Re-Sparking Spatial Imagination in the Great Lakes Megaregion

Geoffrey Thün, Kathy Velikov, Dan McTavish, Colin Ripley | Infra Eco Logi Urbanism: A Project for the Great Lakes Megaregion | Park Books | 2015 | 192 Pages

Since at least the French colonial occupation of the 17th century, the Great Lakes Megaregion (GLM), that grand region spanning the middle of North America including parts of both the US and Canada, has maintained an unprecedented network of production and exchange of global importance. “What we call modernity has many roots and sources, but its material basis in mass production and consumption was first achieved in the Great Lakes Megaregion,” Robert Fishman writes in his introduction to Infra Eco Logi Urbanism. 

Infra Eco Logi Urbanism is a book created by the “experimental platform for architecture and urban design research,” RVTR, housed in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. It is less a book than an illustrated game plan for the future of the Great Lakes Megaregion. Renderings of high speed rail lines, infrastructure projects, and clean energy plans dominate the book’s pages. Its underlying imperative is to address the challenge of building a new spatial imagination, one that confronts contemporary space that has been molded by private forces that reproduce current social relations and that paralyze the possibility of alternatives. Infra Eco Logi Urbanism is a vital refutation of a national culture increasingly centered on apocalyptic futures and a cynical present. 

While much of the region is culturally stigmatized as the Rust Belt, the Great Lakes Megaregion remains one of the world’s busiest trade routes, and its historical legacy as a vast region of production and exchange endures. Man-made canals and trains established a route straight from the Port of New York to the heartland as the nation’s economic stage shifted from agriculture to industrial production. Steel became prominent in cities like Pittsburgh, Gary, and Hamilton, Ontario. Each new boom was built on a previous bust—from grain to steel, from steel to cars. Michigan’s timber barons finished exhausting the state’s vast forests just as Henry Ford was looking for investors, the state subsidizing and developing technologies along the way to help facilitate booms and busts. But if there’s a thesis to be derived from Infra Eco Logi Urbanism, it’s that the Great Lakes Megaregion is not a monument to the past—it’s a guide to the future. 

The book describes a future that is intentionally regional, built on the GLM’s history and its current conditions. It is a project that takes into account a binational landscape from Milwaukee to Montreal, a megaregional undertaking to create a hyper-connected system of urban and rural spaces and economies. This regional future, if it is to be feasible, must be built on top of our current landscape, the book’s authors argue. Instead of existing within a void or relying on more ideal conditions, the project addresses our current landscape as it is. In this future, elevated high speed rail and clean energy distribution utilizes and reshapes our already existing highway network—avoiding painful land acquisition, which would only fragment more local communities and damage indigenous nations—and building communities already growing in that system, recognizing “the geography of the highway as the driver for future urban growth.” RVTR raises the necessity for regional communal spaces that flow with the region’s historical development: “new models and spatial frameworks that… encourage a broad range of publics to participate, produce, and reproduce the cultural common of the metropolis,” repurposing sites of highway interchange into “sites of social interchange.” 

The book works toward a project—satisfyingly illustrated with 3D plans and interior renderings—to build three main hubs of interchange that bridge the social, political, and economic. “The Gateway” is a vast super-complex of sports fields, public spaces, and transportation crossings located above the highway interchange outside of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. “The Crossing” is a towering avant-garde structure atop a proposed bridge between Detroit and Windsor, acting as the political home for the GLM, where issues affecting the region are debated by the “Coalition for the Governance of the GLM.” And finally, “The Exchange” is an exchange hub in Chicago for all of the transport and commerce for the region. Both trains and stocks flow through a series of buildings and communal interchanges. The renderings and detailed maps of the three locations act to not only imagine a regional future, but to plan one. 

In addition to these physical locations, the book outlines political networks, a literal grid of the “social policies, protocols, economic frameworks, cultural and ethnic biases, and operational management” that would need to be addressed to implement a green, equitable, and regional future. In a chart, the book shows how House and Senate bills are passed or killed, upheld or shot down by courts, connected to trade acts and air quality agreements. It is a visualization of the political undertaking required to bring about truly megaregional changes, entailing layers of bureaucracy and the struggle against private forces. 

In its ambitious study and planning, Infra Eco Logi Urbanism breaks the paralysis of our current moment of spatial cynicism with a project that generates megaregional imagination holding clean energy and new bi-national political thinking at its center. The images throughout the book gravely contrast that of so many cyberpunk and apocalyptic depictions of the future, cultural depictions constricted by today’s dominant sociopolitical ideology. Capitalism not only drives cultural forms and our physical geography, but defines the very scope of our imagination. Infra Eco Logi Urbanism is a spark for a new way of spatial imagining. 

Although the book isn’t explicit about fighting for complete economic transformation—the authors ask, almost hypothetically, what if renewable energy wasn’t just about maximizing profits without offering a clear answer—it’s a crucial step in imagining what the future might look like spatially, in reality. The book reflects Marx’s adage: “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” The charm of this project for the Great Lakes Megaregion does not lie in a revolutionary political message, but in its imaginative potential. While RVTR’s book might not possess such powers as to single-handedly bring about a new society, they have succeeded in analyzing the failures of our present and giving birth to the possibility of a new and viable Midwestern future. They have proposed, exclaimed, and prepared forms to be raised in reality. One feels by the end of the book that the Great Lakes Megaregion really is the future. Now we just have to build it.