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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.
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