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Healthy infrastructure
Urban infrastructure has developed as grand sprawling investments in pipes, roads, power lines, telephone services, and so on. Various factors have conspired to favour expansive development of cities in the past; now we have infrastructure systems that appear to "lock in" these patterns, and their maintainability may be of concern. Paying the bills for maintenance and expansion of these systems is closely linked to the opportunities for urban economic development.
An infrastructure system - say a wastewater management system - consists of the physical infrastructure itself, the people responsible for managing it (including wastewater professionals, as well as residents and business owners), and the local environment that must, for example, tolerate spills of wastewater at points of controlled or uncontrolled overflow. This whole system is a complex, adaptive, evolving system - an ecosystem, according to the language of NZ2100 and KiwiGrow. And so, we have ways of measuring its health and sustainability. How is the system developing as a social, economic, environmental, and cultural system. Is the system responsive to needs and issues. Is it adapting to new realities, such as sharpened environmental values, and to new technologies. Or is it stalled in the thinking of the past, relying on continuing expansion of pipe networks. What is being done to minimise energy costs, and CO2 emissions. What evidence is there that the planning of the wastewater system is closely coupled with meeting demands for water supply. What is being done to educate developers and people within the community about alternative ways of managing wastewater that impose very little or no additional pressure on the city's wastewater infrastructure. If significant new investments are planned, what will be their social and economic impacts. And how will these developments add to or detract from the city's emerging image of itself. How knowledgeable are the people who manage the system. Are they well informed of the state of the infrastructure and the trends in asset condition and the associated renewal requirements. Are the obvious things being done to improve system performance, how are priorities set, are they politically driven or genuinely determined by the needs of sustainable development.
Inevitably, immediate investments in urban infrastructure will be closely aligned to the physical infrastructure that exists already. But all investment in infrastructure needs to be directed, and have in mind the longer term needs - and a concept - of a sustainable city that will grow and develop for hundreds of years into the future. Infrastructure for healthy cities
Infrastructure develops to serve a city's current and future needs. This is easy to say, and it should be true, but often infrastructure develops with a certain air of inevitability, as if all the long range thinking had been done and all that remained was the detail. But the reality tends to be quite different, the long range thinking may not have been done, and, if so, it is likely to have been driven by silo thinking in the various planning departments. The ideal, of course, is coupled infrastructure and community development planning, which is a long way short of what happens in many cities today, given the size of the investments and contracts that are involved. New Zealand is fortunate in the levels of development corruption compared with cities internationally. These cities face a huge problem in building a base of ethical decision-making. But even in New Zealand, lack of clarity on wider aims and visions can be a major impediment to integrated, dovetailed thinking about infrastructure development.
Today, it is becoming clear that the cities that will survive and prosper into the future will be those that embrace the new thinking of sustainability that has become more widespread since 2000, and which has especially been reinforced by events such as the financial crisis and the election of an American president able to articulate concerns that had been ignored for decades. Energy solutions, water solutions, ecosystem health, climate change, and finding solutions to the needs of multicultural communities, are all part of the mix in defining the future course of development of a city. In this new reality, simply ploughing ahead with a new highway system as a solution to current congestion is simply untenable. Transport planning, especially, needs to be proactive, and aligned to the needs of creating a desired new city, which will have a strong economic foundation. The new economy calls into question old ideas about central business districts. These were once symbols of a city's economic strength and vitality. Now we know that we should not plan our cities around the symbols of that sector, which will change enormously in the future. We need to be clear what our central business districts are for, and not presume that clusters of branded skyscrapers are the inevitable consequence of the search for the healthy city of the future. Cities are increasingly seeking to re-establish their contact with nature, through waterfront development, and through green corridors that provide access to calm areas that are refuges from the busy traffic, or at least pleasant interludes in a walk across town. City planners are trying to re-establish pedestrian life in corridors previously dominated by motor vehicles, to help ensure that cities are not just places of business and work, but also of leisure, and healthy outdoor experiences.
In this context, it is important that infrastructure planners and city planners come together under agreed - not just tolerated - planning principles and values, and the city should not be subservient to the needs of infrastructure. Infrastructure and urban development planning under the umbrella of NZ2100 and KiwiGrow enhances this possibility, and cities can develop that are truly nurturing, supportive, stable, contributing, responsive, directed and adaptive. |
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