Infrastructure and Urban Technology

I’m here with Bryan Boyer, who is the co-founder of design studio Dash Marshall, Assistant Professor of Practice in Architecture and Director of the Urban Technology undergraduate program at the Taubman College of Architecture. Today we're talking about infrastructures, and perhaps we can begin with you describing what infrastructure means to you, and how you engage with it in your work and in your teaching.

I take a pretty abstract definition of infrastructure. I think of it broadly, as this stuff that makes other things work—generally invisible, because it's so familiar and close to us that we have stopped seeing it. At Dash Marshall, we have done some research and writing related to autonomous vehicles in the past few years to rethink what urban life will be like when autonomous vehicles are common. Most obviously, how will we utilize the space of the street? And, how will we partition the space of the city, including what we currently classify as streets? We can do something like Barcelona and start adopting super blocks because we don’t need to get passenger cars to every single front door. We can get you close enough, and then we can think about a network of bikes, delivery robots, and cargo bikes. So, big questions about what is the space of the city and who is it for, particularly in a moment of technological change, is one of the ways that Dash Marshall has touched on infrastructure. 

The other angle is social infrastructure. And in this sphere, we have more work to do in terms of being creative, imaginative, and analytical about what are the roles that places like parks, libraries, recreation centers, schools, and government buildings have. What role do these places play in our everyday lives, and to what extent could they be reimagined? What if we ask them to do more? For instance, years ago, I was at an event in New York, and Gail Brewer, who was the Manhattan borough president at the time, was talking about a program they were working on to open school cafeterias at night for street food entrepreneurs to use as commissaries. For me this is an interesting possibility to imagine a familiar institution like the school. Yes, we are all familiar with it, but how else could we think about it? It’s also a gymnasium, a kitchen, a woodshop, a library. You can disaggregate the school from a number of different perspectives and then say, as a piece of social infrastructure, can it do more than what it’s currently doing? That was an a-ha moment that came at the same time as Dash Marshall was doing some work for the Knight Foundation precisely on this topic. Together with three other foundations, they launched a project called Reimagining the Civic Commons. They started with 60 million dollars in 5 cities, and I think they’ve expanded to maybe 12. So, the challenge is to ask, how do we get more out of all of these points of contact in the city, more for the people who are already being served by an institution like the school children and their school, but also more in terms of new constituencies being served, which is why the example from Manhattan was so inspiring.

So, do you see physical and social infrastructure as two separate things? How do you understand the relationship between the two?

I don't see one existing without the other—the physical and the social are the two sides of the same coin. It’s interesting to think about the library from that perspective. The idea of the library as a quiet place filled with books, where everyone is genuinely welcome, has been really stretched and in very positive ways. Now, libraries have things like marker spacers and sewing machines, career services, counseling, and some libraries even offer experts that you can “check out.” So, the definition of social has shifted and that has asked the physical to take on new characteristics. This change has taken place in the United States in places like Chattanooga, Philadelphia. There are also more extreme examples, like in the case of the Helsinki Central Library. On the exterior, it doesn’t particularly look like a library, but it absolutely functions as this welcoming place of information, exchange, knowledge, civic engagement, and excitement. And it does so in really novel ways. 

It's hard to tease out the social from the physical. If we think about something like a highway. I live right next to I-375, which is a below grade highway in Detroit built during urban renewal. There’s a big project to surface the highway, bring it up to grade and turn it into a boulevard. At the beginning of the community engagement process I was very excited by this possibility. Currently, we have gone through a couple of years of procedure and the Michigan Department of Transportation has issued what they call the “Preferred Design Alternative,” which a diagram for how the street could be designed. The result is that the highway will be replaced by a highway by another name. It’s going to be nine lanes of traffic, including two turning lanes, at its widest point. That means that it is going to be about as wide as Woodward Avenue, if not wider. I don’t know what the speed limit is going to be, but the cars are not going to drive slowly. With a different street design there would be a possibility that the space fosters commerce and human life, that people will go for a walk, jog or a bike ride. Those are all possibilities in terms of the social role of the street in a city. But the reality of the physical design as it has been currently articulated is so heavy and so counter to those enjoyments, that I think the social possibilities will not be captured in the end. In this case, the physical overwhelms the social. It loses its elasticity. All of this is in the context of an opportunity to repair the racism that was at the core of urban renewal, but the current design squanders that opportunity. We’re on the verge of throwing away our best shot at it by emphasizing cars instead of people, which is really a way of saying that we’re emphasizing suburban, predominantly white commuters over local, predominantly Black Detroiters.

