Planning Infrastructure: Considerations for Regional Development

Introduction

Previous research has shown how the dramatic growth in the size, health and prosperity of cities over the last five thousand years has depended on their ability to invent and install appropriate urban infrastructure (Childe, 1951, 1957, Mumford, 1945). Starting with access to water, roads and waste disposal, through provisions for health and education, to the more recent additions of power and electronic communications, the extraordinary growth of cities to their current role of accommodating more than half the world’s six billion people on a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface has been made possible by successive waves of new urban infrastructure (UN, 1995, 2001).

When we turn to the wider regional scale, the roles and relations of infrastructures are more complex. Not only must they support life throughout their own much wider regional extents, but they must also provide central cities with life-giving resources and opportunities for their future urban expansion. Nowhere is this reciprocal relation between cities and regions better expressed than in the infrastructure networks which link them: regional supplies flow to satisfy urban demands, while cities generate the energy and products to sustain the regional systems. Regional supplies of water, power, labor and raw materials flow into the city, while urban flows of processed information, organization, control and consumer goods flow outwards, using and supporting regional infrastructures.