Infrastructures (Architecture)

Megaproject Planning and Management: Essential Readings contains the seminal articles from the growing body of research on megaproject planning and management along with an original introduction by the editor, Bent Flyvbjerg. The leading and most cited authority in the field, Flyvbjerg has used crowdsourcing and 25 years of experience to cherry-pick from several hundred articles and books the writings that define the field. This volume will be an indispensable source for those wishing to speak with authority about how megaprojects are prepared, delivered, and fought over. The target audience is students, academics, practitioners, and media pundits alike, as well as communities affected by megaprojects.

The current text locates the anthropological study of roads within the wider context of studies on mobility and modernity. Besides introducing the articles of this special issue of Mobilities on roads and anthropology, this introduction also addresses some of the broader theoretical and epistemological implications of the anthropological perspective on roads, space, time and (im)mobility

Back cover text: Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multi-billion dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built. It shows, in unusual depth, how the formula for approval is an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. This results in projects that are extremely risky, but where the risk is concealed from MPs, taxpayers and investors. The authors not only explore the problems but also suggest practical solutions drawing on theory, experience and hard, scientific evidence from the several hundred projects in twenty nations and five continents that illustrate the book. Accessibly written, it will be the standard reference for students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politicians and interested citizens for many years to come.

The Supplementary Green Book Guidance on Optimism Bias (HM Treasury 2003) with reference to the Review of Large Public Procurement in the UK (Mott MacDonald 2002) notes that there is a demonstrated, systematic, tendency for project appraisers to be overly optimistic and that to redress this tendency appraisers should make explicit, empirically based adjustments to the estimates of a project’s costs, benefits, and duration. HM Treasury recommends that these adjustments be based on data from past projects or similar projects elsewhere, and adjusted for the unique characteristics of the project in hand. In the absence of a more specific evidence base, HM Treasury has encouraged departments to collect data to inform future estimates of optimism, and in the meantime use the best available data. In response to this, the Department for Transport (henceforth DfT), has contracted Bent Flyvbjerg in association with COWI to undertake the consultancy assignment "Procedures for dealing with Optimism Bias in Transport Planning". The present Guidance Document is the result of this assignment.

This paper focuses on problems and their causes and cures in policy and planning for large infrastructure projects. First, it identifies as the main problem in major infrastructure development pervasive misinformation about the costs, benefits, and risks involved. A consequence of misinformation is massive cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and waste. Second, the paper explores the causes of misinformation and finds that political-economic explanations best account for the available evidence: planners and promoters deliberately misrepresent costs, benefits, and risks in order to increase the likelihood that it is their projects, and not the competition's, that gain approval and funding. This results in the "survival of the unfittest," where often it is not the best projects that are built, but the most misrepresented ones. Finally, the paper presents measures for reforming policy and planning for large infrastructure projects, with a focus on better planning methods and changed governance structures, the latter being more important.

""This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokaster with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics
constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic
point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

[roads, globalization, transnationalism, development, postsocialism, materiality, Albania]""

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

As megaprojects have become ubiquitous, their real benefits and costs have come under increased scrutiny. We interviewed Bent Flyvbjerg, who has extensively studied megaproject development. Flyvbjerg has found systematic problems in the development process: by intentionally misrepresenting information and deliberately disregarding risks, proponents instigate projects that result in fewer benefits and higher costs than promised.

This paper explores how theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may be used to conduct quality control and due diligence in project management. First, a much-neglected issue in project management is identified, namely that the front-end estimates of costs and benefits – used in the business cases, cost-benefit analyses, and social and environmental impact assessments that typically support decisions on projects – are typically significantly different from actual ex post costs and benefits, and are therefore poor predictors of the actual value and viability of projects. Second, it is discussed how Kahneman and Tversky’s theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may help explain and remedy this situation through quality control of decisions. Third, it is described what quality control and due diligence are in the context of project management, and an eight-step procedure is outlined for due diligence based on the outside view. Fourth, the procedure is tested on a real-life, multibillion-dollar project, organized as a public-private partnership. Finally, Akerlof and Shiller’s recent discussion in economics of “firing the forecaster” is discussed together with its relevance to project management. In sum, the paper demonstrates the need, the theoretical basis, a practical methodology, and a real-life example for how to de-bias project management using quality control and due diligence based on the outside view.

