on one of the largest federal infrastructure investments in U.S. history, the past and its policy implications are a living tome to guide a reimagined future.
The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 was historic legislation with generational impact. In creating the modern-day highway infrastructure, it also de-valued the assets, voices, and concerns of the largely BIPOC communities affected. These are the results when one de-couples physical infrastructure, viewed largely as a spatial enterprise, from human infrastructure, the human capacity and awareness to shape, execute, and benefit from physical improvements.
The 2021 infrastructure package left investments in human capacity on the cutting room floor. However, state and local communities can still shape broader long-term agendas based on lessons of the past, including narratives of resilient communities in the face of bad policy.
These lessons and human experiences give us data, which must be the foundation of 21st century plans. We can only reimagine urban infrastructure if we make investments through what Napoleon Wallace, CIO, The Southern Reconstruction Fund, calls a restorative capital lens. Wallace says:
“In this recovery, cities need infrastructure and private investment that improves the built environment and bolsters residents’ capacity to benefit from those investments.”
Restorative capital is not an extractive investment. Rather, it builds on community assets and capacities; is long-term and regenerative; is localized and community-driven; and, adds public value, not just stakeholder value. Through this lens, reimagining infrastructure begins with investments in:
- The intersection of human and physical infrastructure—we need both for healthy, equitable economies.
- Real-time, localized data and analysis
- Promising and scalable—yet undercapitalized—community-based solutions.
- Public-private partnerships to refine and scale the most effective solutions.
If we’re serious about reimagining urban infrastructure, those with power must be willing to flip the script and share it. In the end, we will distinguish sustainable and equitable cities based on what they invest in and who actually benefits.
Lisa and Michael Nutter lead Community Impact Investments and the Partnership for Social and Economic Mobility, respectively, which together form a new collective impact investment and action research initiative. Lisa Nutter is founder and managing partner of Community Impact Investments, the impact fund and accelerator that is a part of the initiative which invests in scalable community-based solutions to economic mobility. Michael Nutter is the former Mayor of Philadelphia, Senior Executive Fellow at the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, and David N. Dinkins Professor of Professional Practice in Urban and Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He leads the Partnership for Social and Economic Mobility, a multi-university action research collaborative anchored at Penn.
Start with Bold Action
Laura Perna
Sustainable and equitable cities require an infrastructure that ensures that all residents have the opportunity for high-quality postsecondary education.
Higher education has numerous benefits for individual participants and for our cities, states, and nation—yet the opportunity to realize these benefits is highly unequal, and the disproportionate negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely further exacerbate inequality in postsecondary educational attainment and labor market outcomes.
There are many reasons for unequal access to postsecondary education. Students from low-income families and racial/ethnic minoritized groups have fewer opportunities to participate in academically rigorous coursework (e.g., Advanced Placement) in the K12 schools they attend. The failure to curb the growing reliance on student loans to pay college costs has disproportionate negative implications for Black students. Information about how much it may actually cost to attend a particular college is too often incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date, something that disproportionately affects those with fewer personal resources to pay college costs.
The infrastructure of the future must eliminate the many structural barriers that disadvantage students from historically underserved groups. It must provide all students with the academic preparation to complete college-level work, the financial resources to pay for college, and the information and support to navigate their way into and through it.
As the breadth of the Biden Administration’s Build Back Better Framework suggests, one simple solution will not be enough. But we can start with bold action: let’s make the first two years of community college tuition-free. This action would provide a clear message to students and their families that at least some of the costs are covered and increase the number of students able to attain at least some postsecondary education. It won’t be enough, but it’s a start and could spur additional reform.
Laura Perna is Vice Provost for Faculty at Penn; GSE Centennial Presidential Professor of Education, Penn Graduate School of Education; Executive Director, Penn Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (AHEAD); and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow.
