Abstract
The term city infrastructures is often restricted to the physical elements of a city, while in practice it comprises both hard infrastructures for built environment and utilities, as well as soft infrastructures involving services, social groupings and personal skills. Part of the confusion is the lack of clarity about the role and delivery of city infrastructures and its relationship to livelihood and livability. To address this issue, a framework for soft and hard city infrastructures has been developed using results from two case studies to model the relationships, conflicts and connections between soft and hard infrastructures. The first case study concerns the abandonment of a planned urban regeneration project for the Italian City of Lucca in Tuscany where institutional inertia prevented regeneration of a derelict tobacco factory. The second case study concerned results from data analysis of contributions for a public consultation exercise for City of Christchurch in New Zealand. The syntactic data analytics using Flax software coupled with data visualisation demonstrated how an urban narrative can be constructed about citizen priorities based on a framework for soft and hard city infrastructures. The methodology enables citizen engagement through cultivating open processes of urban exploration that advocate ‘connected infrastructures’ thinking.
Highlights
The design, construction and maintenance of the physical fabric of cities is strongly influenced by town planners, architects and engineers based on their professional judgement with often minimal input from the people living and working in these urban spaces
The term city infrastructures is often restricted to the physical elements of a city, while in practice it comprises the rich ecology of utilities, services, land ownership, networks, social groupings and personal skills
The proposed framework for soft and hard city infrastructures has been tested on case study data for two distinctly different cities
Summary
The design, construction and maintenance of the physical fabric of cities is strongly influenced by town planners, architects and engineers based on their professional judgement with often minimal input from the people living and working in these urban spaces. This detached relationship between the professional expert, and the citizen as a primary user, is further complicated by the scarcity of scientific objective research into how city infrastructures perform and in particular meets the needs of users. The methodology is geared towards enabling citizen engagement through cultivating open processes of urban exploration, and advocating the need for ‘connected infrastructure’ thinking (as opposed to disconnected infrastructures). As such it aims to create the capacity among citizen and stakeholder groups to critique infrastructural provision and participate in strategic design thinking about how urban qualities are under-pinned by connected infrastructures, which can strengthen resilience and increase sustainable governance as we face an uncertain global future
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