[Note: This post is part of the Infrastructural City blogiscussion - Chapter 1: Owens Lake: Reconstructing the Void]
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Should Owens Lake’s problematic surface be read as urban, or as rural urban effect? An urban byproduct? An off-site or collateral urbanism? What about similar byproducts – such as mines? The denatured soils and genetically modified mono-cultural expanses of industrial farming? How do we place these productive/consumptive effects that urban conditions generate? Expanding notions of urban could redefine what we mean by an urban census. Perhaps that’s the next step in the infrastructural study of L.A. – assembling an alternative urban census centered around production and consumption; formulating different questions about lifestyles and urban ‘occupation’.
Or, approached from a different angle, dispersed infrastructural connections such as Owens lake and Los Angeles beg for more refined criteria to define regions. As an area of inquiry and exploration, regionalism seems to have been largely forgotten in much of contemporary design (except by the new urbanists). Examining the city via its extended web of infrastructures could provide a new grounding for a more useful, operational regionalism. READ MORE >>
