Infrastructure Inequality Top Trumps
What does New York City and London have in common? Fame, yes. Fortune, yes. Inequality, you bet. Although the fable goes that in every game, there are winners and losers, here are two infrastructure projects that left shadows full of screaming whispers begging to be heard.
‘Life is just like a game,
First you have to learn rules of the game,
And then play it better then anyone else.’ — Albert Einstein
If life is a matter of probabilities, then one would assume that the everyone would benefit. However, when it comes to infrastructure engineering projects, the rewards are not evenly spread. Concurrent with similar tropes in inequality discussions, the private-focus of infrastructure projects contribute to the perpetuation of issues for low socio-economic classes and disenfranchised racial groups. This dissonance associates itself with the choices of those in power, their interests and influences weighed against the public need.
In association with that cheery introduction, I present to you the Infrastructure Inequality Top Trumps. Two infrastructure projects branded for the majority, built for the minority which represent the inequalities sustained by large-scale investment in the private interest.
New York City
Both The BIG U and Hunts Point Lifelines entered a funding competition called Rebuild by Design in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The BIG U, the brainchild of Bjarke Ingels, aims to enclose Lower Manhattan with soft engineering in the form of parks. Protecting the financial district from flooding and storm surge while still fostering social and community activity during non-emergencies.
Hunts Point Lifelines are a series of small projects designed to be a socially-integrated environmental protection plan. Proposals intended to create jobs, enhance infrastructure links and become energy-independent.
Downtown Manhattan is home to the New York Stock Exchange. Real estate is extortionately expensive and a hub for tourism. The average household income is $164,000, with the second-highest non-Hispanic population at 48%.
Hunts Point in the Bronx. It is home to NYC’s largest food distribution centre which narrowly missed being destroyed during Hurricane Sandy. The average household income is $39,000 with 97% Black and Hispanic population.
The BIG U received $335mn, funded by the US Department for Housing and Urban Development.
Hunts Point Lifelines received $20mn.
London
The Garden Bridge, idealised by British actress Joanna Lumley, aimed to replicate the Millennium Bridge in purpose (traffic-free, pedestrianised) with an urban park feel.
The Silvertown Tunnel is the culmination of a transport strategy headache passed from one Mayor to the next. Its inception was in search of an alternative to Blackwall Tunnel, the bane of all South-East Londoners’ existence.
South-East London is the home to TfL poverty. I grew up in Bexley, a London borough without a tube line. Our connection to London by road is the Blackwall Tunnel and Dartford crossing. Both are highly congested, leading to illegal levels of air pollution and destroying the sanctity of suburban living.
The Garden Bridge was abandoned in 2017. Of the £53mn spent, £43mn came from the public hole-in-the-wall.
The Silvertown Tunnel construction has yet to start.
The pressing need for the Silvertown Tunnel persisted over the hype of the Garden Bridge. This is not to say that the tunnel is a legitimate solution, instead to say that hype only lasts so long without delivery.
These questions remain:
How do these public-private partnerships justify their allocation of resources?
What about the elected public interest?
How can these ignored groups take action?
Here’s my take and what it means for the future of innovation and inequality.
Justify By Any Means Necessary
Under the guise of scientific authority, the public is seen as uninformed actors that have no expertise. In this framing, society is to be told how to live, act and behave.
Given this reality, infrastructure projects are marketed and branded to appeal in the public interest where authoritative bodies flout justifications and refutations in favour of their initiative. This tactic can be excellently viewed in the podcast below with Neil deGrasse Tyson where he compares a NASA space mission to citizen spending on lip balm products.
The conflation of two lines of enquiry: public taxes spent on the space programme versus decisions by citizens to where they spend the rest of their disposable income is grossly misleading.
If successful, these dangerous characterisations of speaking in the public interest, code an acceptance of similar future projects that disguise inequality through branding, an imaginary communal goal, and that everyone can win. Such a mindset leads us to question when exactly are bodies working in public interest if they are at all.
Modular Public Interest
The boundaries between private and public are not as clear cut as it seems. Private bodies fund public projects; likewise, public bodies fund private ventures. It’s part of a fluid process full of negotiations, bargains, promises and expectations. The political economy of infrastructure projects has very little to do with the outcomes of those partnerships.
While Hunts Point Lifelines and Silvertown Tunnel look to reinforce the climate and transport resilience, respectively, the framing of the BIG U and the Garden Bridge matched the problems and interests of the invested stakeholders.
Relatedly, there is a difference in the operation of scale. While Hunts Point Lifelines and Silvertown Tunnel aim to alleviate a local problem, the BIG U and Garden Bridge are flamboyant efforts at competing in a global market. The reason for taller buildings, largest structures, a glorified park and floating garden are not exploits that stretch the boundaries of engineering; they have political motivations and ones that silence the people most in need.
In visualising the debate this way, it’s easier to see how public interest is a modular process. It’s compartmentalised into necessities to remain globally prominent in direct competition with necessities for survival.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. Some believe that local issues are paramount to the human progression, and for those groups who lack the paternal figure to assist integration into society; there is an alternative.
Rules Were Made To Be Broken
The benefit of such approach correctly assigns the actors to the project. Through what I’ve written already, projects like the BIG U and the Garden Bridge are internationally-recognised projects marketed towards local people but serving global relationships. What we see here is the opposite. Local projects, local leaders, local solutions. The community created from such resistance mechanisms re-write the rule book on innovation.
It was through lobbying that Hunts Point residents secured the $20mn in funding to support their Lifelines project. Projects like the South Bronx Community Resiliency Agenda run by Hunts Point grassroots organisation, The Point, keep the focus on the urgency of the climate resilience debate by engaging other neighbourhoods in pooling resources, labour and expertise.
The continuation of this work will help residents realise their own future, believe in the community spirit and keep the spark alive for a stronger and safer future. In the absence of central government guidance, such efforts are the source of survival.
There is no easy solution here. The blurring between public and private interests leave a lot to be desired. While the idealism of grassroots innovation promises so much, it would be naive to believe it as a silver bullet.
The politics are messy. Inequality persists. The non-cooperative game continues, but to problematise Albert Einstein: where does the buck stop and can those disenfranchised by the system ever outplay the creators of the game?