Welcome back. This will be the second block of our MOOC on managing urban infrastructures. In it, we will talk about the foundations of managing these infrastructures. Now, this second block has six different sessions. In the first session, we will talk about what exactly the managers do when managing urban infrastructures. Then, we will talk about the stakeholders that are related to the performance of these infrastructures and what the managers do with the stakeholders. Thirdly, we will come back to the different dimensions of managing urban infrastructure systems, the ones we have already talked about in the first block. Then, we will talk about the different schools of thought in managing urban infrastructure systems. Following that, we will have an interview with an expert on public-private partnerships, which are one of the main new forms of managing urban infrastructures. And finally, we will say a few words about the role of the information and communication technologies in the management of urban infrastructure systems, which, as you know, are growing more and more important. Let's first move to the first session. What do urban infrastructure managers exactly do? What are their main activities? There are three big tasks: they have to plan, they have to operate and they have to maintain these infrastructures. These are technical tasks. And basically, in this first session, we will talk about them. The first big activity of infrastructure managers is to plan. And planning comes in two forms because those have two different time horizons: planning for the infrastructure itself and planning for the services that are provided on the infrastructures. For the infrastructure itself, let's take the example of the transportation network, the metro network, the energy network that you are going to put into the city, or the water network. You have to plan - a water network is there for 80 years, you have to plan. Where do you put the wastewater treatment plan? Which streets are you digging up? Which tunnels are you digging? But, even for green infrastructures, you have to plan. Where do we build the trees? It is going to take twenty years for them to grow. Where do you put the parks? This requires careful long-term planning. The second dimension of planning is actually the services, pertains to the services. So, you have transport, vehicles that are running on the infrastructure. Now, you have to plan for the acquisition of these vehicles. But the time horizon is different. They may have a lifespan of ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. And then, you are going to sell them to somebody else. It is another time horizon for planning. Yet, it requires planning. When your vehicles are obsolete, when are you going to buy a new one? Similarly for IT systems which you are going to use for billing the customers in water, in gas, in electricity, for example. We know that IT systems have a relatively short time span. Still, you have to plan which ones to buy, when to buy them, when to replace them, all these kinds of things. And, of course, you have to coordinate between the two. Precisely, because the lifespan is different between the infrastructure and the infrastructure services. So, how are the new wagons that you are going to buy? How are you making them compatible with the infrastructure? You have to plan that. You need to adapt them to the old infrastructure, or you need to upgrade the rail infrastructure so that they will be compatible with the new locomotives that come on track. These are the kinds of coordination problems that infrastructure managers face in terms of planning. The second big task of urban infrastructure managers is operations. I mean, this is maybe the first thing that people see is the transport system working. Are the buses operating well? Are they clean? Are they on time? Are they coordinating? Do you make your connections? Things like that. Every day, operations of transport, energy, water, wastewaters, things like that. This is, I would say, one of the major tasks, and often you have a series of crises in there. So, managers are quite absorbed by short-term operational questions because that's where things go wrong. Again, you also have operations on the services. You have to operate the vehicles, not just the infrastructures, but also the vehicles that are dear. And you have to operate the metering and the billing of water services, or of energy services - electricity and gas services. Another big task of infrastructure managers - of course, things have to be coordinated again between these two. So, for example, if something goes wrong on the track, maybe there is a breakdown of a signal that has an effect on the operations of the train or if the locomotive breaks down, then, you cannot optimally use the infrastructure that is available. So again, also in operations, there are big coordination challenges for managers of urban infrastructure systems. And the third big challenge is the maintenance. Again, we distinguish between the infrastructure and the infrastructure services. Both have to be maintained. The infrastructure has to be maintained. The tracks have to be repaired regularly. Usually, that happens in a night when there is no transport running. The electricity lines, if they get disconnected, have to be repaired. The water pipes have to be repaired. The green infrastructures have to be maintained. You all know that trees will not survive in cities, if there are not watered regularly, if they are not trimmed, and things like that. This is all maintenance of urban infrastructure systems. And of course, you also have to maintain the vehicles, you have to maintain the metering systems, the IT systems, all these kinds of things. And again, the maintenance needs to be coordinated among each other. For example, you maintain the urban transport, the train infrastructure during the times when the trains are not running. This needs to be properly coordinated. You maintain the locomotives, not during the daytime when you need them, but you maintain them during the night, when there are less transport services. We have seen here, in this session, the three main activities of urban infrastructure managers. Now, from here, we will go to the stakeholders. Because all this involves stakeholders: users, citizens, authorities and urban infrastructure managers do not just have to manage the infrastructures. They also have to manage the stakeholders that are involved in all these infrastructures.
