Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Our Built World: A New Concept of Infrastructure
Our Built World: A New Concept of Infrastructure
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Infrastructure and Construction Then and Now
1995 Today
INFRASTRUCTURE
Heavy steel and concrete bridges, overpasses, rail Lightweight, dynamic structures of composite
trestles, etc. materials and other advanced materials;
superconcrete composites.
Large-scale airports with 300-meter runways serve Small airport complexes for super-quiet VTOL/STOL
metropolitan areas craft, tilt rotors, and helicopters, serving urban cores and
individual satellite communities.
Steel-rail diesel and electric power railroads Magnetic levitation and other high-speed rail lines, mono-
rails.
Steel-reinforced concrete structures for commercial Polymer and composite and ultralightweight metals in
buildings, roadbeds, dams most construction, along with rammed and treated soils for
dams, roadbeds.
Steel and concrete pipelines for water, sewage, and Smart sewers that have composite pipelines, are
commodity materials self-healing, and are constructed by automated systems;
smarter, smaller robots called "smart pigs" live in pipelines
to monitor and maintain them.
Little experience with macroengineering projects Growing recognition that global management can be
achieved through macroengineering and large distributed
systems such as those taping polar ice for fresh water and
controlling fault zones for earthquake prevention.
Limited conception of infrastructure, covering Expanded definition of infrastructure, from undersea
transportation, energy transmission, communications, and underground to outer space, covering the
and civil and industrial works traditional categories plus more resource conservation and
use, and environmental interventions and management.
CONSTRUCTION
Computer-aided design relying on printed standards, Human concept/aesthetic design, using expert
and legal codes, and human expertise system engineering and structural design, component speci-
fications, and materials ordering. Virtual model building.
Designers and engineers simulate visits to structures, ex-
perimenting with aesthetic, structural, and functional pos-
sibilities.
Site preparation using human-piloted earth moving, Automated site preparation equipment, laser-guided
excavation, and grading equipment and computer-directed. Teleoperated machinery for some
customized tasks
Site construction of most structures, with some Majority of effort and investment are in factory
prefabricated components component production and assembly
Manual labor and heavy machinery dominate Automated equipment, robots, and teleoperated machin-
ery dominate
Optical and steel tape measurement. Lots of on-site Laser measuring/plumbing/squaring tools, most
measurement trimming, fitting, and customization components manufactured to close tolerances for immedi-
ate fit
Traditional paradigms: structures based on strength New paradigm: dynamic structures that responde to
and tension changing uses and stresses
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It is possible to characterize the world's affluent, middle, and destitute
societies according to the relative conditions of their infrastructures:
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An Infrastructure Report Card
The ratings below use a point scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the highest
quality/efficiency rating for an infrastructure element.
Telecommunications
Roads/Highways
Water Transport
COMMENTS
United States 5 3 5 4 5 4 5 Excellence in telecommunications;
continued emphasis on autonomous
motor vehicle transport at the expense
of high-speed rail; pressures of
sustainability promote advanced water,
waste, and environmental management.
EC 3 5 5 4 5 4 3 Coalescence of the EC promoted first-
rate high-speed rail, air connections, and
telecommunications networks; strong in
ports, ship channels, and environmen-
tal management infrastructures.
Japan 3 5 5 5 5 4 3 Leads the world in integrated transpor-
tation infrastructures based on rail, air,
and water links; first-rate telecommuni-
cations system, linking to global network.
China 2 3 3 3 3 1 2 Some success in rail, water transport
based on upgrading of old systems; now
building a complete fiber communica-
tions network, but service is still spotty;
development at the expense of resource
and waste management leaves those in-
frastructures shoddy.
World 2 3 2 2 4 2 1 1 Economies rely on adequate rail and
road links and good ports; catching up
on environmental and resource man-
agement.
World 3 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 Decrepit or nonexistent infrastructures,
except where foreign money has built
ports and telecommunications links.
Source: Based on Global Business Alliance, June 2025, and Places Rated, October 2024, ratings
for infrastructure.
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The Changing Emphases of U.S. Infrastructure Spending
Index of Government and Private Infrastructure Spending:
1990 to 2025
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ocean storms and high surf, the structures would too often be closed for bad
weather, and would require drawbridge passage for ships and boats.
Ice highways in Alaska have proved a boon to mineral extraction above
the Arctic Circle. The highways are cheap to build and maintain, requiring
only seasonal regrading. Most environmental scientists consider them a rea-
sonable compromise over the construction of paved highways and railbeds.
