Maintenance and Neglect of Infrastructure

Maintenance and Neglect of Infrastructure The main thesis evinced in Bratland's "Capital concepts as insights into the maintenance and neglect of infrastructure" is that the maintenance of public infrastructure ultimately necessitates provisioning such facilities to private ownership. The author is postulating the viewpoint that public creations such as bridges, levees, roads, and other things that are a vital part of the infrastructure of a city are almost always neglected.

Moreover, he believes that such neglect is due in no small part to the fact that because everyone has access to such infrastructure, there is no true sense of ownership on the part of public entities -- namely the government and the various people appointed to political positions within it. The author therefore believes that if public infrastructure was ultimately given private ownership, individuals would tend to maintain that infrastructure in much the same way that they maintain their other private assets.

There are two primary arguments that Bratland utilizes to buttress his thesis. What is interesting about these arguments is that they serve to facilitate a sort of process of elimination type of logic whereas the author reasons that since these two common perceptions of public infrastructure and its maintenance do not work, it is necessary to assign that infrastructure to private ownership. The first of these arguments is that the notion that public infrastructure ultimately leads to a metaphoric form of public capital is false.

Additionally, the author states that such beliefs are not only untrue, but they also contribute significantly to the state of neglect found within public infrastructure in contemporary times. He draws a parallel between public and private capital, and denotes that the latter is almost always prudently maintained since it relates to income and assets and positive markings on a private entity's balance sheet. The same, however, does not apply to public entities, which is why the author believes private ownership of public infrastructure is needed.

The other central argument the author propagates to demonstrate the validity of his thesis is related to the notion of "political and bureaucratic capitol" (Bratland, 2010, p. 35). Essentially this idea is that it is to the advantage of the political careers for politicians and bureaucrats to attempt to maintain public infrastructure to the best of their abilities. However, the author notes that despite the widespread pervasiveness of this idea, the maintenance of public infrastructure in and of itself is not directly related to amassing political capital for bureaucrats and politicians.

This argument is best supported by the reality that the current state of infrastructure in the U.S. -- which is functional yet hardly stable -- attests to the fact that politicians and bureaucrats are not intrinsically linked to the state of infrastructure in the county. Moreover, the general public tends to consider its infrastructure only in those rare instances in which there are disasters, so if anything infrastructure is considered somewhat noxious to the political career of these people, and something they want.