Infrastructural Ecologies: A Macroscopic Framework for Sustainable Public Works

摘要

"Infrastructural ecology" is described here as a planning and design framework that promotes beneficial exchanges across the energy, water, waste, and transportation service sectors to reduce collective system costs, improve performance and reduce environmental and social impacts. Patterned on the workings of natural ecosystems, infrastructural ecology fosters synergies through proactive colocation or otherwise networking of different sector systems. Asset design may also capitalize on adjacent or local land-uses, and utilize untapped constructed or natural system resources. Infrastructural facilities may incorporate other commercial, cultural or even recreational amenities to address community sensitivities while fostering job creation. Ultimately more sustainable, such networked infrastructure facilities are integrated, multipurpose and synergistic; they reduce carbon intensity and GHG emissions; assimilate the free work of natural systems; and can enhance the community in which they are situated. Descriptions of several successful case studies around the world exemplify these ideas and reveal important co-benefits that accrue to each project's triple bottom line.