A recent proposal for a more-engineered ice highway would use repulped
waste paper to create a super durable ice material. The highway would be
sprayed into place, freezing on contact in the Arctic temperatures of eastern
Siberia. Similar techniques have been used to build ice structures, including
living space, in Antarctica.
Infrastructure in space
The United States also depends on the space infrastructure. The space
infrastructure is defined by the growing number of communications satellites
and the emerging space-based manufacturing and its associated transport
docking facilities. Analysts expect a full-fledged space infrastructure in the
future to deal with space debris, govern interplanetary communication and
research, and serve space transportation.
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tures. This winter city, with the backing and technical expertise of Trimar
Corp., proposed and began construction of a dome of unprecedented size to
cover the central core of the city. The geodesic dome was to be built by
robots. It was to be constructed of a lightweight, high-strength polymer, with
elaborate airflow controls built into the shell. Heating elements would melt
away snowfall. The dome would cover just under 2 square kilometers of land
in the downtown area, and would reach 1,000 meters in height. After four
years of feasibility study, a bond issue, and $255 million spent in planning
and research, the project was deemed an engineering impracticality.
Other infrastructure failures were purely financial. Private sector devel-
opers of information linkages, transportation projects, and other projects of-
ten went bankrupt on ultimately profitable systems. Government bailouts and
private buyouts ensured the completion or continued operation of the projects.
Logistics
Innovations in goods transport transformed the urban landscape in 15
large U.S. cities over the past 30 years. The large cities have networks of under-
ground pipelines carrying retail products, food supplies, and packages for deliv-
ery, with all such goods traveling via pneumatic and hydraulic capsules.
Some networks use slurry transport for solid wastes and industrial raw
materials and fuels, including silica, bauxite, and coal. In several cities, engi-
neers over the past two decades converted aging water mains and storm sew-
ers for this kind of transport. They developed robots that traveled the pipelines
to inspect them and install tubing with precise tolerances for the new cargo
systems. They replaced water mains with high pressure composite pipelines,
often in the same tunnels. Dynamic controls help assure that breaks in the
high pressure lines are contained quickly.
Putting much of goods transportation underground has lengthened the
lives of surface roads, lessened traffic, and made streets safer and cleaner for
other uses. Urban and industrial zone noise levels are reduced. Some cities,
including downtown Chicago, bar traffic from certain or all streets, and bar
truck traffic entirely.
Personal mobility
Moving people has involved key shifts in transportation technology.
Those shifts are, in turn, beginning to reshape communities, aligning their
centers along public transit lines where those lines have proved efficient and
accepted by communities. In several large metropolitan areas, property value
patterns show the reorientation, though new development and new commer-
cial enterprises are just beginning to reflect the changes.
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PRT systems are a model for greater transportation infrastructure
management
Analysts expect personal rapid transit systems, such as those in use in
Chicago and Boston, and planned for El Paso, Tulsa, and Atlanta, to be the
model for future metropolitan personal mobility. PRT systems are a boon to
urban aesthetics because they remove heavy vehicle traffic from densely popu-
lated areas. They also free riders for leisure in transit. The systems save on
energy and infrastructure maintenance costs and have proved popular with
urban riders, though less so with those traveling from suburb to suburb and
among satellite cities. Chicago banned non-PRT traffic in its downtown area
in favor of PRT vehicles. That allowed an almost complete reconfiguration of
the city streets to improve pedestrian use and to bar truck traffic.
The PRT systems in Chicago (2017) and Boston (2021) are the entering
wedge for that technology. A half dozen other cities have plans in the works
for PRT systems. The system under design for Charlotte will use on-the-road/
on-the-rail dual purpose vehicles that use automatic guideways and can be
driven on roadways.
Aircraft technology and new airport forms are reconfiguring air travel
Vertical takeoff and landing aircraft and short takeoff and landing air-
craft were fundamental in allowing new airports to be constructed close to or
in urban areas. The key to their use was the development of whisper engines
in the 2010, solving the problem of excessive noise. The smaller facilities
made possible by VTOLs/STOLs cost as little as a tenth that of airports con-
structed in the 1990s to serve growing metropolises in the United States.
Two airports built in the 2010s, Chicago’s New Midway and Atlanta’s North
Metro, innovated with completely underground passenger, baggage, parking, public
transit, and ticketing facilities, saving as much as 60 hectares of space. North
Metro is a combined airport and underground high speed rail facility. The Interur-
ban maglev lines operated by Southern Crescent converge there.
