Infrastructure Corridors: Leveraging Linear Systems for Public Life

The community benefits of public open space were made ever more apparent during lockdowns in U.S. cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parks and open streets became outdoor living rooms, birthday party venues, protest sites, meeting places, date spots, restaurants, and safe group gathering locations. Their function as necessary social infrastructure in the sense that sociologist Eric Klinenberg has defined it, became visible daily. At the same time a racial reckoning and climate emergency pressed for action while municipal budgets strained to meet basic needs. We know public space provision is key to democratic life for both dissent and community building. We also know we need to densify cities and make urban spaces livable and desirable if we want to reduce climate impacts and individual carbon footprints. Developing linear parks and open space systems that take advantage of existing infrastructure corridors is one promising option to meet these goals. These spaces utilize infill sites either by reuse or co-use of transportation infrastructure and due to their long form, have lots of edge which provides access to a greater number of people than a traditional parcel. And also, like all parks, they have the capacity to mitigate adverse urban impacts like heat, noise, and flooding. Our practice-based research group has studied four infrastructure types that were generated from the dominant transportation infrastructures of past waves of economic activity: port, river, rail, and road. Looking at over 400 precedent projects across the globe, we have distilled out five main strategies that inform the design, development, and use of these corridors and their associated storage areas. Contextualizing urban design and open space projects through the lens of their originating infrastructural footprint has not been attempted to date. This research paves the way for understanding the catalysts for infrastructure reuse or co-use, the unique benefits of linear systems, lessons learned from accompanying development patterns, exclusive funding streams, and political returns of investing in this type of open space. The research has been impactful in making the case for linear parks and systems as high-benefit, lower-cost method of open space provision for American metro areas.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.Inter.21.33

Volume Editors
Rico Quirindongo & Georgeen Theodore

ISBN
978-1-944214-39-5