The infrastructure choice
A postcard sketch competition asked Urban Guild members to draw some ideas in a few minutes during an evening gathering at the Guild Summit in Chattanooga in late October. The members include architects, urban designers, and other urbanists.
The winner was Anthony Catania of AMC Architecture & Design of Oklahoma City, who made a polemical drawing about the choices we make in infrastructure investments. Departments of Transportation at the federal, state, and county levels typically fund highways, as shown on the left. But we used to spend our money on connected street networks, shown on the right. That’s how we built our historic cities.
We were smarter about our infrastructure then. The connected networks formed the bones of our most beloved, resilient, and long-lasting communities. The highways serve a purpose, certainly, but they also generate sprawl. That’s the point of: “And they will come.” Our infrastructure investments help to determine how communities grow and how people live in the future. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is why we need to make good choices on infrastructure spending.
We need to fund more street grids and fewer highways. That will result in more sustainable, healthier, safer communities.
