Challenges and Opportunities for Innovation in the Public Works ...

Finally, the substantial public works aspect of infrastructure collides with a distrust of government that
is deeply imbedded in American ideology but especially active in the final decades of the 20th century. Major
infrastructure projects that displace individuals and disrupt communities raise this distrust to a level much
broader than the self-interested resistance of the NIMBY response, further discouraging investment and
innovation.
THE BRB'S STRATEGIC PROGRAM IN INFRASTRUCTURE
Reflecting past and current studies, the BRB concluded, first, that there are indeed obstacles to
innovation inherent in the technology of infrastructure. These obstacles cause innovation to lag behind that being
experienced in other technological fields. Further, these obstacles may be no greater in the United States than
elsewhere, but evidence suggests that U. S. efforts to search for and willingness to invest in new infrastructure
technology lag behind those of other industrialized nations.
To foster broader vision within the nation's leadership regarding the problems of infrastructure and
prospects for enhancing the system's contribution to future wellbeing, the BRB has undertaken a program to
encourage research, changes in government policy, education, and cooperative action by private and public
decision-makers. The BRB program is founded on a premise that the traditional emphasis of research and policy
initiatives-addressed primarily to particular modes of infrastructure-should be linked with broad cross-cutting
initiatives that take an integrative and synoptic view of infrastructure as an organic system. These cross-cutting
initiatives should focus attention on a core of political concerns, institutional structures, and scientific and
technical knowledge common to all infrastructure:
* Complex facilities and multiple users linked through geographically extensive networks
* Common materials such as concrete, steel, and ceramics
* Facilities and services valued not for their own sake, but rather as support for other social and
economic activities
"* Long service lifetimes requiring long-term financial commitments to assure reliable and safe service
"* Diverse and often unforeseen environmental and social impacts that are felt unequally by the various
users and neighbors of infrastructure.
Advances in these cross-cutting core areas will ultimately provide broadly useful lessons for more
effective infrastructure development and management. The pursuit of such cross-cutting concerns--and their
effective integration into national policy-is the central element of the BRB's strategic program in infrastructure.
LOOKING AT LOCAL SOLUTIONS
The initiating activity under this program, approved by Executive Committee of the Governing Board
of the National Research Council in December 1989, has been a series of colloquia designed to address topics
of immediate interest, substantial payoff in terms of motivating improvements in the nation's infrastructure, and
long term relevance. Recognizing that infrastructure problems have national strategic consequences but their
character and solutions are essentially local, the BRB concluded that a major obstacle to effective national action
in infrastructure is bridging the gap between national policy and diverse local and state-level concerns. Studies
to date have largely neglected infrastructure's local users and neighbors, including those who may view particular
infrastructures as a burden out of proportion to their local benefit. This neglect is manifest in the increasingly
widespread NIMBY response to infrastructure projects, now sometimes being supplemented by NOTE (not over
there either) and NIMTOO (not in my term of office)!
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