In yesterday’s post I said good system design in infrastructure is not enough.
We can have an efficient, well structured and resilient system that still contributes to life destruction rather than creating thriving.
To understand why, we need to consider what the infrastructure does.
We can think of infrastructure as neutral: a set of pipes, wires, roads, channels and rails that move things around.
But infrastructure is not neutral.
Rather, it is the arteries and veins that determine the metabolism of the economy — the scale and speed at which energy and materials are pumped around and consumed.
Some types of infrastructure enable a very high metabolic rate:
- Motorways enable high-speed movement of energy intensive vehicles.
- Shipping container infrastructure allows the fast movement of materials and goods around the world.
- Global finance networks allow the astonishingly fast transfer of wealth from one place to another.
From an engineering perspective, these systems can be design to be very efficient and resilient.
But if they are contributing to an economy whose metabolic rate exceeds its ecosystem limits, then the systems is going to run into trouble.
Just as for an athlete, a high metabolic rate can sustain a greater power only for so long before the negative side effects take over: fatigue, injury and build up of lactic acid, which is effectively a poison.
The same is true for our economies.
If the flow of energy and materials through the system exceeds what the ecosystem can sustain, the consequences will catch up: climate breakdown, ecosystem collapse and resource instability.
So this raises important questions for infrastructure designers: are we building systems that push the metabolic rate beyond what the ecosystem can support? Or are we building systems that enable us to thrive within our ecosystem limits?
The transport corridor revisited
Let’s return to the example yesterday of the transport corridor connecting neighbouring cities.
From a traditional engineering perspective we might aim to increase the speed of connection, the capacity and the reliability. These moves all increase the metabolic rate of the economy — in other words, how intensively it can operate.
But what if we were designing infrastructure for an economy that lived within its ecological ceiling? What kind of systems would we build? What pattens would we adopt?
Would we still be trying to maximise speed, throughput and reliability?
Or would be trying to design a different kind of economic metabolism altogether?
Instead of concentrating flows through a few giant nodes, systems might be more distributed. Instead of bypassing places in the pursuit of speed, routes might pass through them, allowing exchange to happen along the way. Instead of friction being treated as a failure of the system, some forms of friction can allow local economies and ecosystems to interact.
These kinds of systems often move materials and people more slowly. But they also tend to operate at a lower metabolic intensity, offering the potential of living well, well within our limits.
The sprint or the long run
Perhaps the difference is something like the metabolism of a sprinter compared to that of a long-distance runner.
A sprinter’s body produces extraordinary bursts of power, but only for short periods before metabolic limits appear.
Endurance athletes operate at a lower intensity but can sustain activity for much longer.
Our infrastructure choices raise a similar question for the economy.
Are we building the metabolism of a sprinter economy — high throughput, high energy and short bursts of performance?
Or the metabolism of an endurance economy — one that can sustain prosperity over the long run?