Reimagining Philadelphia’s Infrastructure through a Lens of Racial Equity
Rebecca Rhynhart
Of the largest cities in America, Philadelphia is the poorest and has the highest homicide rate. These challenges disproportionately impact the city’s Black and Brown residents and neighborhoods. But these challenges did not happen organically. They are deeply rooted in our nation’s history of racist federal and local housing policies. Called redlining, these policies denied Black residents access to lending and legal home ownership, leading to a cycle of social and economic disinvestment in primarily Black communities. Nearly a century later, historically redlined areas of Philadelphia continue to experience disproportionate amounts of poverty, poor health outcomes, limited educational attainment, unemployment, and violent crime compared to other neighborhoods in the city.
Historically disadvantaged neighborhoods should be prioritized by City government, however the inequities affecting these neighborhoods often persist in the delivery of core city services. Our office analyzed on-time trash collection rates, and found that some areas of the city, including Center City, have consistently better on-time collection rates, while others, like Northwest Philadelphia, have consistently worse. Additionally, our review of the accuracy of property assessments, which determines the valuation of properties for tax purposes, found that the Office of Property Assessment does a worse job assessing properties in lower-income areas of the city.
In the 21st century, urban infrastructure must be reimagined through a lens of racial equity. As a local government, we must acknowledge the role structural racism has played in shaping our city today and be intentional in our effort to implement equity-focused and evidence-based programs aimed at reducing the city’s many racial disparities, especially in the neighborhoods where the legacy of structural racism persists today.
Rebecca Rhynhart has served as City Controller of Philadelphia since 2018.
Parks and Public Space for All
Mitchell Silver
Public space should be reimagined as public space for all. Streets, sidewalks, plazas, parks, alleys, parks, schoolyards, school athletic fields, public housing green space—all siloed by the agencies that govern them or by physical, regulatory, cultural, financial barriers or collective bargaining agreements. This must stop.
To be sustainable and equitable in the 21st century, public space must work as a unified public space system where uses can be co-located and not as a fragmented collection of networks. For example, public space serves more than one purpose. Parks are not just green spaces but serve as the first line of defense against climate change and improve physical and mental health by reducing stress and anxiety. During COVID-19, parks and public spaces became our sanctuaries of sanity and should be considered part of our healthcare system.
The pandemic has also shown us that our streets and sidewalks must be reimagined as shared open space resources for living and not just for driving or parking. Let us not overlook other public assets—schools. School boards should rethink how publicly funded school yards and athletic fields are accessible to all and not treated as privatized public space governed by collective bargaining agreements or outdated and overbearing rules.
As the 21st century continues to experience a growth in urban areas, we must elevate parks and public space as essential urban infrastructure for living to truly set the foundation for a sustainable and equitable city for all.
Mitchell Silver, FAICP, is Principal, Vice President of Urban Planning, McAdams and Penn IUR Fellow. He served as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation from 2014 to 2021.
The Future of Infrastructure is Green
Fritz Steiner
Much of the old, grey infrastructure that surrounds us and propels the economy is bad for people and the planet. Neighborhoods, farmlands, and wildlife habitats have been riven by highways. Power lines are frequently unsightly and slice through trees. Combined storm and sanitary sewers pollute drinking water and make waterways toxic to fish.
We need to embrace ecology-based solutions instead. We need green infrastructure that creates ecosystem services rather than depleting them. Such infrastructure would emerge from an understanding of the provisioning, supporting, regulating, and contributing functions of ecosystems. We need to design interventions to enhance natural systems.
For instance, we could view trees as infrastructure. Tree planting alone will not solve the challenges of climate change but can help mitigate some of its harmful effects. Urban heat islands disproportionately impact poor and minority communities in the United States. Urban heat islands contribute to many health problems. These islands are artifacts of a lack of investment in lower-income neighborhoods and discriminatory practices such as redlining.
Planting trees and reducing the amount of asphalt will create healthier, more pleasant places. People benefit, as do other species. Trees provide the oxygen necessary for our lives, reduce stormwater runoff, create shade, and make homes for birds and squirrels. Trees are but one element of green infrastructure that could be implemented today, at minimal cost.
Frederick (Fritz) Steiner is Dean, Paley Professor, and Co-Executive Director of The McHarg Center, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow.
