Doing more with every piece of infrastructure

A bridge, a boulevard, a sewer network or a transit station is not rebuilt every ten years. When we take on the work of renewing a piece of infrastructure, we open a window that may not present itself again for another 50 or 75 years. The real question, then, is not only how to replace what is aging, but what more can be accomplished with the same investment.

Cities today face several challenges at once; sustainable transportation, climate resilience and access to housing are among the most pressing. A structure that addresses only one of these issues, or none at all, leaves a significant part of its value on the table. Hence the idea of drawing multiple benefits from a single project. Rather than rebuilding an identical replacement, we design infrastructure to carry several missions in parallel.

Infrastructure then ceases to be a purely functional object and becomes a piece of the city that benefits the community in many ways. A renewal can become an opportunity to add recreational spaces, to bring services closer to residents, to recreate lively places where there was once only a barrier, and even to accommodate housing. Its contribution to climate resilience can also increase significantly when varied projects build it into their scope, as when a retention basin doubles as a floodable park that absorbs heavy rainfall, or when a street reconstruction incorporates green features that slow the flow of stormwater toward the sewers, cool urban heat islands and support biodiversity.

Large infrastructure thus offers the potential to become a catalyst for urban health. And generating this many benefits on a constant budget remains possible, on one condition: bringing varied expertise to the table from the very start. This is the principle of integrated design, which means thinking through solutions from the outset rather than adding them after the fact. The question then becomes: what kind of city do we want to build through our major infrastructure projects?

This reflection is drawn from the first edition of our newsletter, “Weaving tomorrow’s city” To continue the conversation and receive future editions, sign up here: https://mailchi.mp/lemay/subscription