The underground logistics project Cargo Sous Terrain has quickly become an accepted part
of a Swiss infrastructural future without a critical reflection on its fundamental logics.
Logistics has become an increasingly integral part of urban life and its processes,
successfully and abstractly navigating the various infrastructures that support it. Cargo en
Flux is an alternative paradigm to Cargo Sous Terrain that speculates on a divergent
infrastructural future for Switzerland and specifically the agglomeration of Luzern.
Resisting the Swiss impulse for tunnelling, Cargo en Flux places its infrastructure at
surface level so that it might have a meaningful interface with the public life that it has
become such a key part of. This divergent paradigm makes the argument that by treating
infrastructure as a designed ecology, the network of city distribution infrastructure can
become an ‘urban generator’, while also promoting a healthier relationship with the
complex network of logistical flows. The Cargo en Flux paradigm finds ‘bundling’ to be
essential for both achieving network efficiencies and developing a rich urban interface
with the infrastructural ecology.