Ways of seeing: landscape-infrastructure as critical design framework to analyse the production of Paris’s Boulevard Périphérique

Abstract

When studying change in urban infrastructure landscapes, technical, political, and aesthetical choices are often considered in isolation. Yet, large-scale infrastructures such as urban motorways are the crystallisation of design entanglements. The decisions taken by an engineer—to build an elevated highway instead of a tunnel, to erect soundproof walls, to destroy a church instead of a housing block—are the expression of technical knowledge, cultural prejudices, socio-political frameworks, and value-based opinions reframed as expertise. This paper will be focussing on the ‘social imagination’ of the designers, by calling for a recontextualisation of design choices within their professional and cultural discourses, practices and imaginaries in order to question these infrastructural artefacts as socially produced. This paper will illustrate the relevance of applying a critical design framework to study infrastructure landscape change by focussing on the Boulevard Périphérique of Paris, and specifically on the emergence of noise from road traffic as nuisance.