Next Generation Infrastructure: Principles for Post-Industrial Public Works

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Next Generation Infrastructure

Next Generation Infrastructure

Principles for Post-Industrial Public Works

By Hillary Brown

Copyright © 2014 Hillary Brown

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street NW, Suite 650, Washington, DC 20036

Island Press is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

Island Press would like to thank Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, for generous support of the design and printing of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Hillary.

Next generation infrastructure / Hillary Brown.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59726-805-9 (hardback)—ISBN 1-59726-805-4 (cloth)—ISBN 978-1-61091-181-8 (paper) 1. Infrastructure

(Economics)—Environmental aspects—United States. 2.

Infrastructure (Economics)—Government policy—United

States. I. Title.

HC110.C3B76 2014

363.60973--dc23

2013039889

Keywords: biomass, bioremediation, carbon reduction, climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation, coastal resilience, distributed energy systems, geothermal energy, green streets, hydrogen power, infrastructural ecology, renewable energy, siting public utilities, smart grid, solar power, storm-water management, urban resilience, waste combustion, water scarcity, waste-to-energy facilities, water treatment and storage

For Jeanne and George

Contents

Foreword by David W. Orr

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Introduction: Bold Endeavors Needed

Chapter 2. Toward Infrastructural Ecologies: Interconnected, Multipurpose, and Synergistic Systems

Chapter 3. Greening Heat and Power: An Integrated Approach to Decarbonizing Energy

Chapter 4. Advancing Soft-Path Water Infrastructure: Combined Constructed and Natural Systems

Chapter 5. Destigmatizing Infrastructure: Design of Community-Friendly Facilities

Chapter 6. Creating Resilient Coastlines and Waterways: Hard and Soft Constructions

Chapter 7. Combating Water Stress and Scarcity: Augmented Sources and Improved Storage

Chapter 8. Ways Forward: Think Systematically, Experiment Locally

Notes

Index

Foreword

David W. Orr

An hour north of New York City, the Omega Institute operates a solar-powered wastewater system that looks and works like a tropical greenhouse. It was designed by John Todd and BNIM Architects to process 50,000 gallons of wastewater each day. The system combines indoor and outdoor wetlands to purify sewage without chlorine, aluminum salts, or other chemicals, and without fossil fuels. Plants, animals, and some of the most ancient organisms on Earth remove nitrogen and phosphorus from the waste stream and detoxify contaminants. It is a model of smart ecological design, good engineering, full-cost economics, and foresight. But the Omega Institute facility is only one small example of next-generation design applied to energy, water, transport, and waste-management systems. There are many others around the world that are revolutionizing infrastructure, reducing costs, and improving resilience, as reported here by Hillary Brown.

Our existing infrastructure of wastewater plants, bridges, the electrical grid, pipelines, roads, and dams is rapidly deteriorating. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that its repair or replacement will cost $3.6 trillion. For financial reasons alone it is a good time to rethink the way we design, build, and invest in public infrastructure. But the design assumptions underlying our existing infrastructure are crumbling along with the concrete, steel, wires, and pipes. The designers of the industrial infrastructure presumed an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy, the efficacy of simple and single-purpose solutions to complex problems, and the necessity of brute-force mastery of nature, all executed with a bulletproof confidence in endless economic growth on a finite planet. The fatal shortcomings of that paradigm are massively documented and are becoming a daily bad-news story in our increasingly precarious experience.

But a new ecological paradigm is reshaping the mindsets of the designers of the systems that provision us with food, energy, materials, transport, shelter, waste cycling, and security. Ecological designers and ecological engineers begin with the imperative to design with, not against, natural processes and flows. Following Kentucky writer Wendell Berry they are asking: What is here? What will nature let us do here? What will nature help us do here? The answers, particularly to the last question, are surprisingly positive and point the way to a far more cost-effective, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure. Properly engaged, nature will in fact do a great deal of the work in engineered systems for free. The detailed knowledge of how nature utilizes sunlight, purifies waste, and builds elegant structures without fossil fuels or toxic chemicals is changing the design of human systems. Without much fanfare, emerging fields such as biomimicry, ecological engineering, and ecological design are quietly transforming architecture, engineering, agriculture, forestry, urban planning, and infrastructure development.

The precepts of ecological design are straightforward: (1) use nature as the standard, not something to be overcome; (2) eliminate waste so that everything is food for other organisms; (3) use only renewable energy; (4) preserve and enhance biodiversity; (5) distribute costs and benefits fairly within and across generations. The operating instructions derived from those precepts are: (1) solve for pattern across traditional boundaries of disciplines and bureaucratic silos so that every solution solves more than one problem and causes no new ones; (2) design systems that are resilient and repairable with redundant components; (3) emphasize proximity so that supply chains are mostly local or regional, as urban historian Jane Jacobs once proposed.