This paper focuses on problems and their causes and cures in policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects. First, it identifies as the main problem in major infrastructure developments pervasive misinformation about the costs, benefits, and risks involved. A consequence of misinformation is cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and waste. Second, it explores the causes of misinformation and finds that political-economic explanations best account for the available evidence: planners and promoters deliberately misrepresent costs, benefits, and risks in order to increase the likelihood that it is their projects, and not those of their competition, that gain approval and funding. This results in the ‘survival of the unfittest’, in which often it is not the best projects that are built, but the most misrepresented ones. Finally, it presents measures for reforming policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects with a focus on better planning methods and changed governance structures, the latter being more important.

A major source of risk in project management is inaccurate forecasts of project costs, demand, and other impacts. The paper presents a promising new approach to mitigating such risk, based on theories of decision making under uncertainty which won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. First, the paper documents inaccuracy and risk in project management. Second, it explains inaccuracy in terms of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Third, the theoretical basis is presented for a promising new method called "reference class forecasting," which achieves accuracy by basing forecasts on actual performance in a reference class of comparable projects and thereby bypassing both optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Fourth, the paper presents the first instance of practical reference class forecasting, which concerns cost forecasts for large transportation infrastructure projects. Finally, potentials for and barriers to reference class forecasting are assessed.

Out-of-control information technology (IT) projects have ended the careers of top managers, such as EADS CEO Noël Forgeard and Levi Strauss’ CIO David Bergen. Moreover, IT projects have brought down whole companies, like Kmart in the US and Auto Windscreen in the UK. Software and other IT is now such an integral part of most business processes and products that CEOs must know their IT risks, which are typically substantial – and overlooked. The analysis of a sample of 1,471 IT projects showed that the average cost overrun was 27% — but that figure masks a far more alarming “fat tail” risk.  Fully one in six of the projects in the sample was a Black Swan, with a cost overrun of 200%, on average, and a schedule overrun of almost 70%. This highlights the true pitfall of IT change initiatives: It’s not that they’re particularly prone to high cost overruns on average – it is that there are a disproportionate number of Black Swans. By focusing on averages instead of the more damaging outliers, most managers and consultants have been missing the real risk in doing IT. In conclusion, the article outlines ideas as to what can be done to avoid Black Swans.

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth US$90 billion and representing different project types, geographical regions, and historical periods, it is found with overwhelming statistical significance that the cost estimates used to decide whether such projects should be built are highly and systematically misleading. Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying. The policy implications are clear: legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.

"Over budget, over time, over and over again" appears to be an appropriate slogan for large, complex infrastructure projects. This article explains why cost, benefits, and time forecasts for such projects are systematically over-optimistic in the planning phase. The underlying reasons for forecasting errors are grouped into three categories: delusions or honest mistakes; deceptions or strategic manipulation of information or processes; or bad luck. Delusion and deception have each been addressed in the management literature before, but here they are jointly considered for the first time. They are specifically applied to infrastructure problems in a manner that allows both academics and practitioners to understand and implement the suggested corrective procedures. The article provides a framework for analyzing the relative explanatory power of delusion and deception. It also suggests a simplified framework for analyzing the complex principal-agent relationships that are involved in the approval and construction of large infrastructure projects, which can be used to improve forecasts. Finally, the article illustrates reference class forecasting, an outside view de-biasing technique that has proven successful in overcoming both delusion and deception in private and public investment decisions.

Results from the first statistically significant study of the causes of cost escalation in transport infrastructure projects are presented. The study is based on a sample of 258 rail, bridge, tunnel and road projects worth US$90 billion. The focus is on the dependence of cost escalation on: (1) the length of the project‐implementation phase, (2) the size of the project and (3) the type of project ownership. First, it was found, with very high statistical significance, that cost escalation was strongly dependent on the length of the implementation phase. The policy implications are clear: decision‐makers and planners should be highly concerned about delays and long implementation phases because they translate into risks of substantial cost escalations. Second, projects have grown larger over time, and for bridges and tunnels larger projects have larger percentage cost escalations. Finally, by comparing the cost escalation for three types of project ownership - private, state‐owned enterprise and other public ownership - it was shown that the oft‐seen claim that public ownership is problematic and private ownership effective in curbing cost escalation is an oversimplification. The type of accountability appears to matter more to cost escalation than type of ownership.

