I’ve just come back from Sri Lanka and it was fascinating looking at a country that has had significant colonial development and infrastructure in its history, but has recently been through 25 years of civil unrest. They appear to be a nation that is struggling with understanding how to build quality infrastructure.
People still live in tin sheds built by the British in the late 19th Century. The Galle Fort built by the Portuguese and the Dutch in the 16th and 17th Centuries withstood the Boxing Day tsunami, while the rest of Galle was washed away. Are we, as a global society losing the ability to design and build quality infrastructure?
The east coast of Australia is currently having the discussion regarding building a high speed rail line to connect Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, but the adversaries’ simple statement is, it is not economically feasible. When was it decided that infrastructures’ main role was to make a profit rather than support society?
When I look at Sri Lanka and the colonial infrastructure that is now 300-400 years old and is still in every day use, and I look at the infrastructure in Melbourne, for example the Monash freeway upgrade that is less than 5 years old, I wonder what is missing from our design process. We have a better understanding of the laws of nature, we have a better understanding of materials and how they react to the laws of nature, we have access to some fantastic synthetic materials, yet the Monash is already disintegrating in 3 places that I know of. In what state will it be in 25 years?
We designed and constructed the Melbourne Star, only to have it pulled down after the first summer due to structural flaws, what are we doing wrong?
The Romans build aqueducts, bridges and roads throughout their empire, how much profit did they make from these investments? Sure labour was cheap, but building 3,200 km of road in Britain alone is a massive undertaking. It was obviously about something more intangible than money. Maybe it was to ensure their army could always get to the front line and that supplies could be brought forward en masse. Maybe it was done in an attempt to pacify the locals. Maybe it was done as part of some ego power play to show all their rivals how big and important they were. Whatever the reason, the result was they built infrastructure that was quality to its core.
Sadly, I am not a discipline that understands the term quality. I am a computer systems engineer, and as I am sure we all accept, computers are constantly changing, upgrading and are generally unreliable. What is even sadder is that society has been conditioned to accept this poor performance, Microsoft has been key in generating this tolerance, while Apple attempted to fight against it. Is it our dependence on transient unreliable technology that has lead us to accepting the same standards in our infrastructure? Or that we are used to building something new every 6 months, so it does not occur to us to build something that will be viable in 50 years or 100 years.
I don’t have an answer as to the why, but I do know that we cannot continue down this path of short sightedness. We cannot continue to develop housing estates on flood plains simply because it hasn’t rained in 10 years, we cannot write off a mode of transport which could support nearly 80% of our population and freight needs because it costs a lot. We need to start thinking bigger picture, longer term, and look at the effect on society now and in the future.
Infrastructure is not about polls or elections, it’s about people!
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