Short-term economic thinking is often used as an excuse for poor design. But the fact is that sooner or later we pay for sustainable and resilient infrastructure (and lots of other things) whether we get it or not. We pay for ecologically incoherent design in human health, vulnerability to terrorism or acts of God, climate change, injustice, loss of biodiversity, and excessive operating and maintenance costs. Accounting for full life-cycle costs should cause us to reconsider the rules for investment in public infrastructure from a broader and longer-term perspective. Low first costs are not always cheaper. Avoided future costs, including those of disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, ought to be calculated into infrastructure budgets. Investments that improve resilience and reduce our vulnerability to climate destabilization are a smart use of public and private capital. The point is that we will need to be as creative about financing new infrastructure are we are about designing it.

It is possible to design and build infrastructure for transportation, water management, and energy that reduces ecological damage, climate risks, and construction and maintenance costs, while improving human health and creating the economic foundation for broad-based and sustainable prosperity. This is not a distant possibility. In Next Generation Infrastructure, Hillary Brown shows that the design know-how already exists and is being creatively deployed across the world in dozens of good examples. Next-generation infrastructure is not a luxury for the well-to-do. It is coming on line just as the climate forecast, for rich and poor alike virtually everywhere, is for much higher temperatures, longer droughts, bigger storms, and higher-velocity winds. We will need a new infrastructure that is resilient in the face of much greater stresses than humans have ever experienced before.

Hillary Brown is a brilliant guide to one of the most important, if mostly overlooked, aspects of a resilient society. In her work as the originator and co-author of two important publications for New York City, High Performance Building Guidelines and High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines, and in her subsequent work as a designer, author, and teacher she has developed an extraordinary depth of insight and experience. Next Generation Infrastructure is a vital chapter in the narrative we are writing about the human future and should be mandatory reading for planners, financiers, and public officials at all levels.

Acknowledgments

Since a valuable portion of my career was spent in city government, I offer this book to the many individuals involved in public works who inspired and mentored me. A special debt of gratitude also goes to Michael Singer and Jason Bregman at Michael Singer Studio. Grateful nods especially to Christina Lazarus and to Nancy Levinson for help with earlier writings. Thanks especially to the many friends and colleagues who have supported my emerging interests in this field in notable ways: Andrea Woodner, Claire Weisz, Don Watson, Byron Stigge, Jim Russell, Bill Reed, and Paul Mankiewicz.

Thanks go out to individuals interviewed: David Burke, Paul Chamberlin, Christine Holowacz, Mark Horn, Dave Hyams, Penny Lee, Erika Mantz, Charles McKinney, Thomas Paino, Linda Pollack, Stephanie Reichlin, James Roche, Margie Ruddick, Anthony Shorris, Ken Smith, George Stockton, Laura Truettner, Jurgen van der Heijden, Peter Op ’t Veld, Ariane Volz, David Waggonner, and Kate Zidar.

I’m indebted to those who helped in myriad ways in the development of this manuscript: Rachel Spellman, Cara Turett, Miriam Ward. The work has received support through the generosity of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Fund. I am grateful for Sandra Chizinski’s sharp editorial eye and ear, and for the unfailing support of editor Heather Boyer at Island Press. Finally, this book is also dedicated to my brother Richard and nephews Eliot and Nicholas with love.

1. Introduction: Bold Endeavors Needed

There are sufficient resources to retrofit cities if we practice integrative infrastructure management . . . if we begin to manage the city as if it really were a living ecosystem, which of course it is, or was, and should be.

— Kenny Ausubel, Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies

On August 1, 2007, four of the eight lanes of Minnesota’s I-35W highway bridge were closed to accommodate roadbed repairs. Evening rush-hour traffic was diverted into the four open lanes, creating an asymmetrical stress that compounded an underlying weakness in the bridge’s support system. When the center span collapsed, 17 of the 111 vehicles on the bridge were cast into the Mississippi River, 108 feet below, killing 13 people and injuring 145 (fig. 1-1). ¹

The I-35W tragedy quickly became symbolic of the debilitated state of the once-noble Interstate Highway System—and of what many critics see as America’s disinvestment in its infrastructure. But it also called attention to a broader problem: that a narrow focus on optimizing the various parts of complex systems may undermine the sustainability of the whole.