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of traffic forecasts in transportation infrastructure projects. The sample used is the largest of its kind, covering 210 projects in 14 nations worth U.S.$59 billion. The study shows with very high statistical significance that forecasters generally do a poor job of estimating the demand for transportation infrastructure projects. For 9 out of 10 rail projects, passenger forecasts are overestimated; the average overestimation is 106%. For half of all road projects, the difference between actual and forecasted traffic is more than ±20%. The result is substantial financial risks, which are typically ignored or downplayed by planners and decision makers to the detriment of social and economic welfare. Our data also show that forecasts have not become more accurate over the 30-year period studied, despite claims to the contrary by forecasters. The causes of inaccuracy in forecasts are different for rail and road projects, with political causes playing a larger role for rail than for road. The cure is transparency, accountability, and new forecasting methods. The challenge is to change the governance structures for forecasting and project development. Our article shows how planners may help achieve this.

Risk, including economic risk, is increasingly a concern for public policy and management. The possibility of dealing effectively with risk is hampered, however, by lack of a sound empirical basis for risk assessment and management. This article demonstrates the general point for cost and demand risks in urban rail projects. The article presents empirical evidence that allow valid economic risk assessment and management of urban rail projects, including benchmarking of individual or groups of projects. Benchmarking of the Copenhagen Metro is presented as a case in point. The approach developed is proposed as a model for other types of policies and projects in order to improve economic and financial risk assessment and management in policy and planning.

Do different types of megaprojects have different cost overruns? This apparently simple question is at the heart of research at the University of Oxford aimed at understanding the characteristics of megaprojects, particularly in terms of how they are established, run and concluded. In this study, we set out to investigate cost overruns in the Olympic Games. To do so, we examined the costs of the Games over half a century, including both summer and winter Olympics. We looked at the evolution of final reported costs and compared these to the costs established in the Games bids, submitted to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) up to seven years before the Games occurred. In so doing we established the largest dataset of its kind, and documented for the first time in a consistent fashion the costs and cost overruns for the Olympic Games, from 1960 to 2012. We discovered that the Games stand out in two distinct ways compared to other megaprojects: (1) The Games overrun with 100 per cent consistency. No other type of megaproject is this consistent regarding cost overrun. Other project types are typically on budget from time to time, but not the Olympics. (2) With an average cost overrun in real terms of 179 per cent – and 324 per cent in nominal terms – overruns in the Games have historically been significantly larger than for other types of megaprojects, including infrastructure, construction, ICT, and dams. The data thus show that for a city and nation to decide to host the Olympic Games is to take on one of the most financially risky type of megaproject that exists, something that many cities and nations have learned to their peril. For the London 2012 Games, we find that: (1) With sports-related real costs currently estimated at USD14.8 billion, London is on track to become the most costly Olympics ever. (2) With a projected cost overrun of 101 per cent in real terms, overrun for London is below the historical average for the Games, but not significantly so. (3) The London cost overrun is, however, significantly higher than overruns for recent Games since 1999. London therefore is reversing a positive trend of falling cost overruns for the Games.

During World War I, the US Congress made it unlawful to speak against the war. The executive prosecuted many for doing so and when tried at the Supreme Court it upheld the sentences. During the Iraq War it was not a crime to speak against the war, but it was almost impossible to be heard if you had anything critical to say. Mass media practiced a self-imposed censorship. The op-ed below was written a few days after the invasion of Iraq and sent to main media in the US, but none wanted to print it on the grounds that critique of the war was considered untimely.

As megaprojects have become ubiquitous, their real benefits and costs have come under increased scrutiny. We interviewed Bent Flyvbjerg, who has extensively studied megaproject development. Flyvbjerg has found systematic problems in the development process: by intentionally misrepresenting information and deliberately disregarding risks, proponents instigate projects that result in fewer benefits and higher costs than promised.

