Infrastructure Renovation & Replacement

Your community's sustainable revitalization program should eventually encompass your entire region for maximum effectiveness.

But, it can start with a primary focus on any of the 12 sectors of restorable assets, at any scale.  One of the best starting points for regional renewal is infrastructure.  Water and transportation infrastructure are often the best candidates for integrated regional renewal programs.  Water quality/quantity issues and public transit challenges can motivate jurisdictions to work together when nothing else will.  

If you've already got a strong infrastructure renewal organization or agency, it could be an ideal sponsor for your community's Real Revitalization Program.  Is this organization trusted and effective?  Does it wish to take a larger role in the community's future? If so, sponsoring the Real Revitalization Program is also the best way to help it create (or become) a revitalization forum. 

A revitalization forum is a permanent public-private organization that supports an ongoing revitalization program.  [Note: Readers of reWealth (McGraw-Hill, 2008) will recognize this type of organization as what that book technically referred to as a "renewal engine". It was revealed as the key factor behind the most dramatic urban regeneration success stories documented in reWealth.]

Definition & overview: There's no formal, universally-accepted definition of infrastructure.  Our working definition is "everything that connects our built environment and allows flows: flows of vehicles, pedestrians, power, information, solid waste, water, and sewage."  There are other categories of infrastructure that are either highly specialized (such as security infrastructure), or are new concepts. 

An example of the latter is "green infrastructure", which recognizes that the majority of critical assets upon which we rely, such as air, fresh water, food, etc. are services provided by ecosystems. The phrase "green infrastructure" was coined in order to motivate  society to take the maintenance and restoration of these assets seriously. We tend to take them for granted, expending the majority of our funds on built infrastructure, when renewal of green infrastructure (such as watersheds), is often a far more efficient and effective way to achieve the desired result.