Flipping Book | 110 years of future | Salini Impregilo Library

21 20 of public policy and capital that challenged every city, much as is the case, on a much larger scale, in modern-day Mumbay, Lagos, and Sao Paolo. But technological advances helped overcome some of the hardest problems, for instance, the introduction of drinking water chlorination in the first decades of the twentieth century. Similarly, urban traffic problems became increasing- ly pressing. In 1850 the railway terminals around London’s center created ever-worse congestion. The first underground railway, all of six kilometers long from Farringdon to King’s Cross, was opened in 1863. It was steam-operated, but its enormous suc- cess led to decades of further construction. The Lon- don system was wholly financed by private funds, but Acts of Parliament helped coordinate and cre- ate a more coherent plan. It took another full two decades to complete the so-called Inner Circle of tube lines in Central London. Between the first un- derground railway and 1914, the technology used in digging tunnels improved rapidly, and construc- tion costs declined accordingly. Rider comfort and maintenance costs were vastly improved when the existing network was electrified in the first years of the twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1914, similar systems came into operation in Paris, New York, Berlin and many other major cities. Moscow’s system, still one of the world’s most magnificent pie- ces of urban infrastructure, was built in the 1930s as part of Stalin’s five-year plans. Interestingly enough, modern technology also creat- ed many options for private transportation including not only the automobile but also two-wheeled per- sonal transport, both motorized and non-motorized. As a result, infrastructural investment in urban mass transit was neglected, and in some cases entire sys- tems were dismantled in the United States in the twentieth century, so that Los Angeles has no system to speak of and Chicago’s and New York’s com- muters suffer from technologically obsolete run-down and shabby public transport systems. By contrast, China, a nation that has regarded infrastructural investment as almost synonymous with economic development, can boast some of the world’s most sophisticated and advanced urban and intercity transportation systems even if they are not always economically viable (such as Shanghai’s pioneering magnetic levitation train line). Some developing na- tions are following suit (e.g. Jakarta’s Mass Rapid Transit system, currently under construction), but in much of the rapidly urbanizing developing world such needed projects still seem too costly and polit- ically unfeasible, and severe congestion will in all likelihood remain an inevitable part of daily life. The paradigmatic synergy that occurred in this age between technology and infrastructure was most pronounced in the electrical industry. The upshot of the late Tom Hughes’s magisterial Networks of Power might well have been that whosoever says networks says infrastructure. Electrification required a grid of electrical wires, transformers, generators, and a great deal of coordination. As Hughes point- ed out, electricity involved “systems building,” and because it was a “technology not of concentration but of distribution,” as another historian put it, its needs for infrastructural investment were unusually high. It required close cooperation between three kinds of experts: pure scientists and mathematicians, practical inventors without necessarily much theo- retical knowledge but with a good “feel” for what worked, and entrepreneurs and organizers such as Emil Rathenau and Samuel Insull. Infrastructural investment required not only large amounts of capital, but also standardization. In England, for example, Charles Merz spent many years trying to persuade Parliament to standardize voltages, but not until the Electricity Act of 1926 was this seriously attempted. Earlier, the railroad industry struggled to settle on a standard gauge the distance between the rails, and it took many decades until most countries settled on the standard gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches (1.435 millimeters). The high cost of infrastructural investment for network technologies meant that urban, high-density areas were much earlier to connect to the electric grid and the telephone network than more remote rural areas. In the United States, a major push was made to connect rural areas under President Roosevelt’s new deal under the Rural Electrification Act of 1935, part of the New Deal. In four years, the number of farms connected to the electric grid in the United States doubled. Even so, in 1940, while 96 percent of all urban U.S. households had access to electric lighting, only 31 percent of all rural farms did. The same was true for another networked service, run- ning water. In 1940, 93 percent of urban house- holds had running water, but only 18 percent of rural farms did. The investment in urban water and sewage works became all the more urgent when the connection between contaminated water and infec- tious disease was realized in the second half of the nineteenth century. Infrastructural technology at times allowed it to achieve unprecedented successes, for example through the chlorination and fluoridization of drinking water, but could also misfire dramatically as the many cases of lead poisoning attest. After 1945, infrastructure and technology teamed up in new ways. The rapid expansion of civil avia- tion after World War II presents a fascinating illus- tration of the many ways in which the free market and the public sector can intersect and cooperate in creating and maintaining infrastructures. Airlines in many countries were state-owned or private but reg- ulated companies, whereas the facilities they used, such as airports and air traffic control, remained wholly in the public sector. The degree of regulation that government imposed on airlines differed across countries and over time. Deregulation became com- mon in the 1980s and 1990s, but the public good characteristics of infrastructural investment meant that the government was never altogether out of the picture. Privatization and deregulation of public utilities and transport networks became much more popular, but in the long run some level of regulation remained inevitable. The United States dismantled its Civil Aviations Board in 1985, which had tight- ly regulated airlines since 1938, but the American Federal Aviation Administration is still supervising much of the work of the airline industry. The same is true in communications: phone and cable compa- nies may be private and competitive, but many of the rules are still set by the Federal Communications Commission and its equivalents in Europe (for exam- ple, BEREC). Even when privatized, companies that provide in- frastructural services are still different from other pri- vate companies. Economies of scale driven by large fixed costs and the very large capital requirements mean that the number of firms is usually small. Only large firms have access to the very large quantities of capital needed to run such industries. The airline sector in the United States is now almost entirely served by four giant companies. The same is true for TV cable networks. Antitrust authorities have kept a vigilant eye on their competitiveness, as such com- panies often engage in collusion. Technological change can deeply disrupt and threat- en even the most deeply entrenched infrastructure. Perhaps the most dramatic disruption has occurred in one of the oldest and most venerable parts of infrastructure: the postal system. A combination of technological shocks has made deep dents in this service, and there is serious doubt whether it can survive. Unlike the railroad network, which in many parts of the world was able to adapt to new technol- ogies and build faster and more comfortable trains, the postal service has been unable to compete with email and electronic payments. In the future, new technology will keep disrupting whatever equilibrium emerges between overhead capital and other assets. For example, infrastructural investment in land-line telephony, once an indispen- sable condition for the establishment of a communi- cations network, has been disrupted by the emer- gence of cellular telephones, which have allowed many developing countries to leapfrog over this very costly investment. It seems at least possible that the same may happen to the power grid: if the cost of solar paneling keeps declining, the electrical infra- structure may have to change dramatically and pos- sibly may transform into a back-up source of domes- tic power (normally generated by the households themselves) rather than the chief source of household power. Even the transportation network, once the backbone of any nation’s infrastructure, may eventu- ally see its role dramatically changed. If improved communications technology will indeed make tele- commuting and high-bandwidth electronic meetings a reality, and if our culture adapts sufficiently to ac- cept those as a substitute for most actual meetings in which participants are physically present, our de- pendence on a transport network may be replaced by a demand for ever-higher bandwidth. Whether or not we will experience “the Death of Distance” in Frances Cairncross’s famous phrase, infrastructure will be continually disrupted and transformed by our ever growing technological sophistication.