Re-Thinking infrastructure project for the metropolis: Laboratory Granada

Abstract

Nowadays, urbanism must be able to reflect on the usefulness of certain infrastructure, transport infrastructure mainly, based on new policies for distribution of land uses. In the context of a new culture of sustainability and urban efficiency, this kind of urbanism seeks a reduction on the demand for mobility and expressly designed solutions. The coexistence of nature and artifice in metropolitan contexts is currently an important issue on which to re-think and to re-know its many possibilities. We could consider 'place' as 'urban and territorial material,' reinterpreting the quality of places. We could also look at it through the classical argument of 'points + lines + spots' inherited from landscape ecology. These and other methods are useful for understanding the urban fabric. They provide new meaning to the fabrics’ intrinsic values thanks to the presence of infrastructure. From the perspective of the transport infrastructure project, this reflection should facilitate a methodological evolution aimed at creating a new technology that understands design as a negotiation between citizen demands and spatial offer of 'place'. This technology would overcome the theoretical distance that exists between the perspective of the city as an autonomous compact entity and the 'splintered' present day metropolitan reality, defined by more open lexical and combinatory systems overlapping with conflict. Thus, now more than ever, extending the mechanisms of a creative project; transforming some spatial concepts into instruments such as outline, crossing or section, fusing landscapes, hybridizing functions, or adding different times of the territory, etc., are also technological keys, for the integration of large scale infrastructure.