service infrastructure, such as water supply systems, sewers, schools, and hospitals. Especially, the emergence of Quetelet’s “social physics” or Villermé’s “social ecology” could be an interesting point of comparison as it was established as a reaction to (the threats of) disease and revolt in the overcrowded and polluted industrial city during the early 19th century. Inspired by evolutions in biology, new methods of data collecting had to instigate interventions into the urban “organism,” making it a more healthy and peaceful habitat for the human species (Rabinow 1989; Koch 2011). These earlier design modes generally made abstraction of local characteristics to formulate constructs of territorial organization and societal modernization mainly focusing on “human” ecology—e.g., social mechanisms of controlling and nurturing the masses (Foucault and Senellart 2007) (Figure 2.2a). Today, however, the engagement with sophisticated techniques deciphering sites in order to uncover and recover local, mostly “natural” ecological qualities is developing into a new paradigm (Fournier 2013; Picon 2010c) (Figure 2.2b).
As a historical positioning of these techniques has largely been left untouched,* today’s technological (r)evolution determining infrastructure design is commonly approached from a deterministic point of view, thus resulting in a rather self-referential and often prolix discourse (see Kuhn 1962). One starts from a “new beginning” in urbanism, “against” traditional and modern urban form as well as “against” infrastructure engineering, instead of embedding these design ideas and techniques relating infrastructure, space, and society in a longer chronology and a wider range of disciplines. It appears as if designs/designers are submitted passively to technological change (Picon 2010a). The increasing role of anticipatory/projective knowledge in the production and governance of space and the persistence of an over-determined rhetoric of the new “-isms” make a historical-geographical reflection on design techniques of calculation and cartography timely, if not urgent. Tying in with Ian Thompson’s analysis of Landscape Urbanism (2012) and the study of Thomas Kirchhoff et al. on Landscape Ecology (2013), both decoding the conceptual language of the “new” discourses, this chapter explores the recent reorientation of design to landscape ecological infrastructure against the background of historical ideas and techniques dealing with infrastructure, programmatic uncertainty, and imminent crisis to pierce today’s predominantly self-referential discourse. For placing today’s momentum (re)inventing design techniques, seemingly geared toward physical/natural qualities, in a tradition of technological innovation steering spatial transformation as an intermediary for social innovation could offer new perspectives to recent developments in urban design. It might even lead to (re)considering the way design techniques are embedded in and related to political and social contexts.
More specifically, the current relationship between design rationale and imminent ecological apocalypse is studied by turning to the past, looking at early 19th-century urban interventions geared at curbing an impending environmental crisis. Thus, the comparison is a theoretical experiment, let’s say a first contribution to the “history of the present” (see Elden 2013 on Foucault) of landscape ecological infrastructure with the intention not to find “the origin” but to add some historical-theoretical sensitivity