This is a follow-up to a January 2011 summit that was held at Queensbury Convention Centre to discuss the challenge of how North American cities can afford to repair and replace all the infrastructure that’s been built over the last 50 or 60 years that is now reaching the end of it useful lifespan. At the same time, of course, most of those same cities are continuing to expand as people cleave to a low-density car-dependent lifestyle that will only add to the infrastructure deficit, which currently sits at around $130 billion, in the years and decades to come.
While the last conference attempted to define and quantify the scope of the problem, this one is supposed to focus on practical and sustainable ideas for solving the crisis. The conference goes Sept. 10-12 at the Delta Hotel in downtown Regina. Depending at how successful we are at getting out to the conference, we may have some blog reports. For more info now visit the NIS website.
UPDATE (from Paul Dechene): A commenter mentioned that the NIS is something that we should really go to so we immediately dispatched crack reporter John Cameron to the scene of all the infrastructure action mere minutes ago.
Actually, that’s not true. John’s been planning to go to the NIS for weeks now. Me too. He’ll be there Monday and Wednesday, I’ll be there tomorrow.
Watch for NIS updates right here. And if you’re so inclined, you can go back in time and check out our coverage from the 2011 NIS at this link here. And you can also get up-to-the-minute updates on Twitter with the official National Infrastructure Summit hashtag, #2012NIS.
