"This book is designed for the local practitioner or student who wants to learn the basics of how to develop an infrastructure plan, a program, or an individual infrastructure project. The author offers an overview of infrastructure before moving to the history of infrastructure, supply and demand factors as well as the local institutional context. The relationship of infrastructure to local tools such as the comprehensive plan, the climate change or sustainability plan, and local development regulations are addressed. Chapters also cover preparation of the comprehensive plan and infrastructure and how to develop an infrastructure project. The local financing environment is described and then individual chapters address financing techniques such as bonds and borrowing, user fees, impact fees, and privatization and competition.

The rest of the book describes the individual infrastructure systems: their elements, current issues and a 'how-to-do-it' section that covers the system and the comprehensive plan, development regulations and how it can be financed. Innovations such as decentralization, green and blue-green technologies are described as well as local policy actions to achieve a more sustainable city are also addressed. Chapters include water, wastewater, solid waste, streets, transportation, airports, ports, community facilities, parks, schools, energy and telecommunications. Attention is given to how local policies can ensure a sustainable and climate friendly infrastructure system, and how planning for them can be integrated across disciplines. This book provides a non-technical overview of the engineering, planning and financing aspects of local level infrastructure for planners, engineers and other local officials who need to work with specialized professionals.

It also gives basic 'how-to-do-it' information along with a brief overview of the larger policy and technical issues for each field, all based on the view that twenty-first century issues of climate change, population growth, and the deteriorated state of much local infrastructure require a more integrated view of infrastructure systems than those built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"--