What Counts as Infrastructure In Philadelphia, what counts as infrastructure? What deserves repair and maintenance?
by A.L. McCullough, Daniel Flinchbaugh, and Ari Vamos
AMERICAN INFRASTRUCTURE THROUGH THE LENS OF THE BIPARTISAN INFRASTRUCTURE FRAMEWORK
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n November 15, 2021, after more than six months of debate, President Biden signed H.R. 3684, more commonly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF), into law.1 What the BIF includes and doesn’t include, what it prioritizes and doesn’t, illustrates what constitutes infrastructure in the American political imagination. Infrastructure is not an objective term; rather, it represents a collective agreement about which aspects of the built environment sustain life and deserve continual repair. Using the BIF as a view into this political imagination, we see that some physical assets are understood as essential for the collective life of the nation–bridges, for example–while other places and systems get left behind—such as public schools. The BIF negotiations ended with a total of $3.2 billion dollars for bridge repair and maintenance over five years, the largest investment in bridges since the inauguration of the interstate highway system.2 Meanwhile, schools were parsed out a meager sum. The BIF’s investments in schools are drops in the bucket: so-called clean buses, eliminating lead contamination in school drinking water, and grants for energy efficiency improvements, renewable energy improvements, and an energy efficiency materials pilot program.3 These programs hardly represent a landmark investment in public school facilities across the country. This is not to say that the crumbs of BIF won’t improve schools—lead-free drinking water is both a necessity and a right. But this is a marginal investment in programs which, without full funding, programmatic and technical support, will not last beyond five or ten years. - 24 -