According to an evaluation conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the primary cause of the failure was the initial undersizing of the steel plates that joined critical members of the bridge’s steel truss system, compromising the bridge’s structural redundancy, or ability to withstand extra stress. The NTSB highlighted four additional factors: subsequent additions to the bridge deck had increased the dead weight of the structure;² safety inspectors, who tended to focus on corrosion and cracks, had failed to notice the slight bowing—evident from photos—of the steel plates caused by structural stress;³ 270 tons of repair-related loads, including raw materials, equipment, and personnel, had been positioned above the bridge’s weakest points just hours before the collapse; and traffic controllers had unwittingly added further stress to the structure.

Figure 1-1. Cars remain on the collapsed portion of I-35W Mississippi River Bridge, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, four days after the August 2007 collapse. (Courtesy of Kevin Rofidal, US Coast Guard.)

What the NTSB’s account does not address, however, is an increasingly common problem in the design and management of complex systems: the failure to see and to appreciate the workings of the whole. In the case of the bridge collapse, any knowledge of existing problems likely remained within each of the separate departments responsible for design, repair, inspection, maintenance, and operations. Thus, it might be argued that better information flow among bureaucratic silos might have had produced a different outcome, perhaps even preventing the tragedy. As Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins observe in Natural Capitalism,

optimizing components in isolation tends to pessimize the whole system. . . . You can actually make a system less efficient while making each of its parts more efficient, simply by not properly linking up those components. If they’re not designed to work with one another, they’ll tend to work against one another.⁴

This book explores how we can optimize, rather than pes-simize, the facilities and assets of public services—primarily energy, water, and waste management. The book arises from the confluence of several streams of thought. First, if we’re to chart a course for global sustainability, we must begin to decouple carbon-intensive and ecologically harmful technologies from critical infrastructure systems, namely the essential systems for contemporary society: water, wastewater, power, solid waste, transportation, and communication. Second, we have the opportunity, through the power of systems thinking, to imagine an alternative future and to take bold steps toward that potential. Lastly, although we possess the scientific and technological know-how to move forward, we are critically lacking a policy and implementation framework to support such efforts.

Churning its way across the New York / New Jersey metropolitan region, Hurricane Sandy vividly demonstrated the extreme vulnerability of urban systems to storm surges, which are becoming stronger and more frequent due to climate change. It especially highlighted the interdependencies among infrastructure sectors. Inundating New York City’s vital arteries, floodwaters overwhelmed tunnels and sewers; closed bridges; shut down the electrical substations that control mass transit; curtailed gas supplies; and destroyed streets, buildings, and whole neighborhoods. For days and even weeks, failures triggered by floodwaters deprived millions of electrical, heat, and water services.

One premise of this book is that our current patterns of infrastructure development reflect an industrialized worldview—one that, in the interests of convenience, efficiency, and bureaucratic control, has largely isolated the various elements of our infrastructural systems. A post-industrial viewpoint, by contrast, focuses on understanding how the parts of such systems relate to each other and to the whole. From this perspective, the hardware of energy, water, and waste management is essentially viewed along ecological lines. Next-generation infrastructure means moving beyond compartmentalized thinking toward new, integrated approaches to planning, financing, constructing, operating, and maintaining infrastructure. In both their conception and design, the innovative projects highlighted in this book are less object focused and more outcome driven. They encourage us to move forward with greater sensitivity to the larger infrastructural context; to consider a location in terms of its economic, environmental, and social resources; and to share resources across different systems, thereby reducing costs and extending benefits. Through a systems approach to lifeline services, we can begin to move more rapidly toward sustainability.

The Scope of the Problem

In Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now, Felix Rohatyn recounts the story of America’s entrepreneurial investments in infrastructure—from the transcontinental railroads and the Panama Canal to rural electrification and the Interstate Highway System—chronicling the unusual foresight and intrepid leadership behind each initiative and highlighting the manifold rewards, particularly economic growth.⁵ In the face of the imperative to repair and strengthen existing assets or to reinvent them altogether, what needs to be done, and where are we to begin?

In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers awarded US infrastructure an average grade of D for adequacy and safety—a grade that was raised to D+ in 2013, thanks to a pickup in incremental investments. The same 2013 report contended that repairing US infrastructure assets to achieve a good condition (essentially a grade of B) will require an estimated cumulative investment of $3.6 trillion by 2020—a figure that does not even begin to address growth or expansion.⁶ The following are some highlights from a few recent assessments:

• The United States loses 1.7 trillion gallons of drinking water annually through system leakage and 240,000 water main breaks per year. ⁷ The cost to upgrade distribution, treatment, and storage would be $334.8 billion over 20 years. ⁸

• Each year, more than 75,000 overflows from combined storm and sewage drains discharge 900 billion gallons of untreated sewage into US waterways. ⁹ The estimated cost of updating and expanding wastewater and stormwater systems is $298 billion over 20 years. ¹⁰

