Great urban infrastructure today: may be in the sky, car, or blockchain

[reply to: “What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects” by Allison Arieff, New York Times, Feb 12, 2016].

Grand, imaginative infrastructure projects may come in quite different forms than the traditional railways and bridges; and in the case of the Bay Area, it seems grand visions today mostly come from the technology sector.

For example, the development of autonomous vehicles, led by Google — now joined by Apple, Tesla, Uber, etc — may greatly transform cities, in ways planners and architects haven’t much anticipated or we yet understand. AVs might hugely reduce vehicle accidents, which currently kill over 1M people a year.

Or, take the global race to create low-cost wide-distance telecom/Internet service, with Facebook, Google, SpaceX, OneWeb, etc in a race to build satellite or balloon or hybrid systems. This may catalyze opportunity and development in the world’s fastest-growing cities and regions as much as physical infrastructure ever has.

Even further from railroads & bridges, we could look at the rapid evolution of blockchain and decentralization protocols as a giant, transformative infrastructure project being built by 10,000s of engineers and entrepreneurs, and $B’s of investment. This has potential to transform finance, governance, cooperative work/economic models, etc, possibly enabling more equitable and transparent working models for many sectors. This might end up a more important bridge than the Golden Gate, which while iconic, after all still mostly serves a few little-populated, wealthy SF sub/exurbs.

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Tim McCormick

San Francisco tjm.org @tmccormick