I've been thinking about a distinction between 'offensive' and 'defensive' infrastructure:

• Defensive: relieving a backlog or keeping pace with predictable growth
• Offensive: opening up a new opportunity space - e.g. a geographic region or economic sector

The end result of completing a defensive infrastructure project is simply maintenance of a status quo (avoiding a deterioration), rather than a leap forward. Defensive projects are necessary and worthwhile, but a patchwork of smaller-scale, easier-to-fund defensive projects may crowd out offensive projects that require higher political vision and a longer payoff time.

Examples

Offensive

• Archetypal project: US Transcontinental Railroad, opening up the American West for much faster settlement and growth
• China's construction on South China Sea islands
• Physical infrastructure for major new trade routes:
  • Belt and Road Initiative
  • US Interstate Highway System
  • Panama and Suez Canals
  • National Broadband Network (online commerce)
• Hoover Dam, Snowy Hydro, Israel National Water Carrier bringing water to new regions

The Snowy: A History

Bradfield Scheme

• Major land reclamation, e.g. Netherlands Zuiderzee Works; hypothetical Atlantropa

• Enabling infrastructure for a new sector, e.g. space (Kennedy Space Center, Baikonur Cosmodrome) or nuclear (Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository - if it worked!)

• Technical infrastructure that enables new commerce sectors

  • GPS satellites
  • Rapid Earth observation satellites
  • Human Genome Project investment in sequencing technology
  • Other major research infrastructure

• Fictional examples from golden age scifi, e.g. space elevator, draining Mediterranean to create farmland, bridging the Gibraltar Strait — sometimes would be ecologically disastrous, but the scale of ambition is the key point

  We need more illustrations of optimistic technical futures

• Charter cities and neo-city projects like Brasilia or Masdar — noting that these often fall short in practice

• Depending on how you define 'infrastructure', might include major schemes of institution-building that create significant new opportunity for particular groups

  • Land-grant universities driving practical education
  • GI Bill, free higher education in other countries
  • A comprehensive childcare scheme that dramatically increases female workforce participation

• Disneyland (built among orange orchards and farmland) and Walt Disney World (built among swampland)

Defensive:

• Building new motorways or rail lines to relieve traffic congestion
  • Boston Big Dig
  • London Crossrail
  • Sydney Metro, WestConnex, etc
• Adding new runways to airports, or building the second or third airport in a city that already has one
• Freight terminal capacity upgrades
• Disaster relief infrastructure: flood levees, shoring up coastal areas against climate change, fire breaks, Chernobyl containment
• Most power-generation facilities that just add capacity to a national grid, unless they specifically support development in a new region
• Desalination plants to shore up water supplies in existing cities
• Urban regeneration and redevelopment projects, or frivolous land reclamation like Dubai's artificial islands

Reflections

Environmental impact: Offensive infrastructure is more likely to be high-impact on the environment, and increased environmental controls (a good thing!) may be a reason we see less of this now. It is probably self-evident why we haven't actually attempted to dam and drain the Mediterranean, or even San Francisco Bay as per the Reber Plan — this isn't necessarily evidence of stagnation, but rather a reasonable retrenchment of high modernism. But there are lots of opportunities for offensive infrastructure that isn't high-impact on the environment, such as things like broadband, satellites, and enabling research infrastructure, as well as social infrastructure.

Developed world maintenance and stagnation: A certain kind of project (eg highway, rail corridor) might be 'offensive' in a developing country’s context, but only 'defensive' in another that is already developed. This doesn’t excuse the developed country: it needs to find new offensive avenues to invest in. For example, rather than only rebuilding roads forever, it needs to maintain its roads but also launch satellites. Major physical infrastructure projects (of all kinds, but especially offensive) seem to have slowed in recent decades, possibly due to increased red tape and resistance from special interest groups — see Patrick Collison's site.

Climate projects: Renewable transition projects are an interesting case - the whole project of dealing with climate change by shifting to a renewable-energy economy might be viewed as defensive. But for individual companies or societies, the transition creates offensive opportunities. For example, Australian investment in infrastructure like SunCable or renewables + hydrogen for smelting clean metals could open up an opportunity for significant economic growth.

Superpower: Australia's low-carbon opportunity

Live and dead players: Societies or governments that can only build defensive infrastructure, which is basically upgrading infrastructure types that they already have and know how to build, are more likely to be 'dead players'. Conversely an ability to generate offensive infrastructure is reflective of a live player — China's activities in the South China Sea and the Belt and Road Initiative (investing heavily in foreign construction, rather than just domestic) are good examples.

Live players and dead players (Burja)

Micro applicability: At a small scale such as within a company or team, it's interesting to reflect on what time investments are going to offensive infrastructure, vs defensive infrastructure, vs non-infrastructure items that don't generate a future payoff. If the latter two dominate and there is little capacity or drive to work on offensive infrastructure, there is likely to be stagnation.

Evaluating projects in Australia

Reviewing Infrastructure Australia's current list of priority projects:

current_priority_list.pdf

• 6 of 7 high priority projects are 'Urban Congestion' (defensive); the other - Western Sydney Airport - is 'National Connectivity' (mostly defensive).
• Only 4 of 21 priority projects are in the 'Opportunity for Growth' (offensive) category.
• The vast majority of planning-stage initiatives are also in defensive categories.