Introduction: Bold Endeavors Needed

There are sufficient resources to retrofit cities if we practice integrative infrastructure management ... if we begin to manage the city as if it really were a living ecosystem, which of course it is, or was, and should be.

— Kenny Ausubel, Nature's Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies

On August 1, 2007, four of the eight lanes of Minnesota's I-35W highway bridge were closed to accommodate roadbed repairs. Evening rush-hour traffic was diverted into the four open lanes, creating an asymmetrical stress that compounded an underlying weakness in the bridge's support system. When the center span collapsed, 17 of the 111 vehicles on the bridge were cast into the Mississippi River, 108 feet below, killing 13 people and injuring 145 (fig. 1-1).

The I-35W tragedy quickly became symbolic of the debilitated state of the once-noble Interstate Highway System—and of what many critics see as America's disinvestment in its infrastructure. But it also called attention to a broader problem: that a narrow focus on optimizing the various parts of complex systems may undermine the sustainability of the whole.

According to an evaluation conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the primary cause of the failure was the initial undersizing of the steel plates that joined critical members of the bridge's steel truss system, compromising the bridge's structural redundancy, or ability to withstand extra stress. The NTSB highlighted four additional factors: subsequent additions to the bridge deck had increased the dead weight of the structure; safety inspectors, who tended to focus on corrosion and cracks, had failed to notice the slight bowing—evident from photos—of the steel plates caused by structural stress; 270 tons of repair-related loads, including raw materials, equipment, and personnel, had been positioned above the bridge's weakest points just hours before the collapse; and traffic controllers had unwittingly added further stress to the structure.

What the NTSB's account does not address, however, is an increasingly common problem in the design and management of complex systems: the failure to see and to appreciate the workings of the whole. In the case of the bridge collapse, any knowledge of existing problems likely remained within each of the separate departments responsible for design, repair, inspection, maintenance, and operations. Thus, it might be argued that better information flow among "bureaucratic silos" might have had produced a different outcome, perhaps even preventing the tragedy. As Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins observe in Natural Capitalism,

optimizing components in isolation tends to pessimize the whole system.... You can actually make a system less efficient while making each of its parts more efficient, simply by not properly linking up those components. If they're not designed to work with one another, they'll tend to work against one another.

This book explores how we can optimize, rather than "pes-simize," the facilities and assets of public services—primarily energy, water, and waste management. The book arises from the confluence of several streams of thought. First, if we're to chart a course for global sustainability, we must begin to decouple carbon-intensive and ecologically harmful technologies from critical infrastructure systems, namely the essential systems for contemporary society: water, wastewater, power, solid waste, transportation, and communication. Second, we have the opportunity, through the power of systems thinking, to imagine an alternative future and to take bold steps toward that potential. Lastly, although we possess the scientific and technological know-how to move forward, we are critically lacking a policy and implementation framework to support such efforts.

Churning its way across the New York / New Jersey metropolitan region, Hurricane Sandy vividly demonstrated the extreme vulnerability of urban systems to storm surges, which are becoming stronger and more frequent due to climate change. It especially highlighted the interdependencies among infrastructure sectors. Inundating New York City's vital arteries, floodwaters overwhelmed tunnels and sewers; closed bridges; shut down the electrical substations that control mass transit; curtailed gas supplies; and destroyed streets, buildings, and whole neighborhoods. For days and even weeks, failures triggered by floodwaters deprived millions of electrical, heat, and water services.

One premise of this book is that our current patterns of infrastructure development reflect an industrialized worldview—one that, in the interests of convenience, efficiency, and bureaucratic control, has largely isolated the various elements of our infrastructural systems. A post-industrial viewpoint, by contrast, focuses on understanding how the parts of such systems relate to each other and to the whole. From this perspective, the "hardware" of energy, water, and waste management is essentially viewed along ecological lines. Next-generation infrastructure means moving beyond compartmentalized thinking toward new, integrated approaches to planning, financing, constructing, operating, and maintaining infrastructure. In both their conception and design, the innovative projects highlighted in this book are less "object focused" and more "outcome driven." They encourage us to move forward with greater sensitivity to the larger infrastructural context; to consider a location in terms of its economic, environmental, and social resources; and to share resources across different systems, thereby reducing costs and extending benefits. Through a systems approach to lifeline services, we can begin to move more rapidly toward sustainability.

The Scope of the Problem

In Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now, Felix Rohatyn recounts the story of America's entrepreneurial investments in infrastructure—from the transcontinental railroads and the Panama Canal to rural electrification and the Interstate Highway System—chronicling the unusual foresight and intrepid leadership behind each initiative and highlighting the manifold rewards, particularly economic growth. In the face of the imperative to repair and strengthen existing assets or to reinvent them altogether, what needs to be done, and where are we to begin?

In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers awarded US infrastructure an average grade of D for adequacy and...