Innovative Decentralised Urban Infrastructure: Key Factors in the Direction of Development

Is there such a thing as an urban direction to infrastructure innovation in today’s rapidly expanding cities? City growth has driven evolution of urban infrastructure through a combination of technological, political and commercial innovations, to produce today’s top-down, centralised models; however, these now stand in the way of the innovation necessary to support continuing population growth. The significant investment set out in the UK government’s National Infrastructure Delivery Plan provides an opportunity to address this problem. This paper postulates that applying a decentralised (bottom-up/user-led) approach to infrastructure provision can create the space necessary for a new direction of urban innovation to emerge. It draws on case study examples from the literature, where there have been innovations along these lines, to develop a theoretically informed understanding of what needs to be in place for them to be successful. These findings are used to assess a proposed, large infrastructure redevelopment at Digbeth in Birmingham, to determine the likelihood of success of a decentralised approach.