Ownership and financing of infrastructure : historical perspective

The authors summarize the rich and varied experiences of private and public provision of urban services in France, Great Britain, and the United States over the past 100 years. Their main focus is on experiences in the United States and on shifts back and forth between the public and private sectors. A few of their observations: (i) The values of politically important actors as well as the working of government, political, and legal institutions have shaped decisions about infrastructure development, the sorts of public goods demanded, and the roles played by private firms. (ii) The range of choices that has historically been made with respect to the ownership, financing, and operation of different infrastructures has been far too varied to be encompassed by simple distinctions between"public"and"private."(iii) Throughout the world, many infrastructures owned and operated by governments have been built by private firms. (iv) In the United States, private firms and property-owners associations of various sorts have owned outright both toll roads and residential streets. Private firms have also collected solid wastes and provided urban transport under a range of franchise, contracting, and regulatory arrangements. The situation with mass transit has been similar in Great Britain. Although water works facilities in France are predominantly government-owned, private firms operate and manage most systems under an array of contracting and leasing arrangements. (v) Even when facilities have been owned by private firms, direct competition has been of limited importance in the provision of many kinds of infrastructure. But market discipline can arise from other sources. (vi) Privatization can get government bureaucracies out of the business of performing entrepreneurial activities for which they may be poorly suited. When market forces are weak, however, and important public interests are at stake, strengthening government institutions may be a prerequisite for successful privatization. (vii) In the electric utility industry, private firms played a far greater role in U.S. electric utilities than in Great Britain, in part because of different views about appropriate roles for government in providing essential services. For similar reasons, the state played a much larger role in furnishing telecommunications services in France than in the United States. (viii) Beliefs about the"publicness"of different goods and services have helped shape the character of regulatory franchise, and contracting arrangements. When a good is seen as mainly private, it is easier for private service providers to be compensated mainly by user fees and for most decisions about price, output, and quality, no matter what the role played by private firms in actually providing services. (ix) Goods defined as"public"have often been provided free to users, even though it would have been easy to exclude nonpayers. Examples in the United States include interstate highway systems, public parks, public libraries, and police and fire protection. Free services have been provided because it is believed that in these domains market relationships should not apply - and that denying nonpayers the public services would be a denial of rights. (x) In Great Britain and the United States, the contracting out of public services has been both supported and opposed because of its potential to break the power of public sector unions and to cut workers'pay. In the United States, privatization has also come under attack on the grounds that opportunities for minority employment may be reduced.Regional Governance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Decentralization,Public Sector Management and Reform,Urban Governance and Management,Public Sector Management and Reform,Urban Governance and Management,Regional Governance,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Public Sector Economics&Finance

The Invariance Hypothesis Implies Domain-Specific Regions in Visual Cortex

Is visual cortex made up of general-purpose information processing machinery, or does it consist of a collection of specialized modules? If prior knowledge, acquired from learning a set of objects is only transferable to new objects that share properties with the old, then the recognition system’s optimal organization must be one containing specialized modules for different object classes. Our analysis starts from a premise we call the invariance hypothesis: that the computational goal of the ventral stream is to compute an invariant-to-transformations and discriminative signature for recognition. The key condition enabling approximate transfer of invariance without sacrificing discriminability turns out to be that the learned and novel objects transform similarly. This implies that the optimal recognition system must contain subsystems trained only with data from similarly-transforming objects and suggests a novel interpretation of domain-specific regions like the fusiform face area (FFA). Furthermore, we can define an index of transformation-compatibility, computable from videos, that can be combined with information about the statistics of natural vision to yield predictions for which object categories ought to have domain-specific regions in agreement with the available data. The result is a unifying account linking the large literature on view-based recognition with the wealth of experimental evidence concerning domain-specific regions.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Science and Technology Center (Award CCF-1231216)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant NSF-0640097)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant NSF-0827427)United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant FA8650-05-C-7262)Eugene McDermott Foundatio

The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective

The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective stands alone in its scholarly depth and scope. Tarr’s essays explore not only the technical solutions to waste disposal, but also the policy issues involved in the trade-offs among public health, environmental quality, and the difficulties and costs of pollution control, and all this against the broader background of changes in civic and professional values. Any reader concerned with the interactive history of technology, the environment, and the American city will find in The Search for the Ultimate Sink an informative and compelling account of pollution problems from the past and a serious guide to urban policies for the future. “Over the years Joel Tarr\u27s work has earned him the place as the dean of urban environmental historians. His research and writings are what we all turn to when we begin our own studies.” —Sam Bass Warner Jr. “Tarr has prepared one of the premier books on environmental history, a relatively new discipline.” —Choicehttps://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/uapress_publications/1031/thumbnail.jp

The municipal telegraph network: origins of the fire and police alarm systems in American cities

