On the Teams that Create Soft Infrastructure that Bends the Physical City

In his intervention at Lift09, Dan Hill inspired from Arup’s Total Design to introduce the kind of skillset that would make a team of soft infrastructure architects (software engineers, interaction designers, sociologist, ethnographers, economist, lawyers) to properly bend the physical city. The main challenge to incorporate design informatic systems to greatest advantage without undermining the wonderful things about cities, certainly lies into finding ways to involved disciplinary communities that barely speak the same language and practice with different (contradicting?) objectives. This is certainly the kind of cross-disciplinary pollination Adam Greenfield aims at creating with his upcoming book. In a recent interview Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics, he digged out a quote I have been looking for a long time from (courtesy of the great Brian Boyer):

“If you want to start talking about some serious cross-disciplinary pollination then you better take both sides of that disciplinary divide seriously. When your ubi- runs into my building with its boring HVAC, mundane load paths, typical finished floors, plain old foundations, etc., the transformative powers of comp are bracketed pretty seriously by the realities of the physical world.”

Dan Hill on the skill sets to develop and maintain soft infrastructures. All waiting for some serious cross-disciplinary pollination. Photo courtesy of Vlad Trifa