Infrastructure Planning and Finance: A Smart and Sustainable Guide for Local Practitioners By Vicki Elmer and Adam Leigland

Abstract

Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 27, 2014 Infrastructure Planning and Finance: A Smart and Sustainable Guide for Local Practitioners By Vicki Elmer and Adam Leigland, with contributions by Peter Hendee Brown, Peter Hall, Jeff Loux, and Jeffery Vincent Routledge, 2014 Reviewed by Hannah Clark Over the past decade, local, state, federal, and international entities have stressed the deteriorating state of infrastructure in the United States. While funding has often been named as the culprit, in Infrastructure Planning and Finance: A Smart and Sustainable Guide for Local Practitioners, Elmer and Leigland argue that the current failures in US infrastructure can also be attributed to a lack of coordination at the local, regional, and national scales to ensure that infrastructure investments reflect the dynamic and interconnected nature of today’s society. This textbook provides a historical and current analysis of infrastructure in the United States, clearly identifying the array of challenges and proposing an integrated vision to shift thinking on traditional infrastructure paradigms. Elmer and Leigland look at infrastructure systems, challenges facing them, and potential solutions exclusively from the perspective of the local practitioner, by which the authors mean anyone from a city planner to a director of public works to a mayor. The authors do not assume a baseline understanding of infrastructure planning and finance. Rather, they use an approachable format to provide a basic understanding of policy, regulation, and the range of systems that build the base for infrastructure in the United States. While the authors go to great lengths to cover the basics of infrastructure planning in the context of local practitioners, they also propose a paradigm shift in thinking on infrastructure provision. The authors describe this view as an interdisciplinary approach that analyzes infrastructure from a systems point of view. They write, “Just as smart growth has emphasized the conscious use of land, so smart and sustainable infrastructure emphasizes the conscious look at synergies between systems to develop infrastructure that respects the metabolism of the city (xvii).” This vision suggests that their description and analysis of infrastructure systems would extend beyond the basics of efficient and effective provision of infrastructure and provide the local practitioner with feasible pathways to establish this new infrastructure paradigm. While the authors provide a comprehensive look at the state of infrastructure in the United States and the mechanisms governing its