Event Owners:
IHEEM
2 Abingdon House
Cumberland Business Centre,
Northumberland Road,
Portsmouth, Hants,
PO5 1DS. Tel. 023 9282 3186
office@iheem.org.uk
www.iheem.org.uk
Infrastructure is More Than Material
Time: 10:30 am - 10:55 am
Date: 08 Oct 2024
This paper draws on my doctoral research titled Infrastructure is More than Material, which considers the impact of infrastructure on society and is concerned with human interaction with infrastructure. The research reflects critically on many years working as an engineer delivering projects in ports and transport, water and sanitation, education and health in post-apartheid South Africa.
My argument is influenced by the growing body of interdisciplinary work in the fields of infrastructure and science studies in the humanities and considers the question of post-apartheid infrastructures’ legacies. As Zannah Matson argues in her review of the edited monograph The Promise of Infrastructure, infrastructure (and its promise) structures our relationship to the future and allows us to think ‘alongside the unfinished and interrupted forms that infrastructures often take’.
My paper explores aspects of the unfinished using notions of human-centred design in public infrastructure and the importance of involving the ‘users’ and ‘beneficiaries’ in infrastructure development and delivery. Infrastructure has a profound impact on society, socially and economically, and has been promised as an effective driver of economic growth. Yet depending how it is delivered, the infrastructure capital spent can produce significant human and social assets, in addition to the physical facilities.
Increasingly in South Africa we are seeing facilities fall into disrepair. We see infrastructure that is not used as intended, that doesn’t provide the socio-economic benefits that were intended. For example, a power system that only provides intermittent electricity to businesses severely limits the economy. We see vandalism to socioeconomic infrastructure and in the past schools damaged in protest action.
How do factors such as governance and funding models, design considerations, project implementation methodologies, operational and maintenance policies affect the promise of infrastructural change and facility longevity?
SPEAKERS
Katherine Roper Registered Professional Civil Engineer - Kate Roper Consulting
« Back