Skip to main content
Power

Infrastructure in
America

is a project at Columbia University's Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture connecting infrastructure, politics, and life.

  • Essays
  • Events
  • Initiatives
  • Resources
  • About

Essays

Featured

Cameron Oglesby

"This Plan is a Lie"

North Carolina residents, researchers, and farmers say the rapidly growing biogas industry distracts from a massive hog waste problem—and the public health risks that it causes.

 

Sherri White-Williamson lives about three miles from a pork processing plant in Clinton, North Carolina. On a good day, the air smells fresh, tainted by a minor whiff of rotten egg and sewage. On a bad day, the odor from the plant is so strong, she has to keep her windows closed.

Image

Waste from different hog barns at Butler Farms is routed to lagoons, where it is kept to be processed by an anaerobic digester before it is converted into BioGas

Buell Center

Professional Programs in the Built Environment, 2021

From the summer of 2020 through the summer of 2021, teams at the Buell Center compiled, organized, and analyzed information on 1,115 academic programs at professional schools of the built environment across the United States. Their work is now made available here, in searchable form.

Image

A grey US map shows scattered locations for public and private programs of the built environment, with a gradient indicating relative proportion of the White population across the country.

This map indicates the locations and concentrations of the programs included in the database, with special attention given to the proportion of the White population in each location. For more information, see the publication Green Reconstruction: A Curricular Toolkit for the Built Environment. Design by MTWTF

Alicia French

Temporary Homes in Permanent Crisis

In September 2012, a class action settlement awarded $42.6 million to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita who were living in mobile homes with elevated formaldehyde levels meted out as disaster assistance housing by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Following the hurricanes, over $50 million was spent on the production of more than fifty thousand travel trailers, with many of the contracts going to privately-owned companies that acted as middlemen for the homes’ procurement.

Image

looking through the center of rows of white mobile homes

FEMA trailers at an auction in Hammond, Louisiana (Nick Shapiro)

Amelyn Ng

Beyond Business as Usual: BIM and the Future of Public Works

Building Information Modeling (BIM), at its simplest, is a “Google Docs” of architectural production. Allowing many hands to work simultaneously on complex building projects, BIM is an industry-strength digital modeling ethic that generates drawings, schedules costs and components, simulates construction sequences, and coordinates global teams—all from a shared information database.

Image

Building Information Modeling of the ERDC headquarters building created by the Yates Construction team

Partial BIM model of the USACE's Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) headquarters, designed by USACE and built by Yates Construction, 2017 (US Army ERDC website)


Adriana Garriga-Lopez

Agua Dulce
October 16, 2019

Amelyn Ng

Beyond Business as Usual: BIM and the Future of Public Works
August 14, 2020

Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Blackout: What Darkness Illuminated in Puerto Rico
March 2, 2018

Henderson Beck, Andres Julian Alvarez Davila, Anays M. González Sánchez

Centering Community Design
September 8, 2020

Henderson Beck, Andres Julian Alvarez Davila, Anays M. González Sánchez

Centering Community Design
September 8, 2020

Henderson Beck, Andres Julian Alvarez Davila, Anays M. González Sánchez

Centering Community Design
September 8, 2020

Nina Misuraca Ignaczak

Climate Resilience on Detroit’s East Side
September 16, 2019

Cassandra Shepard

The Colonial Continuum: A Critique of New Orleans' Rebuilding Process
March 7, 2019

Danielle Purifoy, Louise Seamster

Creative Extraction: Black Towns in White Space
April 22, 2019

Danielle Purifoy, Louise Seamster

Creative Extraction: Black Towns in White Space
April 22, 2019

Eddy Almonte

Demolishing C.J. Peete
April 10, 2019

Buell Center

Environment and Eviction
March 1, 2019

Haisten Willis

For 30 years, Georgia and Florida Have Been Fighting over Water
September 30, 2019

Kim Stanley Robinson

For the Green New Deal
January 24, 2020

Danielle Purifoy

How Europe’s Wood Pellet Appetite Worsens Environmental Racism in the US South
October 5, 2020

Carly Berlin

How Louisiana's Oil and Gas Industry Uses Prison Labor
March 24, 2020

Cid Standifer

How Racism Makes the Weather in Cleveland (and Elsewhere)
January 28, 2021

Anays M. González Sánchez

How-to: USAspending.gov
November 5, 2020

Buell Center

Infrastructures of Austerity
March 1, 2019

Avery Gregurich

Is the Mississippi River Ready for Climate Change?
August 13, 2019

Andrea Ballestero

Living with Aquifers
July 26, 2019

Ava Tomasula y Garcia

The Long Tail of Indiana’s Oil and Gas Boom
May 28, 2021

Xander Peters

Louisiana Coastal Communities Forced to Make Expensive Choice: Fix Homes or Flee
August 7, 2020

Eddy Almonte, Alicia French, Jiazhen Lin, Maria Linares Trelles

Mapping an Unnatural Disaster
June 3, 2019

Eddy Almonte, Alicia French, Jiazhen Lin, Maria Linares Trelles

Mapping an Unnatural Disaster
June 3, 2019

Eddy Almonte, Alicia French, Jiazhen Lin, Maria Linares Trelles

Mapping an Unnatural Disaster
June 3, 2019

Eddy Almonte, Alicia French, Jiazhen Lin, Maria Linares Trelles

Mapping an Unnatural Disaster
June 3, 2019

Imani J. Jackson

Mold, Foundation Cracks, Sinking Houses: How a Florida Habitat for Humanity Neighborhood Fell Apart
January 15, 2020

