Soft and hard infrastructure co-production and lock-in: the challenges for a post-carbon city

Abstract

Moving to post-carbon cities involves more than changing fuel sources. It requires deep and complex changes to city systems, and to the architecture of global economic activity. The economic primacy of city systems that has been enabled by a once in 30 million year energy source is also invisibly a result of the development of hard and soft infrastructures of sociotechnical systems. Soft infrastructures are the codes, conventions, rules and policies that both guide the specifications of hard infrastructures (road widths and surface depths of materials, pipe sizes for sewage sanitation, specifications on pipe thickness and valves for gas pipelines) and their context as in city zoning policies that specify land uses, transportation plans that allocate roads and types of roads (and width) and their locations, or policies that decouple energy generation from energy distribution, as in the case of electricity in many industrialized countries. This relationship between hard and soft infrastructures is ubiquitous-there can be no hard infrastructure without a soft one. Airports cannot function without rules about air traffic. The soft infrastructures of air traffic rules are determined by the International Air Transport Association, made up of members from around the world who participate in working groups to develop codes and conventions including the hard infrastructures of airports such as landing strip widths and lengths. Global economic growth and the concentration of peoples in cities are predicated on the ability to exploit fossil energy. Its malleability, transportability, plasticity and enormous energetic content have enabled humans to transform the globe and increase economic activity to a level never before seen.