Recalibrating Infrastructure: Network Urbanism in the Los Angeles Basin

Current modes of production and frameworks for exchange have a global reach, yet they have physical, social, and environmental impact when they meet the ground. They operate off physical and logistical infrastructures set up to organize and facilitate flows, yet these independent and autonomous systems often spawn their own set of unique ecologies and economies as they negotiate local and regional social, environmental, regulatory, and legal systems and structures. Our work will tap into the broader production and economic flows that both sustain and are generated by this unlikely metropolis-looking closely at systems set up for the production, exchange, and/or delivery of food, water, and energy. We will come to understand agricultural, hydrologic, and energy networks and infrastructures on their own terms-and then exploit opportunities to recalibrate the very components of these systems to other, more productive and more dynamic ends. And we will look at how the modified operational systems of a maturing, diversifying Los Angeles might be understood as characteristic of a re-tooled, sustainable twenty-first century metropolis.The studio\’s work will draw on extensive research developed in fall 2009 in Seminar 9206la: Recalibrating Infrastructure: food, water, and energy networks in the Los Angeles basin.Prerequisites: Excellent drawing and research skills required, including 3D. Open to all GSD students; a mix of architects, urban designers / planners, and landscape architects is highly desirable.