The De-structuring of Infrastructure Landscapes

In very few cases, landscape has been an object of concern for the infrastructure designer, especially for transport infrastructure. Paradoxically, transport infrastructure is a large presence in the territories of all countries, especially the most developed ones, and an essential element of unstructured and disintegrated landscapes. Transport infrastructure connects extremes but, at the same time, creates barriers in its path that separate both natural ecosystems and human activities. In this way, it fragments the territory, establishing lines that are alien to the logic of the natural, rural or even urban landscape of the territories it traverses. The logic of minimizing economic cost or maximizing the transport function replaces and cancels the logic of previous landscapes. This paper is focused in the case of Spain and analyses the aspects of the current transport infrastructure design processes that explain this situation. Environmental and landscape assessment becomes an obstacle to overcome and environmental, and landscape quality is not targeted as a global objective. All these aspects can be synthesized as a one-dimensional functional vision of infrastructure that ignores its territorial transversality and the ecosystem functions that the territory produces and shows in the way of a landscape. This reductionist vision, where the territory is only a physical base to support the resistant elements of infrastructure, has reduced it to a functional engineering design for traffic. Finally, the article contributes to reflection on the criteria or methodological changes necessaries in the project process to integrate transversal values and produce another type of landscape of the infrastructure in a territory.