Into the Breach

Okay, so how many times can you say infrastructure on a written page? Here's the latest abstract of the diss abastract:

This dissertation project uses the particular contemporary challenge of cyberinfrastructure as an occasion to explore the potential of the community planning process in infrastructure provision generally. In short, my research aims to assess whether and the extent to which local planning efforts have a measurable effect in terms of cyberinfrastructure deployment. Given that access to cyberinfrastructure is taken to be an essential to economic viability, more and more communities are engaged in both demand- and supply-side efforts at increasing their use of and infrastructure for high-speed Internet access. Since infrastructure deployment is a moving target, explaining the diffusion of infrastructure to underserved areas is both a methodological and policy challenge. In the wake of lagging private sector investment and the increasing affordability of wireless technologies, the public sector has shown an increasing willingness to engage in infrastructure provision, renewing debates of long standing. Given the attendant controversy regarding public sector involvement in telecommunications infrastructure provision, many communities have stressed the need to encourage demand, hoping that such stimulation will encourage private investment in infrastructure. This dissertation assesses a set of community planning processes in the state of Kentucky that have the potential to bridge the (often ideological) gap between private and public investments. Making use of extensive data on broadband deployment gathered as part of the Kentucky initiative, this dissertation project presents evidence that the public planning process may serve to identify pockets of demand for services previously invisible to private sector providers. This project makes two contributions to scholarly discourse, one theoretical and one methodological. As will be detailed in the literature review below, this dissertation is situated between two streams of discourse that need bridging—theories of infrastructure (and other socio-technical systems) and theories of local and public involvement in the planning process. My contention is that the role suggested for the planning process mediates in important ways between the prerogatives of system-builders and the needs of communities, demonstrating a necessary space of articulation that treads the boundary between supply and demand. Moreover, methodologically, this dissertation attempts to harness the techniques of multi-level modeling and geostatistics to determine whether or not a “planning effect” explains infrastructure deployment.