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Waste management
Waste management in most U.S. communities is a different game than
it was a generation ago. Starting in the late 1980s, municipalities recognized
the twin threats of too much solid waste and too much sewage. Technological
responses to each problem involved reducing the sources of waste and re-
vamping waste handling and processing.
Resource systems
The traditional problem of many natural resources is that they are in
abundance in some places and in chronic or acute shortage in others. Inte-
grated resource systems make it possible to overcome these inequities. Cen-
tral to these systems are automated information exchange forums that broker
the supply and demand for resources.
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By the 2010s, state natural resources authorities took a double-edged
strategy to cope with the problem. They installed monitoring systems to guide
withdrawals. They also installed impermeable barriers in underground areas
that had become the main channel for infiltrating sea water.
The Atlantic City barrier involved injections of a polymer into the soils
at about 75 meters depth. Over a 2.7 kilometer stretch, technicians made
about 500 injections. This strategy is under consideration for other coastal
aquifers and for several aquifers threatened by tainted groundwater.
Energy supplies
Electrical energy is similarly centralized and decentralized. Household
and neighborhood power generation from mixed sources is integrated with
the central power generation and distribution systems—the traditional power
utilities. This means that at the household level, there are smart connections
between any generating source in the immediate vicinity and the local, re-
gional, and national grids. The household or commercial user relies on auto-
mated decision and buying systems to negotiate for and purchase power and
sell excess capacity from on-site generation.
Communication
The telecommunications network that evolved over the past century is
a complex web of wired, fibered, and fiberless connections. Almost a thou-
sand satellites, transponders, up and down links, repeaters, and optical switch-
ing centers are distributed across the globe and in orbit. They are coordinated
by widely distributed computing/switching/routing centers and end-use de-
vices for optimizing transmission.
Fiber communication
Eight-and-a-half-million kilometers of fiber-optic networks traverse the
United States. Many were installed from 1980 to 2000, using often cumber-
some methods of routing the lines underground or through existing tunnels.
Today, engineers install new lines using automated tunneling equipment and
robotic machinery that can lay lines in storm sewers and other tunnels. By
2008, telecom companies were using automated robots to travel underground
cable lines, laying fiber-optic cable alongside metal cable, or exchanging
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fiber for metal cable. Telecoms have installed about 190,000 kilometers of
optical cable in this way.
Fiberless communication
The extended Iridium system of satellites is the core of the global fiberless
communications network. In conjunction with the global fiber network, it
provides a personal communication service (PCS), connects machines to
people, machines to machines, and connects sensors to analytical and man-
agement systems.
The satellite network freed people and devices from being tethered by
wires or fiber cable to other devices. Since the 1990s, it has enabled a flower-
ing and spread of electronic devices above, across, and into the landscape.
We have:
Environmental management
Perhaps the biggest changes on the U.S. landscape, though they are
often invisible, are the networks and systems devoted to maintaining, protect-
ing, monitoring, and restoring the environment. These systems result from a
new paradigm in environmental science—the acknowledgment that sustain-
able existence on Earth requires people to manage the environment to bal-
ance its protection with human needs.
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Technology lets us manage nature and people
Managing Nature
• Earthquake control systems in the field
• Earthquake monitoring
• Iceberg docking and processing facilities for towed-in freshwater
• Deep underground pipelines and nuclear-waste storage
• Shallow underground living spaces, storage, etc.
• First explorations of deep-mantle energy resources
• Climate control infrastructure
• Mass-scale floodplain/watershed controls
• In-sea barriers, established to modify/manage the marine environment
• Recapture of river silts from delta bottoms
• Permanent installations to control/manage aspects of nature, restore ecology
• Mobile, robotic ecological restoration equipment
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Conquering the Mississippi watershed
By the late 1990s, it became undeniable that the United States had to rethink the tradi-
tional schemes for managing large rivers and their tributaries. Urban and agricultural runoff
continued to disrupt the biology of rivers. Seasonal fluctuations, floods, and storms, disrupted
human activities on shore.
The traditional way to manage rivers in the United States was to build complexes of
dams, revetments, culverts, and levees to manage the flow of water and restrict that flow to
where people wanted it. Designers took into account caprices of nature and designed things to
withstand flooding, at least to 100-year flood levels.