Mémoire de Recherche au sein du Diplôme de Spécialisation et d’Approfondissement en "Architecture et Projet Urbain", Mention "Projet Urbain et Métropolisation", de l'École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-la-Villette. Ici, la topographie du quartier d'affaires de La Défense est analysée par différents aspects à travers une analyse généalogique de ses projets de développement passés, présents et futurs. Ce mémoire a été soutenu le 10/07/2015 devant un jury de 4 professeurs de l'École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-la-Villette. /// Note : 17,0/20,0 (Mention : "Recherche") /// Directeur de Mémoire : P. Duguet

Mobile communication plays an important role in dis
aster recovery management during emergency
situations. It is helpful in situations where the s
ystem has less robust and less flexible fixed infra
structure.
The Disaster recovery management systems require ti
mely interaction and coordination in order to save
lives and property. Energy consumption in heteroge
neous network is a major issue , whether they
operate within a base station infrastructure , fixe
d network or in a free-standing Mobile Ad Hoc Netwo
rk
(MANET). The lifetime of network will be improved b
y suitably reducing the requirement of power for
connections. There is a challenge to provide Qualit
y of Service (QoS) solutions to wired cum wireless
domains and maintain end-to-end QoS in ad hoc netwo
rk. In this paper we propose a new protocol Power
Aware QoS Multipath Routing protocol (PAQMR) for di
saster recovery network. This protocol is the
enhanced protocol of Ad-Hoc On Demand Multipath Dis
tance Vector protocol (AOMDV). This routing
protocol is used to avoid the loop formation in ne
twork so that it reduces congestion in the channel.
The
Network Simulator (NS-2.34) tool is utilized to me
asure the performance of AODV, AOMDV and
PAQMR protocols in hybrid environment. The metrics
for the simulation are energy consumption,
average end to end delay and packet delivery ratio
by varying the traffic load and pause time in the
network. The results shows that the proposed protoc
ol minimize the power, delay, congestion and
maximize the packet delivery ratio.

Cultural tourism intends to provide an opportunity for everyone to visit heritage sites and raise the public awareness of heritage values and to satisfy tourists with respect to the heritage's authenticity and integrity. One of the most important areas affecting the environment, landscape and space of heritage sites is the tourism infrastructures. The international references discussed about principles for cultural tourism development and refereed to infrastructures with recommendations and guidelines. But the development of built-environment infrastructures requires different guidelines and solutions to design architectural elements. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the cultural tourism infrastructures and analyze the criteria related to the built environment and the architectural elements. It aims to identify the features associated with the architectural design. Method: This descriptive-analytical research firstly reviews the libraries resources and international references to identify the features related to development of infrastructures in world heritage sites. To this end, it focuses on the ICOMOS 1999 Cultural Tourism Charter specifically criteria related to the built environment and architectural design. It then reviews and evaluates thirty important national and world heritage sites in Iran to interpret the extracted attributes and analyze the properties associated with built experiences and long-term management. Results: Analysis of the features extracted from principles two, three and six of the ICOMOS Cultural Tourism Charter, focuses on how to provide tourism services and the creation of new structures and added buildings such as service and information buildings, architectural elements such as signage and guarding, shells and installations such as temporary roofs, and furniture and equipment such as benches or lightning. The findings from field surveys indicate that the functional and service aspects of the infrastructures are essential and top priority. But the visual aspect of extensions and their impact on landscape integrity and in particular facilities and equipment require the presence of designers, careful implementers, and long-term monitoring-sensitive management. This feature in some of the surveyed sites require revision. Conclusion: The development of tourism infrastructures requires principles such as reversibility, distinction from the setting, durability, and adaptability for long-term conservation of valuable cultural heritage sites.

Cultural tourism intends to provide an opportunity for everyone to visit heritage sites and raise the public awareness of heritage values and to satisfy tourists with respect to the heritage's authenticity and integrity. One of the most important areas affecting the environment, landscape and space of heritage sites is the tourism infrastructures. The international references discussed about principles for cultural tourism development and refereed to infrastructures with recommendations and guidelines. But the development of built-environment infrastructures requires different guidelines and solutions to design architectural elements. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the cultural tourism infrastructures and analyze the criteria related to the built environment and the architectural elements. It aims to identify the features associated with the architectural design. Method: This descriptive-analytical research firstly reviews the libraries resources and international references to identify the features related to development of infrastructures in world heritage sites. To this end, it focuses on the ICOMOS 1999 Cultural Tourism Charter specifically criteria related to the built environment and architectural design. It then reviews and evaluates thirty important national and world heritage sites in Iran to interpret the extracted attributes and analyze the properties associated with built experiences and long-term management. Results: Analysis of the features extracted from principles two, three and six of the ICOMOS Cultural Tourism Charter, focuses on how to provide tourism services and the creation of new structures and added buildings such as service and information buildings, architectural elements such as signage and guarding, shells and installations such as temporary roofs, and furniture and equipment such as benches or lightning. The findings from field surveys indicate that the functional and service aspects of the infrastructures are essential and top priority. But the visual aspect of extensions and their impact on landscape integrity and in particular facilities and equipment require the presence of designers, careful implementers, and long-term monitoring-sensitive management. This feature in some of the surveyed sites require revision. Conclusion: The development of tourism infrastructures requires principles such as reversibility, distinction from the setting, durability, and adaptability for long-term conservation of valuable cultural heritage sites.

