Mega infrastructure as a dynamic ecosystem: Lessons from America’s interstate system and Boston’s big dig

Abstract Infrastructure development has become a subject of interest to governments in every corner of the world from India’s smart cities, to China’s South-to-North Water Transfer Project to Africa’s Trans-West Coastal Highway. Notably, megainfrastructure projects are typically more expensive and time consuming than initial estimates. It is contended that these results indicate weaknesses in project decision-making. Furthermore, when project benefits are compared to final project costs, too many of these projects should not even have been undertaken. While improved pre-project decision-making is important, we argue that such ex ante/ex post static evaluation misses the important transformative impacts inherent in these endeavors. It is often the larger inherent institutional transformations embedded in the increased cost and time that create larger and more enduring substantive value. Because megaprojects are transformative they change institutional relationships creating new social benefits and opportunities that could not have been initially foreseen and that would not have occurred in the project’s absence. Using Boston’s “Big Dig,” as case-in-point, we propose a more comprehensive and integrative evaluative ex post appreciation of such projects. We meld the creation of the new physical infrastructure with the urban political, economic and social systems within which it is embedded and within which it adds social and economic value. We believe such comprehensive understanding is warranted because in the final analysis it is these larger, not easily quantifiable, impacts, far more than short term cost and benefit estimations, regardless of mathematical sophistication, that are most determinative of the well-being of center cities and metropolitan regions around the world.