• The number of significant power outages has risen from 76 in 2007 to 307 in 2011. ¹¹ Between 2005 and 2009 the United States experienced 264 large-scale blackouts. Estimates for electrical-system upgrades call for $1.5 to 2.0 trillion in expenditures over 20 years. ¹²

• Ensuring the safety and efficiency of existing mass-transit systems will require between $18.2 and $29.6 billion in annual improvements in 2012 dollars. ¹³

• As of 2012, 11 percent of bridges were classified as structurally deficient. To repair or replace substandard structures by 2028 would cost an estimated $76 billion. ¹⁴

Funded at about 3.5 percent of total non-defense spending, and at roughly the same level since 1976, US infrastructure funding lags behind that of both developed and developing nations.¹⁵ Although the United States is roughly two and a half times the area of the European Union, the US will spend annually, on average, $150 billion—less than 1 percent of our GDP, compared to the European Union’s $300 billion during the decade 2010 to 2020.¹⁶ Infrastructure investment in the developing world also outpaces ours: relative to their GDPs, India and China spend 8 and 9 percent, respectively, on public works.¹⁷

In April 2013, President Obama was pushing for investment in US infrastructure—one of his key priorities—for perhaps the fifth time. Among his proposed initiatives were a $50 billion eco-nomic stimulus based primarily on transportation investments, and $10 billion in public funding that would leverage private investment through a newly created, independent National Infrastructure Bank¹⁸—pleas that have repeatedly fallen on the deaf ears of a Congress preoccupied with austerity. Yet Obama’s proposals parallel those of others around the world.

In the United States, those who fear that forestalling infrastructure investment will cost the US its competitive edge, both economically and politically, are sounding the clarion call for action. The degraded state of US lifeline systems has failed to capture public attention. Infrastructure repairs and upkeep are notoriously unsexy expenditures, and politicians are more invested in cutting ribbons at new projects than in funding basic maintenance, a trend that has further undercut the condition of our existing systems. Thus, despite the intermittent alarms sounded after catastrophic failures, there is little sense of urgency—or recognition that infrastructure systems are vital lifelines to economic growth, public health and safety, and other desirable social goals. Even more unusual is any understanding of how those lifelines are linked, directly or indirectly, to the integrity of natural systems.

Nature and Infrastructure

Human life depends on ecological services provided by nature—from water purification to waste digestion to the regulation of natural hazards.¹⁹ These services originate in ecosystems: self-organized aggregations of living and nonliving elements that exist in a state of symbiosis, sharing energy, information, and matter for mutual benefit.

Human-engineered energy, water, and waste infrastructure systems are, like natural ecosystems, tightly coupled.²⁰ Electrical power generation, for instance, relies on water cooling, while water distribution and wastewater treatment require electricity; electrical energy still relies on coal transported by rail. Transportation services, water treatment, and electricity generation all rely on information technology.²¹ Nonetheless, since the advent of the industrial era, the convention has been to disaggregate the elements of infrastructural systems into different sectors, both physically and jurisdictionally, and to dissociate them from the natural ecosystem services on which they ultimately depend.

The industrial paradigm was largely responsible for estranging public works from the ecosystem services upon which they depend. Few infrastructural transactions remain visible; most services are distributed below grade or are wired high—and almost unseen—above. Power, water, and waste facilities are typically removed from populous areas. The web that connects public services, daily life, and the environment is rarely brought to mind: we don’t think polluting coal combustion as we flick on a light switch, and a refuse chute or garbage bin doesn’t summon images of vast landfills.

There are direct but not readily visible correspondences between ecosystem services and human-made systems. Water filtration and treatment are analogous to the natural ground infiltration that supplies aquifers and reservoirs, and also to the purification accomplished by wetlands. Incinerating waste or relegating it to a landfill are imperfect counterparts to natural microbial decomposition. And when we generate energy, we are essentially releasing the solar power stored in biomass.

As the unparalleled costs associated with the hurricanes of the past decade demonstrate, we suppress or deny the interdependence of constructed systems, as well as their combined reliance on natural systems, at our peril. An evolving post-industrial viewpoint—one that reflects the holistic perspective associated with sustainability—emphasizes interconnectedness rather than separation. From this perspective, the constructed world is nested within the natural one and depends on its health and productivity. Natural ecosystems and human-made infrastructures are not simply a universe of discrete objects but rather are vital working parts embedded in networks that share energy, matter, and information.

When we move from an industrial to a post-industrial worldview, the question is no longer How can we direct nature? but How can we capitalize on the connectedness of our critical systems to nature and to each other?²² What if, for example, the services provided by power plants, sewage treatment plants, and other elements of infrastructure were based on an ecological model of interdependency, instead of an industrial model