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Hybridized Infrastructures: Altering the American Landscape

Will Sutton

 

The University of Arkansas

Department of Architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

Whether we are aware of the realities of residual spaces or not, they exist just about everywhere you go in contemporary urban and suburban life. Residual spaces are all the empty spaces that aren’t utilized for any particular purpose. For example, spaces underneath and in between interstate overpasses, alleys between adjacent buildings, empty space created by derelict manufacturing plants, concrete islands and or medians found in arterial roads, spaces in and around solar farms, and just about anywhere any agency, person, or developer, has planned through a top-down approach. These spaces are seemingly benign, but they are scars from mass development that fail to realize any true purpose. For some, residual spaces may hold some relative value in terms of temporary shelter from the elements or somewhere to explore, but overall, they’re lacking common value to the built environment and the people who inhabit it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sam Rayburn Tollway and I-35 E Interchange, Lewisville, TX, 2024

 

 

 

One useful but frequently vacated Vista Ridge Mall surface parking. Lewisville, TX, 2024

 

The concept of residual spaces makes it worth asking if these spaces can adapt as it or formulate in future planning decisions on how to make residual spaces worth having. This zone of inquiry is particularly focused on residual spaces within hard infrastructures. Often residual spaces are found within hard infrastructures that keep society functioning like the interstate system, bridges, other forms of transportation, energy production plants and systems, water services, and waste services. Over the course of modern and contemporary planning practice history, it appears city planners and governmental agencies have limited the scope of what hard infrastructures are truly capable of. In the 21^st century, what should infrastructure look like? Should a road just function and look like a typical road? How can people interact with the built environment in a novel way? This capstone seeks to understand what successful strategies of hybridized hard infrastructures exist that can be applied to speculative or incomplete hybridized hard infrastructures to make them viable? As technology progresses over time, shouldn’t our infrastructures make progress to adapt to new challenges of the urban and urbanizing landscape? After all, 80% of the United States population lives in urban areas that interact with these systems daily regardless of if they’re perceived or not.

 

Ultimately, understanding how to make better use of residual spaces within hard infrastructures, ever-present tenants of civilization, will create more equitable built environments through making urban and suburban space once inaccessible, accessible to those impacted by the phenomenon of residual spaces.

 

This capstone seeks to highlight these issues, facts, and other research through quantitative methods.

 

Background

 

Residual Spaces

The built environment is riddled with various planning issues. One being the creation of residual spaces left over from modern and contemporary city planning practices. Erick Villagomez, educator, and researcher at the University of British Columbia, defines residual spaces as "A natural result of modern urbanization and the complex interaction of social, technological, and economic processes that drive contemporary urban growth." These spaces often appear near, within, or between automobile infrastructure, deindustrialized sites, and buildings.

 

These residual spaces yield nothing to communities afflicted by them. They're unused spaces waiting for some niche development to come along or not at all.  Many times, residual spaces are products of top-down urban planning and are resultant of outsider planning specialists that fail to connect to the place they’re transforming. Consequently, these outside planners fail to create improvised space planning strategies to utilize residual space to its maximum. Historically, residual space hasn't been much of an issue. In medieval times, land was used intensively for people to put their money, goods, or services to work, as land value was exorbitantly high. Like contemporary issues, America historically has been plagued by excess space, making land generally inexpensive to develop. 

 

Now, that begs the question of how is it possible that we could leave this residual space to not be used? If land is more expensive in America now than ever, how could we use residual space to benefit ourselves and our money? These are some questions guiding this capstone and have led to the study of the hybridization of space in the built environment.

 

Infrastructure

Hard infrastructure makes America go round. Our 25 trillion-dollar economy depends on roads, rail lines, electrical grids, and internet infrastructures to keep us moving. However, US infrastructure frequently lags other nations as nearly 1 in 3 bridges must be repaired, electrical outages are becoming increasingly common, and rural America lacks fast and maintained connection to wireless services. That’s not to brush off the fact the United States has received its highest infrastructural rating in respect to the recent past but going from a D+ to a C- isn't significant enough to compete with other developed countries.

