Infrastructure

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Concrete is the backbone of the modern built world. Twice as much of it is used in construction than all other building materials combined. It holds up bridges, piers, pipelines, pavements, and buildings, yet each pour lasts only fifty to one hundred years. This is the hidden arithmetic of infrastructure, the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area. Roads, railways, bridges, airports, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, and telecommunications all fall under one term, defined as the physical components of interrelated systems that enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions. So why does the United States grade its own infrastructure a D-plus? Why does a single financing gap in one region reach one hundred eighty billion dollars a year? And how did a substance that built industrial society become one of the planet's largest sources of greenhouse gas? The answers reach from a desert city in the United Arab Emirates to rain gardens that soak up thirty percent more water than the lawns beside them.

• 2. Hard And Soft

  ›

  Utilities, waste management, transport facilities, and telecom networks make up what planners call hard infrastructure. This is the physical plant necessary for a modern industrial society to function. Engineers tend to reserve the word infrastructure for exactly this category, fixed assets that take the form of a large network. One definition from 1998 framed infrastructure as a network meant to be maintained indefinitely at a specified standard, kept alive by the continual replacement of its components. Soft infrastructure carries a different weight. It is the set of institutions that maintain the economic, health, social, environmental, and cultural standards of a place. Educational programs, official statistics, parks, law enforcement agencies, and emergency services all qualify. A school building is hard infrastructure; the program taught inside it is soft. Civil defense planners and developmental economists usually speak of both at once, including public services like schools and hospitals alongside police and fire fighting. That combined view fed a strategy called infrastructure-based development, which pairs long-term government investment with public private partnerships, and it has proven popular among economists in Asia, mainland Europe, and Latin America.

• 3. The Report Card

  ›

  The American Society of Civil Engineers publishes an Infrastructure Report Card every two to four years, grading sixteen categories. The list runs from aviation and bridges to dams, drinking water, levees, ports, schools, and wastewater. The United States has received a rating of D-plus, an outcome the source ties to governmental neglect and inadequate funding. A 1987 US National Research Council panel had tried to widen the lens, adopting the term public works infrastructure. It covered specific functional modes like highways, mass transit, airports, water supply, wastewater management, and hazardous waste management. It also covered the operating procedures, management practices, and development policies that interact with societal demand to move people and goods and provide water, energy, and information. Government spending has not kept pace. From the 1930s to 2019, the United States slid from spending 4.2 percent of GDP on infrastructure down to 2.5 percent. The 2017 report card projected that infrastructure would be underinvested by two trillion dollars between 2016 and 2025. Against global GDP percentages, the United States is tied for second-to-last place, averaging 2.4 percent.

• 4. The Investment Gap

  ›

  Researchers at the Overseas Development Institute call the lack of infrastructure one of the most significant limitations on economic growth in many developing countries. The returns on closing that gap are striking. Telecommunications investments average thirty to forty percent returns, electricity generation over forty percent, and roads as high as eighty percent. Africa shows what investment can do. It has been argued that infrastructure contributed to more than half of the continent's improved growth performance between 1990 and 2005. The financing shortfalls remain severe. In Asia-Pacific, around forty-eight billion US dollars is invested against a need of two hundred twenty-eight billion, leaving a gap near one hundred eighty billion dollars every year. In Latin America, satisfying demand would take three percent of GDP, about seventy-one billion dollars, yet in 2005 only around two percent was invested, a gap of roughly twenty-four billion. In Africa, meeting the seven percent annual growth needed for the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 would have demanded infrastructure spending near fifteen percent of GDP, around ninety-three billion dollars a year. In fragile states, over thirty-seven percent of GDP would be required. China has emerged as an important investor, and external infrastructure investment in Africa rose from seven billion dollars in 2002 to twenty-seven billion in 2009.

• 5. Who Pays

  ›

  Most roads, major airports, ports, water distribution systems, and sewage networks are publicly owned, while most energy and telecommunications networks belong to private companies. The way each gets paid follows that split. Public infrastructure may be funded from taxes, tolls, or metered user fees, while private infrastructure generally relies on metered user fees alone. Major investment projects usually raise money through the issuance of long-term bonds. The financing toolkit varies by place. In California, local governments set up infrastructure financing districts that pay for facilities within a defined area using property tax increases. In Sub-Saharan Africa, governments spend around 9.4 billion US dollars out of a total of 24.9 billion. They cover nearly all irrigation spending and a majority of transport and energy investment. The private sector dominates information and communication technology and most of water supply and sanitation. State and local governments carry an outsized load in the United States, accounting for roughly seventy-five percent of public infrastructure spending. That dependence became a vulnerability during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which deepened decades of underfunding as government revenues collapsed.

• 6. The Concrete Problem

  ›

  Asphalt, concrete, steel, masonry, wood, polymers, and composites are the most prevalent materials in infrastructure today. Concrete dominates, and its environmental cost is large. Its production contributes up to eight percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and consumes a tenth of the world's industrial water. Even hauling raw materials to production sites adds airborne pollution, and the sites strip away land that could have been fertile soil or vital habitat. A material counts as sustainable only if the needed amount can be produced without depleting non-renewable resources. It should carry low environmental impact and be resilient, renewable, reusable, and recyclable. The pressure to find such materials grows alongside climate change and diminishing natural resources. The 2007-08 financial crisis offered a warning. The slowdown reduced global greenhouse gas emissions in 2009, but emissions reached a record high in 2010, partly because economic stimulus measures ignored environmental consequences. Whether that pattern repeats could decide if the world meets the emissions goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement and limits global warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.

• 7. The Green Turn

  ›

  More than two hundred economists and economic officials, writing in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, reported that green economic-recovery initiatives performed at least as well as less green ones. An econometric study in the Economic Modelling journal sharpened the point. Spending on renewable energy created five more jobs per million dollars invested than spending on fossil fuels. Green infrastructure puts plant and soil systems to work restoring natural processes. It manages water, reduces the effects of disasters like flooding, and creates healthier urban environments through a decentralized network of stormwater practices. Green roofs sit at the center of that network. A green roof is a rooftop partly or completely covered with vegetation planted over a membrane, with a root barrier and drainage and irrigation layers beneath. Extensive roofs use a growing depth of two to six inches, while intensive roofs exceed six inches. Rain gardens push the idea into the ground. Planted in a small depression or natural slope, they remove up to ninety percent of nutrients and chemicals and up to eighty percent of sediments from runoff, and they soak up thirty percent more water than conventional gardens. Bioswales handle paved areas like parking lots, trapping silt and pollutants while allowing overflow into the sewer system.

• 8. Building Utopia

  ›

  Masdar City is a proposed zero emission smart city to be built in the United Arab Emirates, a place some have called utopia-like. It gathers every strand of sustainable infrastructure into one planned settlement. Its power will draw on renewable methods including solar energy. Set in a desert region, Masdar City must wring water from innovative stages of the water cycle, drawing on groundwater, greywater, seawater, blackwater, and other sources for both drinking and landscaping. Waste will follow the same logic. The city is meant to be waste-free at the start, with recycling encouraged and a system to convert waste into fertilizer, cutting the space needed for accumulation. No cars will be allowed inside its boundaries. A comprehensive bike lane network will take their place, alongside other alternative options prioritized from the earliest stages of development. Masdar City rests on two ideas that define a smart city: urban resilience, a city's capacity to recover quickly from infrastructure defects, and infrastructure reliability, the demand that systems run efficiently while maximizing output. When the two meet, a city can match the output and costs of less sustainable communities while protecting the environment it sits in.