The design of infrastructural networks is among today’s most complex and most important design tasks. In recent times much attention has been paid to the new ‘urbanized’ landscape that has sprung up around infrastructural networks. Around the globe the importance of infrastructure as the motor of economic development is rising because of increasing mobility and need to make central locations accessible. Infrastructure is an important instrument for the design of public space and landscapes: areas around airport and railway stations, motorway systems and sprawling suburbs, traffic routes to shopping malls, access to industrial areas in the periphery and so on.
This book investigates how the design of infrastructure actively influences the organization of the inhabited landscape. Works of infrastructure are analyzed as footprints of civilization, as physical presence, as transformers of perception, and as new vessels of collective life. The authors identify these characteristics, together with the conditions that influence them, and suggest a typology of design attitudes as revealing in recent practice around the world.