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The vision of sustainable development remains difficult to realize in practice. Processes of strategic planning for public infrastructure represent a major challenge, as, in many cases, they return unsustainable investment solutions. Research offers certain planning methodologies to improve the prospects of sustainable investments. However, very little is understood about how planning processes are undertaken in practice, and what problems in the procedural aspects of planning – termed "planning disruptions" in this paper – lead to deviations from the vision of sustainable development in infrastructure investments. This study scrutinizes the current scope of planning methodologies through the empirical case of a water supply augmentation in Melbourne, Australia. We derive a typology of planning disruptions which offers initial ingredients for a diagnostic tool to explore planning problems in the context of sustainable development. We also suggest making the current scope of planning methodologies more robust, by developing interventions that explicate and prepare for potential disruptions.

AbstractRisk and resilience assessments for critical infrastructure focus on myriad objectives, from natural hazard evaluations to optimizing investments. Although research has started to characterize externalities associated with current or possible future states, incorporation of equity priorities at project inception is increasingly being recognized as critical for planning related activities. However, there is no standard methodology that guides development of equity‐informed quantitative approaches for infrastructure planning activities. To address this gap, we introduce a logic model that can be tailored to capture nuances about specific geographies and community priorities, effectively incorporating them into different mathematical approaches for quantitative risk assessments. Specifically, the logic model uses a graded, iterative approach to clarify specific equity objectives as well as inform the development of equations being used to support analysis. We demonstrate the utility of this framework using case studies spanning aviation fuel, produced water, and microgrid electricity infrastructures. For each case study, the use of the logic model helps clarify the ways that local priorities and infrastructure needs are used to drive the types of data and quantitative methodologies used in the respective analyses. The explicit consideration of methodological limitations (e.g., data mismatches) and stakeholder engagements serves to increase the transparency of the associated findings as well as effectively integrate community nuances (e.g., ownership of assets) into infrastructure assessments. Such integration will become increasingly important to ensure that planning activities (which occur throughout the lifecycle of the infrastructure projects) lead to long‐lasting solutions to meet both energy and sustainable development goals for communities.

This paper examines the practice in France since the 1990s in working towards decisions on major infrastructure. Whilst in some European countries the drive since that time has been to press faster decision-making and deregulation, in France the response to difficulties in progressing large infrastructure schemes was to move to more deliberative approaches, both at the project level and in relation to environmental issues as a whole. The paper considers these approaches alongside the growing literature on deliberative democracy, particularly that on deliberative systems. It is suggested that there is much scope to learn from the accumulated experience in these fields, which could help to provide a more considered, open and pluralist approach to infrastructure decisions, genuinely taking account of all alternatives, as against the tendency to move to a more demand driven and limited democracy approach which has been promoted in England and Wales in the UK and to a certain extent at EU level as well.

The 'interpretive turn' in policy analysis has greatly enhanced understanding of policy process dynamics. However, it has not afforded much attention to explaining the currency of novel concepts where open dispute appears absent in policy discussions. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by employing an innovative discourse analysis approach to examining the emergence of green infrastructure planning policy in the Republic of Ireland. Whereas the analysis accounts for the rhetorical force of language, it reveals that those advocating the green infrastructure concept were not passive actors in receiving a static discourse. Instead, it demonstrates that such agents actively sought to negate opposition and advance their policy objectives by exploiting the discourse's flexibility and consensus-building potential, as well as strategically identifying and employing a range of dissemination opportunities. Drawing lessons from this case, a new framework for understanding the interpretive analysis of seemingly unopposed novel policy concepts is presented.

