Three cheers for infrastructure maintenance and repair!

I

One of the ironies of infrastructure analysis is the finding that fixed infrastructures and continuous supply of services are saturated with and by contingencies, not least of which are shocks and surprises.

First, the fact that infrastructures involve on the ground assets has long been recognized as rendering them vulnerable to all manner of wider environmental contingencies:

Once developed, these infrastructural assets are difficult to relocate or repurpose. In effect, capital investments become affixed to specific built environments and localities, forming stable networks of spatial interdependence. These networks, on the one hand, facilitate circulation and accumulation by linking resource frontiers, but on the other, also expose capital to territorial and political contingencies inherent in fixed spatial arrangements. . .

(accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21622671.2025.2569670)

So too at the start of infrastructure development with the lag between investing in new infrastructures and their provision of critical services:

. . .investments were by their very nature ‘fixed’ at a certain point in time, introducing another source of uncertainty: when money was converted into physical means of production, it took an extended period of time before it began to deliver returns, but it was hard to predict all the changes that could occur while the investor was waiting to realise them.

(accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/?pc=1711, p. 29

That extended period of time includes the shocks and surprises that explain those much-recorded gaps between infrastructure plan and implementation and between implementation and actual operations of what are in practice and on the ground, interconnected critical infrastructures.

It is in this context of unpredictability and contingency that we must understand the role of “infrastructure maintenance and repair”–at least as actually undertaken during really-existing infrastructure operations. M&R is, if you will, the best proof we have about whether or not infrastructure operations survive the unholy trinity of: the solutionism of fool-proof designers and planners; “advanced” technologies introduced prematurely only to become obsolete earlier than expected; and our intensified dependence on the resulting kluge and amalgam for actual services in real time and over time.

II

So what?

Well, we at least have a different answer to why people seek first to restore the infrastructures they have, even when as bad as they have been. For example, why doesn’t the persisting prospect of catastrophic failures with catastrophic consequences of a magnitude 9 earthquake in Oregon and Washington State convince the populations concerned that the economic system that puts them in such a position must be changed before the worst happens? The answer: Because critical service restoration–from the Latin restaurare, to repair, re-establish, or rebuild–is the real-time priority for immediate response after a catastrophe.

Yes, let’s talk about replacing or repurposing the infrastructures we have before a catastrophe; yes, let’s talk about alternative systems with entirely different demands for maintenance and repair. But never forget that, when that catastrophe hits, the priority is to get back to where we were before the disaster, if only to repair what we what we are familiar with and know how to maintain thereafter.