Social infrastructure

Abstract

Current urbanization patterns and aging transportation infrastructures have marginalized millions of US citizens. The result is that 4 .5 million US residents live within 100 meters of a four-lane highway' and have become hound to communities, which endure social hardship and environmental detriment. For too long, the physical form of the city has taken a relaxed position on these endangered and often hazardous urban edges. Considering the social, spatial and environmental conditions. the central argument of this thesis is that architecture built along major transportation corridors must respond to the scale of the infrastructure itself Dense concentrations of pollution and rising transient populations (homeless, working poor and chronically unemployed) surrounding transportation infrastructure call for a new approach to contemporary urbanism. The thesis Social Infrastructure investigates an elevated 3/4 mile stretch of highway 1-93 in South Boston - an infrastructural remnant of the 14.6 billion dollar Big Dig'. TIle elevated highway built in 1955, has formed a number of under-utilized and vacant sites along and under the 1-93 corridor. This thesis explores a new mode of urbanism, which leverages policy, urban design, landscape, and architecture to embrace the infrastructural scale and to demonstrate new potential for this bleak urban condition. The result is a set of three hybrid architecture and landscape typologies which seek to resolve social inequity, reuse infrastructural space, and remediate environmental conditions.