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 'co rridor' for moving goods, services and people, or is it a 'conduit' fo r the movement of energy, water, waste and telecommunications along a complex lattice of pipes, cables, wires and sewers? Privatisation of t hese networks has, however, transformed the debates about the provisio n and management of networked infrastructure in cities. Under the road the privatised utilities are digging hundreds of thousands of holes a s they renew and repair old networks, and there are also several billi on pounds of new investment in cable, telecommunications, energy and t ransit networks. On the road surface pressures are also increasing as traffic growth, pedestrianisation schemes and new transit investment a re all fighting for precious road space. This creates the curious para dox of private utility companies operating in what is still effectivel y a publicly owned good-the road network. The New Roads and Street Wor ks Act is supposed to 'balance' competing demands for space appears to be overtaken by the relentless drive to fit new infrastructure networ ks 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 l ocal government policy-makers need to develop a new sensitivity to the opportunities that are opening up around the superimposition of netwo rks and the convergence between different forms of infrastructure; bot h have implications for strategic urban management. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.