Next generation infrastructure: Principles for Post-industrial Public Works - Softcover

Hilary Brown

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610911814 ISBN 13: 9781610911818

Publisher: Island Press, 2014

Synopsis

The 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis-St. Paul quickly became symbolic of the debilitated interstate highway system, and of what many critics see as America's disinvestment in its infrastructure. The extreme vulnerability of single-purpose, ageing infrastructure was highlighted once again when Hurricane Sandy churned its way across the northeast United States. Inundating New York City's vital arteries, floodwaters overwhelmed tunnels and sewers; closed bridges; shut down mass transit; curtailed gas supplies; and destroyed streets, buildings, and whole neighbourhoods. Next Generation Infrastructure takes a critical but ultimately hopeful look at how our infrastructure networks can be made more efficient, less environmentally damaging, and more resilient. Brown argues that, if we're to chart a course for global sustainability, we must begin to design, regulate, and finance infrastructure that decouples 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. The book highlights hopeful examples from around the world, ranging from the Mount Poso cogeneration plant in California to urban rainwater harvesting in Seoul, South Korea, to the multi-purpose Marina Barrage project in Singapore. Brown encourages us to envision infrastructure within a larger economic, environmental, and social context, and to share resources across systems, reducing costs and extending benefits. This is a must read for professionals and students interested in a more resilient urban future including urban designers, architects, urban planners, urban policymakers, landscape architects, and engineers.

About this title

About the Author

Hillary Brown, FAIA, is Founding Principal of the firm New Civic Works and Professor at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Previously, Brown served as Assistant Commissioner of the City of New York, where she was the founding director of New York's Office of Sustainable Design. Brown led publication of the nationally recognised City of New York High Performance Building Guidelines and co-authored High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines. She has served on both the national and New York Chapter Board of Directors for the U.S. Green Building Council and is a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute and the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Next Generation Infrastructure

Principles for Post-Industrial Public Works

By Hillary Brown

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Hillary Brown
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61091-181-8

Contents

Foreword by David W. Orr, 
Acknowledgments, 
Chapter 1. Introduction: Bold Endeavors Needed, 
Chapter 2. Toward Infrastructural Ecologies: Interconnected, Multipurpose, and Synergistic Systems, 
Chapter 3. Greening Heat and Power: An Integrated Approach to Decarbonizing Energy, 
Chapter 4. Advancing Soft-Path Water Infrastructure: Combined Constructed and Natural Systems, 
Chapter 5. Destigmatizing Infrastructure: Design of Community-Friendly Facilities, 
Chapter 6. Creating Resilient Coastlines and Waterways: Hard and Soft Constructions, 
Chapter 7. Combating Water Stress and Scarcity: Augmented Sources and Improved Storage, 
Chapter 8. Ways Forward: Think Systematically, Experiment Locally, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

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 safety—a grade that was raised to D+ in 2013, thanks to a pickup in incremental investments. The same 2013 report contended that repairing US infrastructure assets to achieve a "good" condition (essentially a grade of B) will require an estimated cumulative investment of $3.6 trillion by 2020—a figure that does not even begin to address growth or expansion. The following are some highlights from a few recent assessments:

• The United States loses 1.7 trillion gallons of drinking water annually through system leakage and 240,000 water main breaks per year. The cost to upgrade distribution, treatment, and storage would be $334.8 billion over 20 years.

• Each year, more than 75,000 overflows from combined storm and sewage drains discharge 900 billion gallons of untreated sewage into US waterways. The estimated cost of updating and expanding wastewater and stormwater systems is $298 billion over 20 years.

• The number of significant power outages has risen from 76 in 2007 to 307 in 2011. Between 2005 and 2009 the United States experienced 264 large-scale blackouts. Estimates for electrical-system upgrades call for $1.5 to 2.0 trillion in expenditures over 20 years.

• Ensuring the safety and efficiency of existing mass-transit systems will require between $18.2 and $29.6 billion in annual improvements in 2012 dollars.

• As of 2012, 11 percent of bridges were classified as structurally deficient. To repair or replace substandard structures by 2028 would cost an estimated $76 billion.

Funded at about 3.5 percent of total non-defense spending, and at roughly the same level since 1976, US infrastructure funding lags behind that of both developed and developing nations. Although the United States is roughly two and a half times the area of the European Union, the US will spend annually, on average, $150 billion—less than 1 percent of our GDP, compared to the European Union's $300 billion during the decade 2010 to 2020. Infrastructure investment in the developing world also outpaces ours: relative to their GDPs, India and China spend 8 and 9 percent, respectively, on public works.

In April 2013, President Obama was pushing for investment in US infrastructure—one of his key priorities—for perhaps the fifth time. Among his proposed initiatives were a $50 billion eco-nomic stimulus based primarily on transportation investments, and $10 billion in public funding that would leverage private investment through a newly created, independent National Infrastructure Bank —pleas that have repeatedly fallen on the deaf ears of a Congress preoccupied with austerity. Yet Obama's proposals parallel those of others around the world.

In the United States, those who fear that forestalling infrastructure investment will cost the US its competitive edge, both economically and politically, are sounding the clarion call for action. The degraded state of US lifeline systems has failed to capture public attention. Infrastructure repairs and upkeep are notoriously unsexy expenditures, and politicians are more invested in cutting ribbons at new projects than in funding basic maintenance, a trend that has further undercut the condition of our existing systems. Thus, despite the intermittent alarms sounded after catastrophic failures, there is little sense of urgency—or recognition that infrastructure systems are vital lifelines to economic growth, public health and safety, and other desirable social goals. Even more unusual is any understanding of how those lifelines are linked, directly or indirectly, to the integrity of natural systems.