That’s really interesting. The physical and social aspects of infrastructure are always in conversation, they are always changing and are never static. They’re always changing and shaping one another. You mentioned Detroit, and that’s my next question: how has living in Michigan shaped your relationship to infrastructure?

Living in Michigan has made me extremely grumpy about roads. And not in the way that our governor talks about “fixing the damn roads.” In my opinion, Michigan has a 1980s conceptualization of the built environment—exemplified by a persistent inability to think about public transit, particularly at a regional scale. This part is very frustrating—as a lay person who lives here—to see the reality of fellow citizens of the city who have extremely long commutes to work because the public transit is kind of quasi-functional. Michigan wants to promote itself as a place with twenty-first century economy and twenty-first century talent. And indeed, there’s a lot of that here including the great students at our fine University of Michigan! But it’s sad when a city like Detroit makes a bid for Amazon’s HQ2 and gets kicked out relatively early in the process because we don’t have any public transit. Even if you are not a fan of Amazon, it should be shocking that a private company looks at Detroit and Southeast Michigan and says, “yeah, you’re not a real city!”

This is the first place I’ve lived where I meet people in their twenties and thirties who are excited and even eager to live in a suburb. I meet someone in that age range and I expect to hear that they live downtown, or want to live downtown or somewhere in the city, and it’s like a 50-50 chance they live in Ferndale, Royal Oak, or somewhere else. They’re obviously making those decisions for a good reason, but it’s telling to me. Having lived in the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Austin, Texas, Helsinki, Basel, and spent plenty of time in lots of other places, I’ve never met a young person who’s like, “I cannot wait to go to the suburbs!” Maybe it’s a weird quirk of this area, but I think it also speaks to the problematic relationship we have with physical infrastructure here.

I just taught a class on infrastructure and power last semester and it was amazing to see how often Michigan—Detroit and Flint in particular—come up as examples of infrastructural failure. In terms of the question of power and change, what role do you think institutions have in shaping infrastructure?

Institutions can help us push against the status quo. So, in the case of I-375, we have an exceedingly rare opportunity here to do something really meaningful, and to do it better than anybody else. How many cities have deleted a highway? A dozen, plus or minus? We have good odds! The real question is whether we perceive ourselves as having this unique opportunity, having a unique asset in our hand, and then whether we see ourselves as being bold enough to imagine that we can do something other than just survive. Detroit has had a difficult and complicated history, but if we want to attract new businesses and residents, we must have bigger ambitions. Why would the next university student choose Michigan over Berkeley or Columbia, or somewhere else? The answer is that we do something here better than anywhere else. Full stop. So, we have to figure out what that is, and we have to execute on it. 

There’s a great opportunity here related to urban technology. I personally believe that within our lifetime we will have to figure out how to rethink the way American settlements are made and how they operate. We have to rethink how we get our water, how we get our power, and how we store and transmit it. We have to rethink how we move, how we eat, how we govern ourselves. All of this is necessary because it’s clear that the design standards of the infrastructure we have did not contemplate the climate we are now living within. Much of our current infrastructure is too fragile or brittle to survive. Where is that reinvention going to happen?

There’s a lot of this innovation happening on the coasts and those are lovely places. I love New York, it’s awesome, but what you create for New York does not automatically translate to a place like Indiana, Illinois, or Michigan. Because the economic context, the density, and the culture is so different. But if you were to reimagine, say, how a typical single family home gets water in a place like Michigan, well, then that idea is pretty transferable because Michigan looks a lot like Illinois, Indiana, and Wyoming, among other places. It looks a lot more like those places than New York does. So, I think there’s a broad opportunity for us in this state and region, and especially at this university to think about the basics of American life and to be incredibly inventive across those areas. If we can do that, there will be really fantastic research and economic opportunities for us that are also protected by the competitive advantage of this “middleness,” in the most positive way. The types of questions, experiments, hypotheses and even answers our students come up with will make them feel not like some coastal jewel box, but like they are creating something with real possibility of scale and transformation.

How are you thinking about infrastructure within the Urban Technology curriculum? What role does the region play, as an opportunity to not only innovate new technologies, but to also learn from existing urban intelligence?