 

Seen after the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal was signed into law by President Joe Biden, nationwide capital investment at the state and local level has increased. There’s clearly a consensus Americans are in need for new and maintained infrastructural networks. Not only are infrastructural changes needed at the objective federal and state level, but they are also needed at a more subjective community-oriented level. Social infrastructures like transportation, health centers, parks, and community spaces are necessary for citizens' survival in urban and rural areas. Could a reconsideration of hard infrastructure’s single use functions to engage the social and ecological engender a way of prioritizing the maintenance of existing and creation of future infrastructures in a new way? Overall, thinking about how to maximize land in space and capital we’re given to modify through infrastructure could provide numerous benefits at different socioeconomic, ecological, and demographic ways.

 

Hybridization

As hinted previously, hybridizing space intensifies land usage, and it becomes increasingly necessary to consider how to hybridize architecture and the built environment when designing due to population growth and market factors. In an ever sprawling and costly built environment, intensifying space utilization leads to the densification of people, businesses, and amenities necessary for a thriving city or town to emerge. Hybridization of space isn't restricted by scale. It can be done in formal and informal processes and can occur between different kinds of typologies of buildings and more significant functions of civilization, like infrastructure as discussed.

 

Starting off exploring ideas of hybridized infrastructures at a smaller and rural scale, Agrivoltaics is evidence of the benefits of hybridizing typical farming practices with photovoltaics. Farms across America participate in Agrivoltaics. Farms collaborate with energy producers to install photovoltaic systems on their land. Agrivoltaics creates the benefit of hybridizing land use for maximum gain by not limiting usage to one use. By installing PV systems, crops can be adequately shielded from the sun at the hottest hours of the day, creating microclimates beneficial for watering crops used for human or livestock consumption and producing necessary green energy from solar panels. 

 

As another example of less intensive residual space reclamation and hybridization, Landing Studio, based in Boston, MA, creatively solved a seasonal problem. Boston's weather and climate patterns demand the usage of salt to make automobile infrastructures safe and usable during winter snowstorms and events. This salt needs to go somewhere, but salt isn't needed all year round. Consequently, Landing Studio designed the PORT project. Acronym for Publicly Organized Recreation Territory, PORT seeks to utilize and counter the creation of residual space in the form of reimagining a 13-million-gallon oil tank farm into a season park in warmer months when salt is not needed for roads. 

 

In effect, an improved relationship between citizens and the waterfront is emphasized through shared resources of salt and space. Citizens feel connected to the city through appreciating the presence of necessary material to keep the city moving. Access once denied through privatized space is now open for the public to enjoy. 

 

Typology

However, what is most compelling about the PORT project is that it starts to consider not only the architectural realm but also the infrastructural realm's connection to the public sphere. Generally, an untapped resource for residual space creation, infrastructure provides definite space to capitalize upon that can be open to the public anyway in some form or fashion through the provision of funds through taxes to create a product for all to use. 

 

Evident of this are some speculative projects devised in the modern era. Paul Rudolph was commissioned by the Ford Foundation in 1967 to explore mixed-use developments above Mid-Manhattan expressways proposed to connect a greater share of Manhattan to its metro area. While most likely privately funded in collaboration with the public sector, Rudolph devised housing and commercial buildings are created and the uses and heights of these developments varied depending on the local context within the city. The project consisted of articulating triangle concrete frames to carry the structure load above the expressway. 

 

Similarly, Robert Moses, an infamous New York City planner, proposed these Mid-Manhattan expressways. One was initially in Midtown, and the other was later proposed for lower Manhattan. These expressways would allow developments like the ones Rudolph conceptualized for the Ford Foundation and deal with issues concerning the sale of air rights to build skyscrapers and other developments.

 

 

Cross-Manhattan Expressway Conceptualization, Paul Rudolph, 1967

 

Moses’ visions were partly realized through the Washington Bridge Apartments in Washington Heights, New York. The sale of air rights above the approach to the bridge allowed for a public housing project on public land. However, as aspiration as this project was, it’s generally considered a failure for the lack of proper regulation of carbon monoxide levels found within the apartments. Surely something to figure out and consider when discussing the hybridization of spaces in the built environment.

 

Typology

Contemporarily, projects dealing with hard infrastructures like Practice for Architecture and Urbanism’s Wave Bridge in Indianapolis, Indiana, makes strides toward achievable goals of hybridizing bridges for automobiles, and making them more accessible to pedestrian traffic. Wide sidewalks and bike paths allow pedestrians to use up to 53% of the total space allocated for movement. These kinds of projects regarding multi-modal movement are evident that steps taking towards hybridizing infrastructures is relevant and necessary for a productive and community engaged society to proliferate.

