Small infrastructures: Breaking down scales and categories

Just as soft infrastructures need to be considered as necessary adjuncts to hard infrastructures, and equally vital to the success of both cities and organizations, small infrastructures are different in nature and complementary to larger ones. Of course, dividing and classifying by size is only one way of sorting things, and small infrastructures can be of both the hard and soft variety. I will discuss aspects of both in terms of their impact and usefulness in enabling the urban environment to function.

Infrastructures can also be categorized by the way they perform. When thinking about stormwater, for example, there are “trunk” systems such as main drains, which are tree-like hierarchical systems of pipes that increase in diameter as more and more branches join into the flow. Such a system has very definite peak capacity limits that can only be raised by increasing the diameter