Cities don’t die…
A little off-topic: this past Sunday’s Chronicle included an article I wrote on cities and disaster. It only mentions transportation now and then, but it does have an overriding theme that’s very relevant.
San Francisco, 1906: no buildings, no people, but there are streets and lots.
The most fundamental and lasting things in cities are not buildings or even people but infrastructure: roads, railroads, water lines, sewers, power grids, even lot lines. Without these things cities cannot function, and in building infrastructure we impose a new man-made geography that shapes our world more than natural geography does. Houston was built on an arbitrary plot of land based on the inaccurate premise that Buffalo Bayou was navigable up to White Oak Bayou. But once there was a city here infrastructure — at first railroad lines, then later the ship channel, pipelines, interstates, and airports — was built that gives us geographical advantages that nature didn’t. In the end, enough people invested in the idea that the bayou was navigable to create the economic and political ability to dredge enough mud to make that claim true.
All of which is to say: infrastructure matters. And the decisions on building it need to be made accordingly: openly, carefully, and with the big picture in mind.
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