Infrastructure value maximisation: overcoming the infrastructure valley of death

Abstract

The scale of projected infrastructure financing requirements is enormous and will lead to major impacts on both short-term and long-term sustainable development. The scale and rate of sustainable infrastructure deployment, and therefore the ability to transform a city radically to a liveable, sustainable and resilient form, are adversely impacted by a series of obstacles, typically referred to as the valley of death. These obstacles are described within the context of powerful economic paradigms that dominate the infrastructure investment environment, specifically those of macroeconomic approaches and basic economic theory; the growth paradigm; and the handicapping of entrepreneurial state activity. With a new form of state entrepreneurial leadership and restorative economic theory, it is argued that radical city transformation is possible and that the speed of transformation can be accelerated.