One of the things that is core to our design pedagogy is that research is important. And research involves humans and humans have expertise. We must design with people and not for people. So, the idea of co-design or more participatory design process is important. Some architecture schools talk about it, including here at Michigan, but if you look outside of architecture, it’s much more common. As design professionals, we need to get over this addition to authorship that we have had for way too long. The idea of the architect, or the designer, as the sole genius at the top of a process. And if we can wean ourselves from that addiction, then actually the design process doesn’t need to be antagonistic to local expertise. In fact, it’s dependent upon local expertise. Design cannot happen without it! The designer’s role is to think about how do you synthesize all these inputs? How do you design a process so that people feel that they are not just heard but that they actually have a hand in what’s happening? So, I think that when it comes to infrastructure, there are two areas of opportunity for the Urban Technology program. One is thinking about the process of participating and engagement. I am personally on a mission to make engagement obsolete. We’re obsessed with engagement, but it’s actually a really passive way to think about people having a role to play in something like the development of infrastructure. In contrast, if we have a participatory process that is more about co-creation, that’s more about co-design, then engagement to make sure people are OK with option A or option B is not as important, because their opinions will be the DNA of the options, not some platitudes sprinkled on at the end. I am interested in getting as many people as possible involved in making decisions together. This might require new technological platforms, new tools across the board so that people can say what they like and what they don’t like.  

The other way that Urban Technology thinks about infrastructure is that we are asking students to consider the user experience of the city, from buildings to infrastructural spaces: the coastline, the water system, the street network, the power grid, etc. When an idea like a micro grid becomes popularized, we will have new questions, individuals will be expected to take on new roles and responsibilities. For instance, how do we decide who’s in the micro grid and who’s not? How do we decide how energy is stored and allocated in times of crisis? What are the rules? There’s a governance layer that is very interesting. And even beyond governance, how does all of this translate into literal interfaces? In our lifetimes, there will be a whole new set of interfaces for things like utilities that were previously completely abstracted from individuals. This is a chance for us—whoever designs the interface for controlling a micro grid, for instance, has the potential to make it about the individual or about the collective. These types of questions require an understanding of not only software and computer science, but also things like civic values, priorities, and degrees of need. These types of problems are fundamentally shared or urban in nature and thus any enabling technologies involved must be designed with a similarly urban perspective.

You've had a couple of sets of students now for several semesters. I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how they're reacting to the curriculum and also what you’re learning from them.

What I am learning from them is easier to answer. I am so impressed by their optimism and their impatience. They recognize that there’s a lot of agency in technology and that you can disagree with the value sets that drive certain technologies today, or imagine how technology could be deployed with new values. If you asked them, “why did you end up studying here… this is a completely new degree! You must have been really convincing to your parents to get them to let you do this.” And one of the most frequent things that I head from then is that “I really like cities, and I want to do something like urban planning or urban studies… But I also like technology. And I can do both and not have to choose.” So, that’s awesome to hear, and it’s awesome because we now have about 70 students in the program across two years. They are every bit as committed to building equitable, sustainable, and fun cities as our architects and our planners. But they’re interested in a different approach. In the end, city life is living together, and the more forms of agency we have the better, because there’s no single magic bullet, right? 

The first batch of students who joined are currently having their first design studio right now, which is exciting. There’s actually a video about our city intensive program, during which the students participate in a kind of urban summer camp. We get everyone on the bus and drive to Toledo and learn about water. Then, two weeks later, we go to Chicago and learn about mobility. Then, two weeks later, we learn about land use in the region of Grand Rapids and drive to a bunch of stops to see different levels of density. So, we have created a very immersive learning experience. The students are very proactive. For instance, Jonathan Massey came and gave a guest lecture in the first course they take, taught by Malcolm McCullough. He gave a talk about San Francisco of the 2000s, discussing tactical urbanism. The students got excited and they went and painted a new crosswalk on central campus that weekend. That’s cool! It’s neat to see them start to occupy this world and grow into individuals who see the city as something that can be edited, remixed, and improved based on need.

That’s excellent! Is there anything else you’d like to add about infrastructure or the Urban Technology program?

I guess another important issue that fascinates me is the scale question. So much of what happens in an architecture school is organized at different physical scales. But then imagine, what is the scale of Uber? Is it global because that’s the footprint at which it operates? Is it tiny because you access it through your phone? It’s all of those. And that’s been one of my riddles—thinking through what we really mean when we say urban technology. It requires us to hold both ends of the scalar spectrum in our heads at the same time. I think that's something that is a big opportunity for us to flesh out here at the University of Michigan. Something as fundamental as the notion of scale, the meaning of that term, and the role it plays in organizing architectural thinking becomes ground for new approaches, new perspectives.

That’s wonderful, Bryan, and we will be eager to check in with you about these questions in the future! Thanks so much for your time.