If any rebuilding or post-disaster recovery makes a city resilient, to what end is the concept of resilience useful? Feedback from recent disasters shows that most of the affected territories have been rebuilt in some form.
The aim of this paper is to provide a framework to improve urban resilience independently of the nature of the disturbances. Recent disasters had a significant impact on critical infrastructures providing essential urban services such as energy, transportation, telecommunication, water and food supply or health care. Indeed, several natural and human-made hazards may lead to disruptions, and most critical infrastructures are networked and highly interdependent. Henceforth, resilience building remain focused on specific hazards (Resilience to what?) or on improving the resilience, separately, of single infrastructures (Resilience of what?). In order to enhance urban resilience, this paper is based on learnings from three case studies that are the 2001 WTC terrorist attack, hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 and the 2016 Seine river flood in Paris. These events highlight disruptions to urban services, but also some resilience options. In light of both the literature and our case studies, a framework of unspecific resilience is provided for improving some resilience principles, namely omnivory, redundancy, buffering, high flux, homeostasis and flatness within electric energy, water and food supply and transportation networks. Rebuilding resilience within this framework is further discussed with respect to all kinds of disruptive events.
Keywords: critical infrastructures ; hazards ; urban services ; disruptions ; interdependencies ; resilience modelling ; unspecific resilience ; all-hazards resilience ; WTC terrorist attack ; hurricanes Irma and Maria ; Paris flood

L'évocation du paysage minier et de ses composantes implique l'utilisation d'un vocabulaire très spécifique, technique et parfois obscur pour les néophytes. Afin de mieux « lire » ce paysage, il est indispensable de comprendre le rôle des éléments qui le composent et plus particulièrement celui des infrastructures minières. Tel est l'objet de cette communication.Nous nous attacherons à considérer les infrastructures dans le cadre strict des installations de surface d'une exploitation minière. Sont exclues de ce fait les infrastructures minières souterraines, les mines à ciel ouvert, l'environnement urbain constitué par les cités ouvrières et les corons, ainsi que les industries de transformation que sont les usines d'agglomération, les cokeries, les hauts-fourneaux et les fonderies. Si le cadre technique reste limité, il est, par contre, ouvert à toutes les matières minérales extraites, qu'il s'agisse de combustibles, de minerais ferreux et non ferreux ou de matériaux industriels, dès lors que leur extraction se fait par des méthodes souterraines. Le cadre géographique est limité, dans nos exemples, à la France métropolitaine, il pourrait néanmoins s'étendre parfaitement à l'ensemble des pays miniers de la planète, l'universalité étant sans doute l'une des grandes caractéristiques des infrastructures minières. La période concernée est également étendue, elle se situe globalement sur toute la durée du XXe siècle. Définition de l'infrastructure minière : Ensemble des installations et des équipements nécessaires à l'exploitation d'une mine (TAG-Thésaurus de l'activité gouvernementale).

In this talk I use three spatial points of entry – the road, the town and the mountain – in order to ask if and how the concept of the hinterland helps to see beyond the colonially inflected triad of the South African rural as sublime wilderness, a place of failed service delivery, or as an agricultural setting, in all of which racially sorted access to the rural as idyll has dominated for so long. The hinterland is not a neutral descriptor and refers to a situation that is itself always already skewed. It is not a rehabilitative or reparative term, but rather a concept that seeks to describe and sharpen for analysis situations of discursive, economic, material and political disavowal that are associated with a spatial remove or demarcation of specific places from what metaphorically counts as civilization or the good life. By offering readings of the pastoral in Henriette Rose-Innes short story “Poison” (2010), of death worlds in Michael Matthew’s film Five Fingers for Marseilles (2017), and of personhood in John Trengrove’s Inxeba (2017), I seek to explore how the hinterland can be thought and represented in South Africa and beyond, and what kind of extractions, genres and affects the concept makes visible, particularly in comparison to related terms like rural, countryside and periphery.