Unreliable Sustainable Infrastructure: Three Transformations to Guide Cities towards Becoming Healthy 'Smart Cities'

The term "leapfrogging" has been applied to cities and nations that have adopted a new form of infrastructure by bypassing the traditional progression of development, e.g., from no phones to cell phones - bypassing landlines all together. However, leapfrogging from unreliable infrastructure systems to "smart" cities is too large a jump resulting in unsustainable and unhealthy infrastructure systems. In the Global South, a baseline of unreliable infrastructure is a prevalent problem. The push for sustainable and "smart" [re]development tends to ignore many of those already living with failing, unreliable infrastructure. Without awareness of baseline conditions, uninformed projects run the risk of returning conditions to the status quo, keeping many urban populations below targets of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. A key part of understanding the baseline is to identify how citizens have long learned to adjust their expectations of basic services. To compensate for poor infrastructure, most residents in the Global South invest in remedial secondary infrastructure (RSI) at the household and business levels. The authors explore three key "smart" city transformations that address RSI within a hierarchical planning pyramid known as the comprehensive resilient and reliable infrastructure systems (CRISP) planning framework.