Joel A. TARR, The Municipal Telegraph Network: Origins of the Fire and Police Alarm Systems in American Cities. The municipal telegraph is one of the technologies that constituted the infrastructure of the emerging networked city in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a communications improvement, it helped in overcoming the city's fragmentation and aided the municipality in dealing with crises of fire and social order. Municipal adoption of a fire alarm telegraphic system was often related to fire department reorganization in a centralized and bureaucatic direction. , "\he fire-alarm telegraph not only improved the ability of the municipal government to fight fires but helped reinforce bureaucratic control over the firemen. Large cities adopted the new technology at a rapid rate. In contrast to the fire alarm telegraph, municipal adoption of the police telegraph was relatively slow. This reflected not only a slower pace in municipal bureaucratization of police functions but also the different nature of these functions compared to fire fighting. Police, in contrast to firemen, were likely to encounter a variety of situations calling for responses not communicable by a single signaling mechanism. In addition, the telegraph was limited as a device to enforce more bureaucratic control over the beat patrolman - a deficiency corrected by adding a telephone to the police call box. These cases suggest that the city presented a different context for technology adoption compared to the private market and that only powerful social and political pressure could compel the adoption of the new systems required to modernize city service delivery.Joel A. TARR, Le réseau télégraphique municipal et les origines des systèmes d'alarme-incendie et d'alarme de police dans les villes américaines. Le télégraphe municipal est l'une des technologies constitutives de la ville-réseaux qui apparaît au cours de la seconde moitié du dix-neuvième siècle. Permettant de meilleures communications, il contribua à la résolution du problème de la fragmentation de la ville et à la gestion des incendies et des troubles de l'ordre public L'adoption par une municipalité d'un système télégraphique d'alarme-incendie allait souvent de pair avec la réorganisation des services de pompiers selon un modèle centralisé et administratif. Ce système permettait non seulement une lutte plus efficace contre le feu mais aussi un plus grand contrôle administratif du personnel des casernes. Les grandes villes adoptèrent rapidement la nouvelle technologie. En revanche, l'adoption d'un système analogue d'alarme de police fut plus lente. Cela s'explique non seulement par le rythme plus lent observé dans la réorganisation des services de police mais aussi par la différence de nature des fonctions de chacun de ces deux services. C'est qu'à l'inverse des pompiers, les policiers étaient susceptibles d'être confrontés à différentes sortes de situations, nécesissitant des moyens de communication plus sophistiqués qu'un appareil ne transmettant qu'un seul signal. De plus le télégraphe ne permettait qu'un contrôle limité des patrouilles - lacune qui fut comblée par l'adjonction d'un téléphone aux bornes d'appel de police. Ces exemples suggèrent que le contexte d'adoption d'une technologie donnée par une ville différait de celui d'un marché privé, et que seules de fortes pressions sociales et politiques pouvaient dans le premier cas imposer l'adoption des nouveaux systèmes techniques nécessaires à la modernisation des services municipaux.Tarr Joel A. The municipal telegraph network: origins of the fire and police alarm systems in American cities. In: Flux, n°9, 1992. pp. 5-18

Perspectives souterraines. Les égouts et l'environnement humain dans les villes américaines. 1850-1933

Underground perspectives. Sewers and social environment in american cities. 1850-1933. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American cities experienced a wave of insfrastructure construction that produced the modern technology-intensive piped, tracked and wired city. A critical part of this infrastructure was sewers — an underground network of pipes for the removal and transportation of wastewater from homes, factories and commercial establishments to places of disposal. Sewers were essential to the functioning of the modern city and had reverberations throughout urban society that is overlooked if one focuses only on the technology. Joel A. Tarr will focus on the origins of wastewater systems in the United States, the major technological design systems, and the impacts of the technology on a range of social, institutional and values factors.A la fin du XIXe siècle et au début du XXe, les villes américaines ont connu une vague d'équipements d'infrastructures qui devait aboutir à leur donner le visage qu'on leur connaît aujourd'hui : une ville équipée de voies, de câbles, de tuyaux. Les égouts constituent l'une de ces infrastructures : il s'agit d'un réseau souterrain de tuyaux destiné à l'évacuation et au transport des eaux usées depuis les logements, les usines ou les entreprises jusqu'aux exutoires. Les égouts jouent un rôle essentiel dans le fonctionnement de la cité moderne et ont des répercussions sur la vie des citadins, répercussions dont on ne doit pas seulement examiner l'aspect technique. Joel A. Tarr étudie les origines des réseaux d'assainissement aux Etats-Unis, leur conception technique et leurs effets sur toute une série de valeurs sociales et institutionnelles, sur la qualité de la vie.Perspectivas del subsuelo. Las cloacas en las ciudades americanas. 1850-1933. A fines del siglo XIX y a principes del XX, las ciudades americanas fueron equipadas con la infraestructura que les daría el aspecto bajo el cuál las conocemos actualmente : una cuidad equipada con vías, cables y tuberías. Las cloacas constituyen una de esas infraestructuras : se trata de una red subterránea de tuberías destinada a la evacuación y al transporte de las aguas consumidas desde las viviendas, las fábricas y las empresas, hasta los desagüaderos. Las cloacas juegan un papel esencial en el funcionamiento de la ciudad moderna y tienen repercusiones sobre la vida de los ciudadanos, repercusiones que no solo atañen el aspecto técnico. Joel A. Tarr se ocupa de los orígenes de las redes de saneamiento en los Estados Unidos, en su concepción técnica, y en sus efectos sobre toda una serie de valores sociales, instituticionales y cualitativos.Tarr Joel A. Perspectives souterraines. Les égouts et l'environnement humain dans les villes américaines. 1850-1933. In: Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, N°23-24, 1984. Les réseaux techniques urbains. pp. 65-89