I've been thinking about a distinction between 'offensive' and 'defensive' infrastructure:

• Defensive: relieving a backlog or keeping pace with predictable growth
• Offensive: opening up a new opportunity space - e.g. a geographic region or economic sector

The end result of completing a defensive infrastructure project is simply maintenance of a status quo (avoiding a deterioration), rather than a leap forward. Defensive projects are necessary and worthwhile, but a patchwork of smaller-scale, easier-to-fund defensive projects may crowd out offensive projects that require higher political vision and a longer payoff time.

Examples

Offensive

• Archetypal project: US Transcontinental Railroad, opening up the American West for much faster settlement and growth

• China's construction on South China Sea islands

• Physical infrastructure for major new trade routes:

  • Belt and Road Initiative
  • US Interstate Highway System
  • Panama and Suez Canals
  • National Broadband Network (online commerce)

• Hoover Dam, Snowy Hydro, Israel National Water Carrier bringing water to new regions

  The Snowy: A History

• Major land reclamation, e.g. Netherlands Zuiderzee Works; hypothetical Atlantropa

• Enabling infrastructure for a new sector, e.g. space (Kennedy Space Center, Baikonur Cosmodrome) or nuclear (Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository - if it worked!)

• Technical infrastructure that enables new commerce sectors

  • GPS satellites

  • Rapid Earth observation satellites

    Planet Labs

  • Human Genome Project investment in sequencing technology

  • Other major research infrastructure

• Fictional examples from golden age scifi, e.g. space elevator, draining Mediterranean to create farmland, bridging the Gibraltar Strait — sometimes would be ecologically disastrous, but the scale of ambition is the key point

  We need more illustrations of optimistic technical futures

• Charter cities and neo-city projects like Brasilia or Masdar — noting that these often fall short in practice

• Depending on how you define 'infrastructure', might include major schemes of institution-building that create significant new opportunity for particular groups

  • Land-grant universities driving practical education
  • GI Bill, free higher education in other countries
  • A comprehensive childcare scheme that dramatically increases female workforce participation

• Disneyland (built among orange orchards and farmland) and Walt Disney World (built among swampland)

Defensive:

• Building new motorways or rail lines to relieve traffic congestion
  • Boston Big Dig
  • London Crossrail
  • Sydney Metro, WestConnex, etc
• Adding new runways to airports, or building the second or third airport in a city that already has one