The future of public works
On community-scale solar, Housing First, and the things we ought to consider having public works departments care for in our cities
For all of the jokes made not that long ago about a mythical “Infrastructure Week”, there really is a serious effort made each May to mark “Public Works Week”. The job of a public works department varies from municipality to municipality, but by and large they are organized around maintaining a community’s physical infrastructure assets, like streets, stormwater systems, and often utilities like water and wastewater service.
■ What’s interesting to contemplate is how that definition could meaningfully and usefully evolve with time. Community-scale solar power, for instance, was economically infeasible not that long ago. Today, it’s not only much more affordable than ever, it might actually serve a very sensible public interest to install some forms of it as a means of achieving greater community resilience to various forms of natural and human-made disaster. As infrastructure, it could well fall under the public works umbrella.
■ Similarly, there could be other physical assets that might make economic sense at the community level that look like good candidates for “public works”, even if they’re not conventional. Improved weather forecasting and structural engineering science have made community-scale storm shelters or safe rooms into useful public assets in some places. Those certainly look like infrastructure.
■ So, potentially, do some approaches to “Housing First” strategies as a response to homelessness. In many cases, the chronically homeless take up temporary shelter in places already under the care of public works agencies (like bridges and sidewalks). It’s not unimaginable that some communities could decide to put the upkeep of shelter arrangements under a public works department.
■ As it becomes evident that we may well be closing in on a global population peak but with no letup in the continued expansion of urbanization, it makes sense not to pigeon-hole public works just to what we recognize now, but to think about what physical assets might be useful and desirable now and into the future. Good community resilience planning has never been more important, and changing economic and geopolitical circumstances ought to press us to think about what ideas and projects make sense now that may never have crossed our minds before.