Episodes of failure in those systems, such as the floods of 1993 and 2011, as well as
agricultural problems and the drive to sustainable agriculture, changed how people viewed
rivers. A new paradigm emerged, often called “let it flood.”
The new paradigm flew in the face of traditional practices of governments, particularly
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has become the Federal Infrastructure Management
Agency.
The emerging complex is one in which dynamic structures, including flood gates and
levees, protect existing cities, but community leaders relocate smaller towns and industrial
facilities to higher elevations. Small communities can no longer get insurance and loans to
build and rebuild in certain flood zones. At the same time, the flows of the Mississippi and its
main tributaries are coming under control through dams and cataracts. Runoff management
systems gather excessive flow from heavy rains in flood lakes, tens or hundreds of acres in size.
Some of them are constructed as riverside wetlands. There the water is available for agricul-
tural use, or to maintain river flows in times of less rainfall or to be directed into underground
aquifers.
The “let it flood” notion comes from a further strategy that is emerging. Much of the
agricultural bottomlands in the Mississippi Valley historically flooded as a natural seasonal
process. That flooding can rejuvenate agricultural lands, and is seen as a net positive for sus-
tainable farming. Today’s bottomland farming corporations are making seasonal flooding a
part of their integrated agricultural practices, much like the ancient Nile.
CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY
A new structural-design paradigm is transforming structural engineer-
ing and design. Throughout human history, construction rested on two para-
digms; tension and compression. The resulting structures were strong and
functioned well as long as their substrates remained stable and their materials
remained strong. Today, engineers build structures that rely on dynamism.
The structures can adjust themselves structurally to stresses from people and
nature. This is done by simulating how living things respond to stresses: sin-
ews, muscles, and joints react flexibly to the stresses put on them. Surfaces
adjust to temperature, moisture, and pressure, especially wind pressure, to
preserve a structure’s contents and integrity. Smart materials, sensors, and
actuators, embedded and distributed throughout the structure make all this
possible.
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Dynamic structures proliferate
• The Barrow Tollway in San Francisco is an earthquake-proof elevated roadway with con-
tinuous dynamic adjustment to substrate shifts and lateral and vertical shaking.
• The Hitachi Building in Seattle is Hitachi’s 270-story U.S. headquarters, built as a demon-
stration project to show how interior space could be freed from much of the structural
support required by traditional skyscrapers.
• Twin Forks Dam in Montana spans 255 meters. Unstable substrates and variable water
loads required a dam that could dynamically respond to compression.
• The New York-Boston Maglev is a partially elevated high-speed rail line that reacts dy-
namically to vehicle loads and lateral tensions, as well as relies on dynamism for its basic
structural integrity.
Design
The design phase of construction, whether it is infrastructure, commer-
cial buildings, or housing, is the most critical phase of any project. In the last
century, two elements governed structural design: (1) the materials and tech-
niques of construction and (2) aesthetic choices that could be made using
those materials and techniques.
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Site preparation, excavation, construction/assembly
Robotics and other automation pervade the next three phases of con-
struction. Autonomous robots, such as grading and excavating machines, are
used for site preparation, excavation, and construction. More difficult prob-
lems can be solved with teleoperated machinery that allows human operators
to work safely at a distance from the machine.
Finishing
There is relatively little structural finishing to do on site. Construction
members typically are finished in the factory. Custom construction still re-
quires finish work, some patching and seam covering on site. There, powerful
tools enable workers to quickly finish a building.
Where in 1990 it might take weeks to complete building interiors, fac-
tory production of components and today’s interior finish materials make it
possible to do the work in a day or two. For a Cape Cod model home, it takes
one worker two days to complete interior finishing; for a Tudor style, 2.5 days.
Many modern-style homes require only about two worker hours for final site
finishing. Some products that make home, office, and other commercial fin-
ishing easier are:
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Structure life history records start at design stage
The growing practice of recording each structure’s life history became a U.S. law in 2013.
Today, the electronic cornerstone of a structure contains a full record of its design, construction
and repair histories, use, energy consumption, ownership, and other particulars. Visual im-
ages, including full motion, are stored with other continuously updated data from sensors and
monitoring devices. Any authorized user can query the record from the building or remotely.
The record is especially important to rescue workers, renovators, regulators, energy auditors,
and owners.
The ideal structure is designed for regular maintenance and has built-in
flexibility. Modularity helps. Modular add-on units for commercial structures
and homes are planned in the initial design of most structures. Modules are
also designed to be replaced in situ. Internal building modules use a fold-
down principle so that disassemblers can collapse, remove, and replace them
with modules expanded into place or assembled from several components
inside a structure.
