Public Works Past and Future: A brief reflection Charles David Jacobson, Ph.D. Senior Research Associate, Morgan Angel & Associates Washington, D.C. Past President, Public Works Historical Society ecause I am a former president of the Public Works Historical Society and a historian who has devoted much of his career to the study of the history of public works and urban technology issues, the reader of this brief reflection would be entitled to expect that I am concerned with preserving great public works structures and commemorating great public works achievements of the past. This assumption would not be entirely incorrect. The history of public works, however, is about far more than the preserving of dusty artifacts and the placing of markers on old buildings and bridges. Thinking about public works developments over long periods of time and about circumstances faced by public works developers in the past can also be a source of insight into present-day opportunities for change and improvement. After all, that graceful old bridge that still carries traffic today, those ancient water mains that (mostly) do not rupture, and those subway escalators that somehow never work when one is on one’s way to work—all of them were new once upon a time. A few individual thoughts that come to mind include the following: 1. If nothing else, the study of the past teaches that thinking about the future matters. Although conditions and tastes change over time in ways which can be difficult to predict, public works known to be well made and beautiful at the time they are
built do, in fact, usually serve future needs more successfully than public works built with little thought and on the cheap. 2. Infrastructure and public works systems can be very powerful means of shaping the futures of the places in which we live. The very fixed character of roads, rail transit systems, and other such permanent installations is important in this regard. Because such infrastructure cannot be easily moved, owners of property along their routes can more safely make long-term plans for the development of their parcels. 3. Just as the present is different than the past, the future will be different than the present. This has implications for the design of facilities, e.g., making allowances in designs for additions of capacity or for possible changes in use can be of great service to people down the road. It can also be wise to think about designing facilities in ways which make allowances for inevitable breakdowns. In the case of the Washington, D.C. Metro system, for example, system builders during the middle and later decades of the twentieth century chose to locate some stations very deep underground and to rely on escalators to transport passengers to and from street level. So long as the escalators function, the system works reasonably well. Unfortunately, the escalators often don’t… 4. Thought also needs to be given to implications of change for
the workings of ownership and regulatory arrangements. In the case of fixed and long-lived systems such as roads, bridges, rail transit systems, and water works, for example, historical experience demonstrates that even the most carefully specified long-term lease or private ownership arrangement can be rendered obsolete and dysfunctional by changing conditions and unexpected developments. In sum, the history of public works can be an unmatched source of perspective and insight into the dynamic character of public works issues and the importance of planning for the future in making public works decisions. Historical study can also be a useful source of humility on the inevitability of unpredictable change and unexpected outcomes and the folly of easy assumptions that the future will be just like the present. Think fifty or a hundred years back in time and it can help you think fifty or a hundred years forward as well. Your great grandchildren, if they are not too busy playing the computer (or whatever) games of the future, will thank you. Charles David Jacobson, Ph.D., is a former president of the Public Works Historical Society; a Senior Associate with Morgan Angel & Associates, LLC; and the author of Ties That Bind: Economic and Political Dilemmas of Urban Utility Networks, 1800-1990. He can be reached at (202) 265-1833 or charles@ morganangel.com.
June 2012 APWA Reporter
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