Lights! Water! Motion!

The world’s urban infrastructure needs a $40 trillion makeover.

Blackouts in New York City, drought in London, gridlock in Lagos, and cholera in Cairo all point to a global infrastructure crisis, warns an article in the spring issue of strategy+business magazine. Booz Allen Hamilton estimates that over the next 25 years, modernizing and expanding the water, electricity, and transportation systems of the world’s cities will require approximately $40 trillion — a figure roughly equivalent to the 2006 market capitalization of all shares held in all stock markets in the world.

“Solving the problem,” write Booz Allen Vice Presidents Viren Doshi and Gary Schulman and Booz Allen Principal Daniel Gabaldon, “will require letting go of obsolete approaches to financing, governance, and management — approaches that no longer work in our politically, technologically, and administratively complex society.”

The authors estimate that by 2050, for the first time in history, more than 50 percent of humanity will be living in metropolitan areas. The next generation of cities will require much more than incremental improvements to infrastructure. Instead, the authors call for the public and private sectors to join forces in addressing the transportation, energy, and water crises in tandem with a comprehensive strategy. They conclude that cities that organize infrastructure effectively “will become centers of  growth and innovation for the farsighted companies of the next 100 years.”

Read the strategy+business magazine article "Lights! Water! Motion!"

story posted March 9, 2007