Infrastructure

This book provides an overview and assessment of infrastructure¿s legal and governance underpinnings.

Infrastructure is often thought of as a term referring only to the physical entities ¿ pipes, cables, utility poles, highways, airports ¿ that facilitate the transmission of water, gas, telecommunications and electricity, as well as enabling both private and public transportation, and serving to house more or less public services such as health care and schools. However, infrastructure planning and implementation are not reducible to bricks and mortar. The complex process requires drawing from and sometimes re-inventing or recycling legal tools, from construction contracts to financing ¿deals¿, which are often taken for granted by both practitioners and urban studies scholars. These are as important today as they were when the first railway lines were built, and to a large extent they remain just as invisible: the avalanche of drawings and photographs of planned or in-process