What Is Remedial Secondary Infrastructure? Implications for Infrastructure Design, Policy for Sustainability, and Resilience

Abstract

The phenomenon of remedial secondary infrastructure (RSI) is omnipresent in cities of developing nations where the municipality has provided basic primary infrastructure (often in a largerscaled central network design), but these services are viewed as inconsistent and unreliable. Consequently, in response, individual households privately purchase additional infrastructure services to correct, or remediate, the already provided for primary infrastructure—hence the name remedial secondary infrastructure. RSI affects all socioeconomic levels, and has profound implications for the day-to-day quality of life for citizens, as well as economic and environmental impacts and the resilience of cities. Yet, RSI has not been defined, or specifically discussed, in the context of infrastructure policy and design. The existence of RSI represents a failed primary delivery of basic services in terms of quality and/or reliability to the household, and also indicates that residents have developed a long-standing mistrust that an infrastructure system could be maintained without RSI. This communication presents (1) a definition of RSI; (2) clarifying RSI unique characteristics; and (3) implications for future infrastructure design and policy.