Demolition
Today’s buildings are designed for demolition and materials reuse,
whereas before 2005, most demolition materials were wasted—burned or
put in landfills. The central goal in demolishing structures is to do so safely
and cleanly and to recapture materials for reuse. Because full-fledged design
for reclamation construction is a recent development, few large-scale demo-
lition projects on such structures have been completed. The emphasis today
is on demolition and materials recovery for old buildings not designed for
efficient reclamation. The showpiece of the demolition industry was the dis-
mantling of New York City’s Olympic Towers in 2022. The project took 29
days. Had the structure been designed for dismantling, it is estimated that it
could have been dismantled in four days.
Three decades ago, by contrast, there was almost no scavenging of
structural components, and most materials went to landfills. Modular con-
struction and high value-added materials like composites and metal alloys
mean that the parts of structures 20 years old or younger have ready markets
for reuse. Older structures pose a more difficult problem. Some of their parts
and materials are wanted for historic restoration of other buildings and for
some artful materials reuse. However, much of the material is waste that is
recycled back to basic mineral components. So far, only a few dozen build-
ings in the United States have undergone this process in full. However, home
demolition wastes have been one of the commodity wastes since early this
century, mined for useful recyclables.
Prototype reclamation machinery has continued to fail in the field be-
cause of the complexity of sorting and grading wastes. To preserve the value
and condition of certain materials, such as concrete composites, such ma-
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chinery must be virtually flawless in its operation. Teleoperation and automa-
tion dominate the field.
Where construction debris can be hauled to processing facilities, the
record for automation is better. Controlled conditions make it possible to sort
and grade material with little or no human labor.
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Venezuela has a highly urban population, and the concentrations of
the country’s population in its several large metropolitan areas are still rising.
Venezuela’s population grew from 18.9 million in 1992 to 27.3 million in
2010 to 34.8 million in 2025. The population increased from 84% urban in
1992 to 93% urban today.
Metropolitanization combined with the steep and rolling terrain around
its capital and biggest city, Caracas, has made infrastructure expansion diffi-
cult. Caracas has a subway system that is almost 50 years old. The system
underwent expansion in the late 1990s, and the 2010s, but remains inad-
equate for the city’s 4 million population. Traversing the steep hillsides sur-
rounding the city are a mix of cable cars, funiculars, and footpaths. Buses and
jitneys connect remote suburbs to the ends of the subway system.
Private infrastructure develops
The port of Santa Marta, near Maracaibo in Venezuela, was built entirely with private funds and
bond issues in 2010-2014. Petróleos de Venezuela, then a newly privatized oil firm, decided the
port facilities in Maracaibo were inadequate and that labor unions and other forces were in the
way of modernizing the port. So the company built its own, state-of-the-art facility. Today, Santa
Marta is a successful operation, serving 24% of Venezuela’s trade.
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Floating highways and railways protect rainforest ecosystems and resources
The principles of so-called floating transportation corridors are the same for rail and highway.
They do not actually float, but are constructed above the ground in sensitive environmental
zones to ensure minimum impact on those environments. The structures sit on pilings that
enter the soil and extend to depths where they can be stabilized without excavation, founda-
tions, or footers. This permits the passage of groundwater, and the maintenance of other natu-
ral processes on the forest floor.
The resulting highway sits at about mid-canopy, and requires only that tree limbs and other
growth be kept away from about 10 meters height and 15 meters width surrounding the rail or
road bed. The pilings are designed to be no more a factor in the ecology than tree trunks, and
in most cases are less so.
The rail and roadbeds built on the Transamazonia Corridor are dynamic structures designed to
adjust to shifting subsoils and bedrock. Sensors in the pilings and roadbed trigger continuous
adjustment to keep the structures level and structurally sound.
Automated hydraulic pile drivers made the construction of the Transamazonia Corridor prac-
tical and affordable. The project cost $120 billion and was completed in 2014.
From the ecologist’s point of view, the principles of construction for the
corridor are “uninterrupted biological, hydrological, carbon cycle, and social
processes.” In other words, construction designs and execution sought to “float”
the rail and highway links several meters above the rainforest floor to avoid
harm to the natural exchange of water, soil and plant processes, animal life,
and the lives of native people in several aboriginal reservations in the region.
