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 break ground to rebuild a piece of infrastructure, we also 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: climate resilience, access to housing and sustainable transportation are among the most pressing. A structure that answers only one of these issues, or none of them, leaves a significant share of its value on the table. Hence the idea of drawing several benefits from a single construction project. Rather than rebuilding an identical copy, we design infrastructure so that it carries several missions in parallel. Infrastructure then stops being a purely functional object and becomes a piece of the city that benefits the community in many ways. A repair can become the opportunity to add housing, to bring services closer to residents, and to recreate lively places where there was once only a barrier. Climate resilience can also increase significantly when varied projects build it into their program, such as when a retention basin doubles as a floodable park that absorbs heavy rainfall, or when a rebuilt street welcomes green features that slow the flow of rainwater toward the sewers, cool urban heat islands and support biodiversity.

Major infrastructure thus becomes a catalyst for urban health. And generating this many benefits within a fixed budget remains possible, on one condition: bringing varied expertise to the table from the very start. This is the principle of integrated design, which consists of 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