By: David Jenkins
Many of us take the opportunity of the new year to come up with some resolutions and hopes for the year ahead. Usually, these are personal goals and ambitions, but this year my thoughts turned to my professional remit, which is the asset management and infrastructure domain.
I sat down and listed my hopes for the sector in 2023. Infrastructure and asset management are so critical to the lives of our communities and the efficiency of our economy. Yet, many things can be improved on and done so much better.
The first goal goes well beyond the 12 months of 2023. Many infrastructure assets, big and small, will serve communities for decades. They will be refurbished, potentially retrofitted and repurposed. As a result, decisions made on infrastructure in 2023 will reverberate through generations and will outlast many of us.
And yet so much of our planning is short-term. So, the first resolution or hope for 2023 is that we plan for the long term despite living in a short-term world. This requires a change of mindset for infrastructure planners and the elected representatives in the way they work with all three tiers of Government.
My second hope is to consider changing circumstances as we develop our infrastructure strategies.
The pandemic has changed how we use our cities and the nature of work. People have moved to the regions, and our central business districts are being re-imagined. Beyond that, we have an ageing population that requires a significant service industry. Yet, the people working in this industry are often forced to make long commutes because they have to live far away from their workplaces.
Climate change is a pressing issue for infrastructure planning, and sustainability and resilience are critical. Still, both themes extend well into the future and will also be driven by demographic changes.
Demographic considerations also raise issues around inter-generational inequity. For example, many of us welcome new infrastructure for the current generation, but if we don’t plan well enough – financially and in terms of its use – it may be an unwelcome burden to future generations.
Just as many young people today blame baby boomers for locking them out of the housing market, young people in the future could face a bleak reality of not only never achieving home ownership but continuing to pay for the infrastructure their parents and grandparents enjoyed, which might not be as valuable to them.
This goes back to the idea that infrastructure is a long-term consideration and proposition and raises the point that, in many cases, shiny new assets might not be the most appropriate solution, either for now or in the future.
Asset maintenance and renewal is as, or arguably more, important than building greenfields infrastructure and choosing that path can be a way of addressing the issue of intergenerational inequity.
