Infrastructure, America’s De Facto Urban Design

Infrastructure has functioned as America’s de facto urban design plan for centuries. Specifically, transportation infrastructure networks, although much can be said of other infrastructures of water management, energy, communications, and solid waste. But the corridors that make up port, river, rail, and road systems have proven extremely durable as organizing features, even as they obsolesce as new, faster or cheaper forms of transportation are built out. Seaports were once the dominant hubs of merchant activity and passenger transportation. Then inland rivers began to be exploited and transformed to carry goods and raw materials in and out of the interior. The introduction and implementation of rail transportation transformed landlocked areas in the West. And most recently, the invention of the automobile, native to the US, ultimately came to dominate the American landscape through highly accessible, high speed routes and roads.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.112.112

Volume Editors
Germane Barnes & Blair Satterfield

ISBN
978-1-944214-45-6