Cameron Oglesby

N.C. releases general biogas permit despite environmental justice concerns
July 12, 2022

Austyn Gaffney

Nuclear Waste in Kentucky Poses Threat to Region Facing Historic Flooding
December 3, 2019

Chad J. Reich

Path Dependency (or, Appalachia is not Post-Industrial)
July 30, 2020

Elizabeth Yeampierre, Lourdes Pérez-Medina

The People's Power
April 10, 2019

Elizabeth Yeampierre, Lourdes Pérez-Medina

The People's Power
April 10, 2019

Reinhold Martin

Pittsburgh, Paris, Charlottesville: The Infrastructure Question
September 6, 2017

Ava Tomasula y Garcia

Possible Landscapes
January 6, 2020

Anna Clark

Power to the People
November 17, 2020

Maria Linares Trelles

Preservation and Redevelopment in Post-Katrina Mississippi
April 12, 2019

Alicia French

Privatizing Public Health
April 12, 2019

Buell Center

Professional Programs in the Built Environment, 2021
November 24, 2021

Buell Center

Professional Programs in the Built Environment: A 2020 Snapshot
September 8, 2020

Max Goldner

The Professionalization of Care: Health
September 8, 2020

Jonas Staal

Propaganda (Art) Struggle
October 1, 2018

Malini Ranganathan

Property, Pipes, and Improvement
July 16, 2019

Conor Harrison, John Harwood, Hilda Lloréns, Agustín Irizarry Rivera, Canay Özden-Schilling, Abby Spinak

Public Electricity: A Digital Roundtable
September 18, 2019

Conor Harrison, John Harwood, Hilda Lloréns, Agustín Irizarry Rivera, Canay Özden-Schilling, Abby Spinak

Public Electricity: A Digital Roundtable
September 18, 2019

Conor Harrison, John Harwood, Hilda Lloréns, Agustín Irizarry Rivera, Canay Özden-Schilling, Abby Spinak

Public Electricity: A Digital Roundtable
September 18, 2019

Conor Harrison, John Harwood, Hilda Lloréns, Agustín Irizarry Rivera, Canay Özden-Schilling, Abby Spinak

Public Electricity: A Digital Roundtable
September 18, 2019

Conor Harrison, John Harwood, Hilda Lloréns, Agustín Irizarry Rivera, Canay Özden-Schilling, Abby Spinak

Public Electricity: A Digital Roundtable
September 18, 2019

Conor Harrison, John Harwood, Hilda Lloréns, Agustín Irizarry Rivera, Canay Özden-Schilling, Abby Spinak

Public Electricity: A Digital Roundtable
September 18, 2019

Nikhil Anand

Public Water and the Intimacy of Hydraulics
November 27, 2019

Marisol LeBrón

Puerto Rico's War on Its Poor
December 12, 2018

Andy Horowitz

The Racial Strife that Can Blow in with a Hurricane
August 25, 2017

Maria Linares Trelles

Reforming “Resilience,” Erasing “Climate”
December 9, 2019

Shea Howell

Resisting Emergency Management
April 25, 2019

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Septic Injustice
May 24, 2019

Bailey Basham

The South's Communication Infrastructure Can't Withstand Climate Change
January 8, 2021

Maia Brown

Stopping Veolia: A Report from Seattle
June 20, 2019

Alicia French

Temporary Homes in Permanent Crisis
December 23, 2020

Shea Howell

Thinking for Ourselves: Reflections on Emergency Management
March 27, 2017

Cameron Oglesby

"This Plan is a Lie"
March 25, 2022

Andrea Muehlebach

Toward a Social Infrastructure
December 9, 2019

Peter Marcuse

Un-Natural Disasters, Recursive Resilience, Unjust Compensation, Visionless Planning
June 15, 2013

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

The Urban Intensions of Geontopower
May 3, 2019

Sara Faraj

Urban Renewal Today
November 10, 2021

Alon Schwabe, Daniel Fernández Pascual

What is Above is What is Below
May 21, 2019

Alon Schwabe, Daniel Fernández Pascual

What is Above is What is Below
May 21, 2019

Danielle Purifoy, Louise Seamster

What is Environmental Racism for?
July 22, 2020

Danielle Purifoy, Louise Seamster

What is Environmental Racism for?
July 22, 2020

Rachel Havrelock, Kathleen Blackburn

What to do with the Chicago River?
February 24, 2020

Rachel Havrelock, Kathleen Blackburn

What to do with the Chicago River?
February 24, 2020

Alison Stine

When the World is Remade, Make it Like Appalachia
April 24, 2020

Jacinta Ruru

Who Are Your Waters?
July 9, 2019

Jiazhen Lin

Who's Managing Booker T. Washington High?
April 9, 2019

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?
October 5, 2017

Eamon Whalen

Will Minneapolis’s Upper Harbor Terminal Project be Good for its Neighbors?
October 9, 2020

Kate Aronoff

With a Green New Deal, Here's What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation
December 5, 2018

Zachary Lamb, Todd E. Vachon

Working for a Just Adaptation
February 6, 2020

Zachary Lamb, Todd E. Vachon

Working for a Just Adaptation
February 6, 2020

Marcela Olivera

Working with the Commons
June 13, 2019

Power

is part of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, organized by and with many contributors.
© 2021 Columbia University

Buell Center Logo