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Superconcrete provides hope for destitute countries
The great boon to impoverished world infrastructure comes from an unexpected source: the
development of an easily prepared and worked superconcrete, sold under such names as
Duracrete and Thinsculpt.
The concrete’s strength is 8.4 times that of reinforced portland cement. Chief among its advan-
tages is the ability to build stronger but thinner-walled houses, roadways, airstrips, industrial
facilities, grain silos, and other structures. The material promises to help at least some destitute
countries firm up their infrastructures and begin to advance their economies.
The net result of the failure of the poor countries to invest in adequate
infrastructure is that they have inadequate patchwork systems for water, power,
waste management, transportation, and communication.
Aggravating the problems of the destitute is the rapid shift of their popu-
lations from rural areas to totally unprepared urban areas. As a result, only a
minority of World 3’s urban dwellers have basic public services continuously
available. Critical infrastructure systems for destitute country cities include:
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The scars show today. Mozambique is still the fifth poorest country, of
those with 20 million or more inhabitants, measured in per capita GDP. None
of its often-cited potential, based on good ports, hydroelectric power poten-
tial, oil, and minerals has been realized. Its location adjacent to the successful
states of South Africa and its increasingly successful neighbors Zimbabwe and
Botswana have not paid off, despite favorable trade possibilities.
Half Mozambique’s GDP today is foreign aid or foreign investment, a
situation little changed since the 1990s. Maputo businesspeople rank projects
less by their viability than by their eligibility for aid or foreign investment.
Chasing foreign money has long been a game played with zeal by Mozambican
businesspeople and foreign salespeople pushing heavy equipment and infra-
structure projects.
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Mozambique’s Rising Population Grows Urban
Population in Millions Showing Urban Share
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Mozambican trade is served by truck and rail routes to border “inland
ports” and by the seaports of Maputo and Beira. Those ports are maintained
as adequate but not particularly up-to-date facilities by business interests in
Mozambique.
Road and rail modernization became an aid-agency policy in the 2000s.
Studies by then had shown that two capital investment keys were essential for
successful economic development: (1) modern, efficient transportation and
(2) up-to-date telecommunications. Aid packages since 2000 have required
attention to those parts of an aid recipient’s infrastructure. Aid to Mozambique
since about 2005 has been contingent on parallel investment in roads, rail-
ways, and communications infrastructure.
Contracts let for many infrastructure projects went to local and regional
construction companies who took shortcuts and used inferior materials for
their work. The National Highway, completed in 2013, was rutted and potholed
five years later because of too much sand in the concrete, improper site prepa-
ration, and inadequate use of reinforcing materials. The National Highway
was to be an integral part of the southern cone of Africa’s transportation net-
work, a key element in the CATO plan to build the economies of the region.
International construction firms, contracted to build several bridges and
hydroelectric dams in the 2010s, in several cases quit work and were driven
from the country by violent insurgency. There are three unfinished hydroelec-
tric projects in Mozambique today that are awaiting either new financing or
the cessation of tribal violence.
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Critical Developments 1990-2025
Year Development Effect
Early Estimates of the cost to repair the Intensified public- and private-sector concern with
1990s U.S. infrastructure at $1 trillion the need to improve the infrastructure for competi-
to $2 trillion. tive advantage and further economic growth.
1999 National Infrastructure Initiative Intensification of infrastructure spending on high-
(United States). ways, roadways, bridges, and conventional rail.
2001 Federal Infrastructure Agency Rising out of the National Infrastructure Initiative,
(United States). this agency took over the coordination of all parts
of the U.S. infrastructure.
2010 First of Japan’s Alice City Demonstration that mass-scale mixed-use structures
complexes completed. underground could be technologically and
financially viable.
2011 Dallas-Martin process patented. Capability to efficiently process wastes into
recyclable fractions.
2013 Global Commons Agreement on Established the principle that national infrastructures
Infrastructure. should strive for integration with the emerging
global infrastructure by adhering to construction and
other standards.
2014 Transamazonia Corridor Demonstration of the floating roadway concept on
completed. an intercountry scale.
2015 Mexican, United States, and Annual agreements govern the sale of water sup-
Canadian water grids fully plies throughout the continent, enabled by com-
coordinated. plex control of the pipeline network.
2017 Second National Infrastructure Renewal of the national program, with a new focus
Initiative (United States). on telecommunications, resources, and environ-
mental management.
2022 Demolition of the Olympic First demonstration of efficient construction materi-
Towers, New York. als reclamation on a skyscraper scale.
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Unrealized Hopes and Fears
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