Burnham: "Infrastructure is not the end result of a previous creative process, but the beginning of a new one."

Ideas for reuse don't have to be big or overly complicated. They just have to be good and sustainable. While New Albany ponders if people actually have a place within the confines of its automobile-centric infrastructure, other cities are experimenting with new, human centered interpretations of their pre-existing environments.

Eight Imaginative Projects Reusing Infrastructure in Cities, by Jillian Glover (This Big City)

What if your local telephone booth was also an electric vehicle charging station? Or construction scaffolding became a fun place to sit down and eat lunch? Or a roadside billboard became a lush, air-cleaning bamboo garden?

All of these examples are part of a new exhibition launched this week by the Boston Society of Architects called Reprogramming the City: Opportunities for Urban Infrastructure. The show presents a global overview of ways in which the existing, traditional forms of infrastructure in cities around the world are being redesigned, repurposed, and reimagined to better serve citizens in the 21st century.

Curated by urban design director Scott Burnham, it showcases more than 40 examples of imaginative reuse and repurposing of urban infrastructure, from physical objects to the city’s most functional systems and surfaces. Cities represented include London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and Boston.

According to Burnham, the exhibit explores a new paradigm of urban creativity and resourcefulness that treats the hardware of the city as a platform of opportunity. Infrastructure is not the end result of a previous creative process, but the beginning of a new one.