Infrastructure Adaptation (Transitioning Linear Systems)

Because of these attributes, infrastructure adaptation projects can serve to improve carbon outcomes with urban design while catalyzing positive economic change. By transforming transportation corridors through adaptive reuse, retrofitting, or right sizing, cities can provide low carbon mobility, densify urban form, and attract residents who value livability--in addition to garnering the traditional benefits of open space like community building, improved mental and physical health, biodiversity, and climate adaptation.

This book brings together port, river, rail, and road infrastructure adaptation interventions into a typology, highlighting strategies, benefits, elements, and processes in common. Each of the 60 built project examples, by a range of international landscape architects, urban designers, and architects, demonstrate different ways engineered systems evolve from monofunctional megastructures to multi-functional platforms designed to support living systems. Infrastructure adaptation as an emerging project type was studied over many years by XL Lab, the research and innovation lab at SWA Group, an urban design, planning, and landscape architecture firm. This project continues practice-based commitments to large-scale landscapes, anticipating near future conditions in the built environment, analyzing design performance, and addressing emerging complexities and unprecedented challenges.