Your Infrastructure Needs a Makeover. Here are 3 ways to make it happen.
I am in love with this giraffe. He is tall and cute and lives under a highway in Oakland, California. Alright, technically, it’s a painting of a giraffe on a heavy concrete post holding up an elevated highway. I have driven past him many times in a non-descript residential neighborhood in Oakland and he makes me laugh every single time.
Giraffe aside, let’s talk infrastructure.
Infrastructure systems are essential circuits connecting the city, but the irony is that their physical manifestation often dissect neighborhoods.
Oftentimes, elevated highways and train tracks create dead zones with their noise and overpowering built structures. Wide roads and far-apart transit stations require pedestrians to go through long stretch of underpasses. Then there are those overpasses, rising above car exhaust, that require climbing up numerous steps. These are not welcoming spaces but people need them to get around. So many municipalities and organizations have tried to “dress-up” the infrastructure to make these spaces feel attractive and safe.
Here are three ways to give your infrastructure a makeover:
Strategy 1: Art
One quick and cost efficient method is to paint murals on blank, overpowering surfaces. The giraffe in Oakland is painted by Dan Fontes, one of his many works commissioned by the City of Oakland. I have happily seen this strategy similarly employed from Quebec City to Warsaw, Poland.
Another more site-specific way is public art for transit stations. Many cities have established programs for such a purpose. New York City’s Arts for Transit implements a comprehensive public art program that makes its old dingy stations and platforms much more lively to move through. Similarly, London’s Art on the Underground was launched in 2000, envisioning Tube stations as cultural and social environment.
As for overpasses, it could be as simple as making them more visually pleasing. In Seattle, Olympic Sculpture Park installed “Seattle Cloud Cover” — a glass barrier depicting colors of the changing sky — on the bridge that crosses over the railroads to connect downtown Seattle with the park.
STRATEGY 2: Educational Exhibition
A long stretch of necessary pathways create a captive audience unwittingly, presenting a unique educational opportunity.
I was recently in Mexico City, where transferring from one Metro platform to another could feel like an endless walk, but La Raza metro station transformed its incredibly long tunnel into an educational exhibition. “The Tunnel of Science” (El Túnel de la Ciencia) educates the public on natural sciences. A segment of the tunnel even glows in the dark to illustrate the solar system!
San Francisco Airport (SFO) has its own museum unit to show passengers that airports can be more than fast food and newsstands. SFO Museum commission public arts and features more than 20 rotating exhibits in every terminal.
STRATEGY 3: Public Space
If these dead zones can already be enlivened with arts and educational exhibits, then making them into public spaces is highly feasible.
Waterfront Toronto’s Underpass Park is a great example of such use. The 2.5 acres park was built in 2012 under two underpasses, furnished with swings, playgrounds, basketball courts, and skateboard terrain.
(Interestingly — as I’m about to hit publish on this post — residents, politicians and experts have been weighing in over what to do with a portion of the city’s elevated Gardiner Expressway: remove it, repair it or do a hybrid of the two. The mayor has advocated for the hybrid option, while the chief city planner and over 1,400+ concerned residents have called for the expressway’s removal. City council will be voting on the issue in early June).
“Under the Elevated”, a project by The Design Trust for Public Space, researched and cataloged residual spaces under elevated infrastructures. For a few months, the project team installed pop-up installations at different sites to study the impacts.
In the Bronx, a booth with solar-powered LED lights was installed. The Boogie Down Booth provided seating for people and speakers that broadcasted Bronx-born music to counter the noise from the elevated train tracks above. In Chinatown, seating and comment boards were installed under the Manhattan Bridge, inviting people to linger and leave their thoughts.
The Rockaway Waterfront Alliance has recently released a proposal for Project Underway — a park under the elevated train track along the Rockaway Peninsula.
The physical impacts of large infrastructure projects are widely documented. Such systems are crucial, but the structures often lead to dead spaces that no one would like to visit unless absolutely necessary. Art and educational exhibits can create safe and attractive spaces and — bonus — transforming them into usable spaces can be even more valuable in our dense urban areas.
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