Rethinking Infrastructure Towards Synergic Design

After decades of detailed descriptive efforts, we can start to look at the dispersed city by evaluating its performance in terms of resilience and flexibility: in this context, the presence of large amounts of infrastructure becomes a major element of design interest. How could infrastructure re-orientate the phenomenon of the European dispersed city, providing the formation of sustainable urban life? In this paper, we suggest how new interpretations of infrastructure, and more specifically the recycling of existing stock, might play a crucial role in improving the sustainability, austerity and resilience agendas of the post-Fordist (decentralized) society (Belanger 2010). We shall discuss the case study of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a region which is undergoing a process of dispersion of urbanization whilst concurrently having the opportunity of a larger re-structuring of its infrastructural asset. As Pièrre Bélanger suggests, new alliances between ecology and economy within an “infrastructural urbanism” (Allen 2007) approach can be envisaged, towards the exploration of multidimensional and multipurpose characteristics of infrastructure. This opposes current mono-functional segregation and towards the application of synergic design in the redevelopment of decaying infrastructure and contaminated land (Bélanger 2003).