Those on the front line of urban infrastructure management—municipal government and utility leaders—face the critical challenge of ensuring that cities and their water resources are ecologically sustainable and able to provide clean water for all beneficial uses. To do so, we must tap new ways of thinking about and responding to this challenge. Five areas in particular merit discussion.
Increasing the Social and Economic Benefits of Environmental Infrastructure
Reliability and compliance are the minimum expectation. We need to do more. Every project needs to be viewed as a multi-purpose, multi-benefit opportunity. We push the triple bottom line when addressing industry—challenging corporations to put more focus on the environmental and social returns they produce. We must also create greater economic and social returns from public projects designed primarily to protect and improve the environment. For example, how can we take the billions of dollars that will be spent on controlling combined sewer overflows and use those dollars to do more than simply hollow-out caverns underground?
Improving Collaboration Among Agencies and Jurisdictions
Every day we are addressing the convergence of urban utility functions. The most obvious example is the overlap and, in some cases, consolidation of water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities. But convergence goes beyond that. We need better inter-jurisdictional collaboration that facilitates integrated planning efforts, improved system modeling capabilities, and a sustained commitment to joint project planning, implementation, monitoring, and accountability for results. We are also seeing the erosion of governmental borders and legal property lines in favor of the softer natural transitions that define the boundaries of topography and ecosystems. Looking for watershed-based approaches in densely urbanized, multi-jurisdictional settings introduces changes, and sometimes incongruities, in the way individual stakeholders literally "see the world."
Making the Transition from Fast-Conveyance to Closed-Loop Systems
Almost everywhere, we are attempting to transition from "fast-conveyance" systems to more closed-loop, self-sufficient systems, and that is not easy. The increased demands for water reclamation and reuse create concerns about water quality and public health protection, while at the same time offering increased sustainability and greater independence from over-committed sources of supply. This public policy debate is far from over.
Introducing Public Stakeholders Into Technical Decision-Making
We are seeing a much more diverse group of community stakeholders participating in the public decision-making process and becoming increasingly well educated regarding complex technical issues and choices. This mandates structured, documented, and transparent decisionmaking combined with improved communication, simulation, and visualization tools for productive public stakeholder dialogue.
Leading in a Time of Rapidly Changing Priorities
Finally, I think that we are seeing a significant shift in the priorities placed on urban infrastructure, with the environment and energy moving ahead of mobility and economic growth in terms of their relative importance to the public. These priorities have been well documented. For example, the Center for American Progress (www.americanprogress.org) in its "Public Opinion Watch" cited the following from the 2005 Gallup Poll:
If there were ever a time to step forward and contribute to our understanding of what "sustainability" in urban infrastructure means, it is now. This means engineers, developers, architects, planners, and municipal leaders working together to define and achieve a new vision for our cities.