Urban infrastructure: The contemporary conflict between roads and utilities

British cities are the site of a new form of intense competition for a scarce resource-the gap under the road. Is the road essentially a 'corridor' for moving goods, services and people, or is it a 'conduit' for the movement of energy, water, waste and telecommunications along a complex lattice of pipes, cables, wires and sewers? Privatisation of these networks has, however, transformed the debates about the provision and management of networked infrastructure in cities. Under the road the privatised utilities are digging hundreds of thousands of holes as they renew and repair old networks, and there are also several billion pounds of new investment in cable, telecommunications, energy and transit networks. On the road surface pressures are also increasing as traffic growth, pedestrianisation schemes and new transit investment are all fighting for precious road space. This creates the curious paradox of private utility companies operating in what is still effectively a publicly owned good-the road network. The New Roads and Street Works Act is supposed to 'balance' competing demands for space appears to be overtaken by the relentless drive to fit new infrastructure networks into cities and privatise key aspects of highways provision. There are major difficulties sharing out this limited space under the city. The emergence of new horizontally organised regional utility companies providing water, waste, energy and telecommunications services could generate more effective coordination cross the networks. Central and local government policy-makers need to develop a new sensitivity to the opportunities that are opening up around the superimposition of networks and the convergence between different forms of infrastructure; both have implications for strategic urban management. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.