Excerpt
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.
About the Author
Hannah Clark holds her MCP from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.