Infrastructure only tends to be noticed when it is absent, declining, or decrepit, or when enormous cost overruns, time delays, or citizen protests make the headlines. If infrastructure is indeed a fundamental driver of economic growth and social development, why is it so difficult to get right? In addressing this perennial question, this volume makes the case for a governance perspective on infrastructure.
Infrastructure only tends to be noticed when it is absent, declining, or decrepit, or when enormous cost overruns, time delays, or citizen protests make the headlines. If infrastructure is indeed a fundamental driver of economic growth and social development, why is it so difficult to get right? In addressing this perennial question, this volume makes the case for a governance perspective on infrastructure
Traditional infrastructure regulation–the law of regulated industries–rests atop three pillars: rate regulation, entry restriction, and universal service. This mode of regulation has typically been applied to providers of network-type resources: resources that are optimally supplied as integrated systems. The monetary system is such a resource; and money creation is the distinctive function of banks. Bank regulation can therefore be understood as a subfield of infrastructure regulation. With few exceptions, modern academic treatments of banking have emphasizes banks' intermediation function and downplayed or ignored their monetary function. Concomitantly, in recent decades U.S. bank regulation has strayed from its infrastructural roots. This regulatory drift has been unwise.
In: McGee, Robert W. 2021. What Infrastructure "Crisis"?, Fayetteville State University, Broadwell College of Business and Economics, Working Paper. July 24, 2021. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.19249.10082
Nuevo Leon plans more than US$1 billion for infrastructure upgrading, with ample opportunities for foreign investment. Monterrey and Nuevo Leon already offer excellent infrastructure, with good highway and rail connections to the U.S. market and impressive urban development. Now investments of up to US$2 billion will provide a new Metro (subway) line, highway upgrades, improved health facilities and a major expansion of the water supply, with significant opportunities for Mexican and international companies. Adapted from the source document.
This volume offers an interdisciplinary and global perspective on aspects of security and defence, with a special focus on the protection of social infrastructures in the face of various forms of violence. It examines some multi-faceted solutions and stresses the need to approach the problem from many disciplines. The optimistic conclusion from this work is that there are concrete and specific ways to address conflict and violence, and the importance of being alert in order to prevent their eventual negative consequences.This work integrates and synthesises theory, research, and public policy analysis in an effort to solve the complex questions and problems presented by this topic, and focuses on a range of topics, including militia and police, law, diplomacy, aggression and conflict studies, and psychology. This encourages a broader perspective and thought-process global collaboration and cooperation, and an integrated synthesis of knowledge. It broadens the conceptualisation of the phenomena under discussion and links them with tangible examples.This book represents an important resource for researchers and students of security and defence, violence, and peace, as well as anyone with an interest in studying methods of protecting critical infrastructures and more specifically of probable the most important social infrastructure, the people, reducing the threats of terrorism from a psychological approach
Infrastructural time / Hannah Appel -- The future in ruins : thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure / Akhil Gupta -- Infrastructures in and out of time : the promise of roads in contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey -- The current never stops : intimacies of energy infrastructure in Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel -- Infrastructure, apartheid technopolitics, and temporalities of "transition" / Antina von Schnitzler -- A public matter : water, hydraulics, biopolitics / Nikhil Anand -- Promising forms : the political aesthetics of infrastructure / Brian Larkin -- Sustainable knowledge infrastructures / Geoffrey C. Bowker -- Infrastructure, potential energy, revolution / Dominic Boyer
Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Physical infrastructure is critical to the nation's economy and affects the daily life of virtually all Americans--from facilitating the movement of goods and people within and beyond U.S. borders to providing clean drinking water. However, this infrastructure--including aviation, highway, transit, rail, water, and dam infrastructure--is under strain. Estimates to repair, replace, or upgrade aging infrastructure as well as expand capacity to meet increased demand top hundreds of billions of dollars. Calls for increased investment in infrastructure come at a time when traditional funding for infrastructure projects is increasingly strained, and the federal government's fiscal outlook is worse than many may understand. This testimony discusses (1) challenges associated with the nation's surface transportation, aviation, water, and dam infrastructure, and the principles GAO has identified to help guide efforts to address these challenges and (2) existing and proposed options to fund investments in the nation's infrastructure. This statement is primarily based on a body of work GAO has completed for the Congress over the last several years. To supplement this existing work, GAO also interviewed Department of Transportation officials to obtain up-to-date information on the status of the Highway Trust Fund and various funding and financing options and reviewed published literature to obtain information on dam infrastructure issues."
In this paper, we conceptualise the human body as infrastructure, asking what kind of infrastructure it currently is and what kind of infrastructure it could be. We therefore tease out the historically and geographically specific ways in which human bodies have been (re)produced as infrastructure, emphasising the violence of abstraction in capitalist modernity that transforms the productive body into a technology of calorific inputs and outputs. Nevertheless, through demystifying abstract labour we point to the relations of (re)production (needed for the body's ongoing repair) and the metabolic processes (responsible for both decay and repair) that are subsumed within a broader capitalist system of accumulation. In so doing, we turn to the immanent contradictions and struggles that resist the body's production as a one-sided technology of circulation and through which it is, and can become, an infrastructure for life and sociality. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed
Chapter 01-Assembling Calculative InfrastructuresIntroduction1; Economizing Failure; Creating New Entities; Calculating Failure; Making Failure Operational; Rethinking Failure; Conclusion; References; Chapter 02-A Calculative Infrastructure in the Making: The Emergence of a Multi-Layered Complex for Governing Healthcare; Introduction; Governing by Quantification, Calculation and Infrastructures; When is an Infrastructure? Moments of Convergence and Processes of Layering; Making a Calculative Infrastructure for Governing Quality