Nature and Infrastructure

Human life depends on ecological services provided by nature—from water purification to waste digestion to the regulation of natural hazards. These services originate in ecosystems: self-organized aggregations of living and nonliving elements that exist in a state of symbiosis, sharing energy, information, and matter for mutual benefit.

Human-engineered energy, water, and waste infrastructure systems are, like natural ecosystems, tightly coupled. Electrical power generation, for instance, relies on water cooling, while water distribution and wastewater treatment require electricity; electrical energy still relies on coal transported by rail. Transportation services, water treatment, and electricity generation all rely on information technology. Nonetheless, since the advent of the industrial era, the convention has been to disaggregate the elements of infrastructural systems into different sectors, both physically and jurisdictionally, and to dissociate them from the natural ecosystem services on which they ultimately depend.

The industrial paradigm was largely responsible for estranging public works from the ecosystem services upon which they depend. Few infrastructural transactions remain visible; most services are distributed below grade or are wired high—and almost unseen—above. Power, water, and waste facilities are typically removed from populous areas. The web that connects public services, daily life, and the environment is rarely brought to mind: we don't think "polluting coal combustion" as we flick on a light switch, and a refuse chute or garbage bin doesn't summon images of vast landfills.

There are direct but not readily visible correspondences between ecosystem services and human-made systems. Water filtration and treatment are analogous to the natural ground infiltration that supplies aquifers and reservoirs, and also to the purification accomplished by wetlands. Incinerating waste or relegating it to a landfill are imperfect counterparts to natural microbial decomposition. And when we "generate" energy, we are essentially releasing the solar power stored in biomass.

As the unparalleled costs associated with the hurricanes of the past decade demonstrate, we suppress or deny the interdependence of constructed systems, as well as their combined reliance on natural systems, at our peril. An evolving post-industrial viewpoint—one that reflects the holistic perspective associated with sustainability—emphasizes interconnectedness rather than separation. From this perspective, the constructed world is nested within the natural one and depends on its health and productivity. Natural ecosystems and human-made infrastructures are not simply a universe of discrete objects but rather are vital working parts embedded in networks that share energy, matter, and information.

When we move from an industrial to a post-industrial worldview, the question is no longer "How can we direct nature?" but "How can we capitalize on the connectedness of our critical systems to nature and to each other?" What if, for example, the services provided by power plants, sewage treatment plants, and other elements of infrastructure were based on an ecological model of interdependency, instead of an industrial model of segregation?

Infrastructural Ecology

Nature's operating patterns depend on integration rather than segregation of functions. We know, for example, that planting legumes near other crops may eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers; that spacing tree rows so that certain companion crops can be grown under and between them maximizes yield; and that planting nut-producing trees among wheat, soy, or other crop rows helps to protect against wind and to stabilize topsoil. These examples, drawn from the discipline of permaculture, have an analogy in the realm of infrastructure: as we begin to recognize the beneficial links among infrastructural systems, we can capitalize on the efficiencies that emerge when shared components perform more than one function, or when energy, water, or waste is exchanged among them. Collectively, such synergies may lower carbon emissions, save resources, reduce or eliminate waste, and provide auxiliary civic benefits.

As David Holmgren, one of the founders of the practice of permaculture, has observed, "Integration of previously segregated systems appears to be a fundamental principle driving post-industrial design." Such integration is at the root of infrastructural ecology. Like the discipline of permaculture, infrastructural ecology takes its cue from the way that nature, when left undisturbed, already works: by optimizing the flows of resources and information in ways that are specific to the environmental context. For example, biotic systems—relying solely on energy gathered from the sun—"cascade," or pass along energy, water, and nutrients in a closed-loop arrangement that leaves no residual waste.

The term industrial symbiosis was coined in the late 1980s to describe innovative ways to locate energy infrastructure, industry, and other commercial entities together for mutual benefit. The classic example of the "eco-industrial park," established in Kalundborg, Denmark, in the 1960s and 1970s, resulted from a collaboration among public and private entities driven by a common interest: to optimize energy and resource use (fig. 1-2). Kalundborg's hub is a coal-fired power plant whose waste heat warms greenhouses, a fish farm, and 3,500 homes. The power plant shares surplus steam with an oil refinery and a pharmaceutical company, eliminating heat pollution from the receiving waters. Fly ash scrubbed from the power plant's waste stack replaces two-thirds of the virgin gypsum that would otherwise be needed to manufacture sheetrock in the factory next door. Waste nutrients from the pharmaceutical plant feed a local pig farm, and waste from the fish farm is used locally as crop fertilizer. This web of waste reduction and reuse (22 separate exchanges as of 2011) generates new revenues for the partners, whose $60 million investment in the exchange infrastructure has produced $15 million in annual savings. Annually, moreover, CO2 emissions are reduced by 64,460 tons, and 3.9 million cubic meters (137.7 million cubic feet) of water were saved.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Next Generation Infrastructure by Hillary Brown. Copyright © 2014 Hillary Brown. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Island Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1610911814
• ISBN 13: 9781610911818
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224