The objective of this work has been to propose a framework that will aid governments with the development of more coherent and effective infrastructure planning and resilience policies through a system-of-systems approach that is grounded in theory for complex sociotechnical systems. The framework has been developed by using a work domain analysis (WDA). The WDA consists of an abstraction hierarchy analysis and a part-whole decomposition. Together, the abstraction hierarchy and the part-whole description form the abstraction-decomposition space (ADS) for which the system constraints apply. By imposing constraints, the WDA promotes design for adaptation where actors within the system are allowed to adapt their behaviour as they find appropriate without violating the system's constraints. The proposed ADS consists of five levels of abstraction and four levels of decomposition. By applying the ADS, it will aid decision making related to the overall purposes of the critical infrastructure system, the values and priority measures that are used to assess the system's progress towards the functional purposes, as well as formulation of infrastructure needs that are necessary to achieve the functional purposes. The framework is formative in the sense that it reveals how work can be done in the critical infrastructure system. This is important because it is not feasible to prescribe, describe and risk assess all possibilities for action that are available in complex sociotechnical systems, especially when dealing with unforeseen events. Future research should focus on finding science-based yet useful in practice ways for establishing values and priority measures that encompass sustainability issues and resilience standards.

Introduction: Railway Transportation: Regions, Economy and Development -- Post-Industrial Revitalisation of Railway Stations: The Path to Commercialisation -- Portuguese Colonial Railways: Agents and Subjects of Railway Imperialism (1880-1915) -- Impact of Metro-rail projects on Land use and Land value in Indian cities - The case of Chennai -- Commuting and Regional Patterns: A Study of the Oldest Suburban Railway Line of Eastern India -- Analysing Energy Efficiency of Rail and Road Transport in Pakistan with Data Envelopment Analysis -- Rail Freight Transport System in Tripura: An Analysis of Performances and Prospects -- India's Public Transport Systems: Role of Metro Rail Systems -- Intermodality towards Enhancing Rail Freight Transportation Prospects -- Perceived Railway Service Quality Assessment: A Compendium of Literature Studies -- Role of Railways in Rural Development -- New or Renewed Kolkata, the Outcome of the Metro and Railway Network Designs -- Bangladesh-India Rail Connectivity: Foreseen Opportunities for Tourism -- Growth of Slums on Railway Land in Guwahati City, Assam: A Sociological Review -- Railway Modernisation in South Asia: A Case Study of India -- What Role for Railways in the Eurasian Supply Chains? -- The Role of Railway Transport System in Modern Multiscale Spatial Development. Bulgaria in the Orient Express -- Privatisation of Indian Railway Services: Story so far.

Spatial Data Infrastructure is one of the requirements for sustainable development and many countries worldwide are at different stages of implementation. Several researchers have shown that SDI has helped governments to recover funds due to reduction in duplication of efforts and also has increased efficiency in resource management and planning.Tanzania as other developing countries, is at initial stages of establishing the National SDI with a policy proposal and the national steering committee in place. However, lack of knowledge and experience among the stakeholders, complexity and dynamics of its components and their interaction are major challenges that hamper the growth of SDI. Although many studies have explained the complexity and dynamics of SDI, little has been done that involves stakeholders to model complexities for more reliable plans.In this thesis, social concepts and system modelling are used to understand SDI planning process in Tanzania. Input data were obtained based on mixed methods approach, including questionnaire survey and workshops involving local and central government officials and other stakeholders that are producers or users of spatial data. This thesis begins with the application of Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) for understanding spatial data sharing and the results showed that TPB was effective in accounting for intention to share spatial data in Tanzania.Second part was a methodology for SDI planning in Tanzania based on system dynamics technique and the community of practice concept where an optimum model was developed with consensus of SDI stakeholders. The model, gave theplanners an insight about the future effects of today's plans and decisions. The proposed models and concepts are highly recommended for SDI planning and for raising awareness to gain support from policy makers.Third part was on investigating the Agent Based Modelling (ABM) approach for simulating SDI development. The output was evaluated and was within a reasonable range and depicted the main attributes, roles and interactions of agents. The results will help SDI planners and other stakeholders in making reliable SDI strategic plans.Finally a case study for an operational SDI was demonstrated. A land use plan was proposed based on a spatial Multi-Objective Optimization approach where influencing conflicting factors needed to be considered and satisfied. NSGA IIalgorithm was used in optimization. The proposed approach and output can considerably facilitate land use planning. Similar approaches are highly recommended for other countries in Africa of which their cities are under development.