Infrastructure

The infrastructure of a country or region refers to the vast network that makes possible the movement of goods, people, and information over time and space. The term generally includes roads, streets, and highways; seaports and airports; hydroelectric dams and power-generating plants; telephone and communications lines; natural gas pipelines; and aqueducts, sewers, and other water control facilities. The development of modern cities would not have been possible without well-developed infrastructures that sutured distant places together into a coherent whole and rolled out the landscapes on which production and circulation could occur. Although certain infrastructural forms existed even before capitalism (e.g., Roman roads), the modern infrastructure arose during the Industrial Revolution when roads, canals, sewers, and other such networks made possible the circulation of people, capital, goods, and information on a rapid, sustained, and regular basis. Because they exert a huge influence over economic and social activity and land uses, infrastructures involve considerable efforts on the part of urban and regional planners.

Infrastructures are enormously expensive and almost always built by the state rather than by private firms in the market. The reasons for this are many and varied. Few private entities can mobilize the resources necessary to construct such phenomena, which involve large sunk costs and economies of scale. The U.S. national highway system, for example, was the largest single project ever undertaken by the federal government; started in the 1950s, it was not completed until the 1970s, with profound impacts on land uses and economic activity among and within cities.

Moreover, infrastructural goods face the rules of public economics rather than private economics, with very different conceptions of property rights, ownership, and the right of exclusion. In public goods, where there is no excludability and often there are universal service obligations, there always is a “free rider” problem whereby users do not directly pay for the costs of building or maintaining the infrastructure they use. More broadly, infrastructures socialize the costs of transportation for firms while keeping the benefits private. Under the global force of neoliberalism, however, many infrastructure components around the world (e.g., electrical generating systems) are being privatized and sold to private investors.

Infrastructure is a key part of David Harvey's spatial fix, that is, the landscapes constructed by capitalists to serve their interests at different historical junctures. The surplus value required to create these projects (the secondary circuit of capital) is huge, their costs must be amortized over long periods, and they change slowly.

Although infrastructures often are studied in technocratic apolitical terms, they are in fact highly political in nature. Who pays (and who does not), who benefits (and who does not), and where roads go (and where they do not) all create changing surfaces of inequality as the positive and negative externalities of the infrastructure are unevenly distributed over space and among different social groups.