 

Additionally, Conduit Urbanism, a hard infrastructural research project by Kathy Velikov, Geoffrey Thün, seek to conduit multi-modal forms of transportation, communication, and green energy to the interstate system in the Great Lakes Megaregion. For example, their theoretical concept proposes using residual space within parallel interstate roads to construct wind turbines to help power adjacent high speed rail infrastructure. This achieves max utilization of space while also theoretically providing benefits to people who live close to the interstate and can take advantage of energy production, multiple forms of transportation, and nodal connection centers also a part of the concept that facilitate some community interaction.

 

It appears with these two example projects, the issue of hybridizing infrastructure is less about creating a new infrastructural typology, and more about the varying degrees to which one can take an infrastructure in any direction to achieve a positive result to benefit local ecologies and social spheres. These two projects not only build off another regarding multi-modal forms of transportation but also beg the question of how far can we go when it comes to hybridization? Not that all hard infrastructural hybridizations deal with transit, but both projects insinuate more and more ways to think about how to alter the physical landscape and the infrastructural one as well. What that could look like is to be determined through research in this capstone.

 

Approach

 

Defining the Research

Seeing as creation of residual space is inherently a mismanagement of space and capital used to fund urban planning projects, more specifically hard infrastructural projects, it’s imperative this topic be researched to ensure engagement of funding is properly used to benefit communities not only through creation of hard infrastructures but the hybridization of them to provide community services beyond those expected.

Research will be found primarily through traditional forms of scholarship like literature review. More specifically, this literature review will consist of discovering existing, proposed, and incomplete hybridized infrastructural projects through holistic case studies.

Specific Tactics

Through case studies, I intend to identify why specific projects are successful and or fail to materialize based on varying factors like funding, location, demographic, city policies, zoning laws, social amenity, environmental, etc… will be the focus of my research. From there, I plan to retroactively apply successful attributes of realized hybridized infrastructure projects to identify any viability with these projects through writing analysis and drawings to visually show adapted solutions if required. This broadens the knowledge of understanding hybridized infrastructures and their viability within urban settings and why they may not be more prevalent in society.

Using Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges as precedent for research methods, I will complete strategies similarly outlined within the book.

Theory of Method

Case studies are a method of research that allows intensive study of a particular topic to learn more about the way something works in its contextual environment. This isn’t just to pull blanketing conclusions about a topic based off information gathered, but rather to study a topic in an exploratory way to mine information out of something that may be left out of a less holistic approach to studying.

Parameters

Currently, I plan to study 2 successful hybridized infrastructures of contemporary relevance. I will need to research these and study them holistically to understand their structure and ways of working successfully. Additionally, I will find 2 projects that failed to materialize to apply successful qualities to and or better understand limitations to creating successful hybridized infrastructures to advance knowledge in this field for future applications in the built environment. To complete my capstone in my final semester on time, I intend to find these precedents earlier in the summer of 2025 to stay on schedule with my drafted schedule outline.

I am currently interested in studying publicly funded or jointly funded hybridized infrastructures to advance the agenda of collective funding of a community focused project and amenity. I think I will have to be specific about what kind of infrastructures or hybridized infrastructures I study to properly apply successful attributes to any project that wasn’t viable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Week 1 Begin PT 1	Successful Case Study 1 Research and Investigation
Week 2	Successful Case Study 1 Analysis and Synthesis
Week 3	Successful Case Study 2 Research and Investigation
Week 4	Successful Case Study 2 Analysis and Synthesis
Week 5	Failed Case Study 1 Research and Investigation
Week 6	Failed Case Study 1 Analysis and Synthesis
Week 7	Failed Case Study 2 Research and Investigation
Week 8	Failed Case Study 2 Analysis and Synthesis (Spring Break?)
Week 9 End PT 1	Finish Part One Synthesis of Capstone this Week
Week 10 Begin PT 2	Analyze Failed Case Study 1 and Apply Principles of Any Successful Case Study to it – Write and Create Drawing
Week 11	Finishing Writing and Drawing
Week 12	Analyze Failed Case Study 2 and Apply Principles of Any Successful Case Study to it – Write and Create Drawings
Week 13 End Pt 2	Finishing Writing and Drawings
Week 14	Finish Capstone Paper
Week 15	Final Edits and Capstone Defense
Week 16	Finals Week Presentation