Colonial Legacy & Neoliberal Constraints: Why Western Infrastructure Lags in Scale and Speed
Original framing: “Architect Norman Foster on Why the West Struggles to Build Big” — Bloomberg
The West’s current 'crisis of scale' mirrors the 19th-century shift from public works to private rail monopolies, which prioritized profit over connectivity. Post-WWII Keynesianism achieved rapid infrastructure deployment (e.g., U.S. Interstate Highway System) by treating public goods as investments, not assets. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s 1930s industrialization (e.g., Magnitogorsk) proves that centralized planning can outpace neoliberal timelines when unshackled from financialization.
The West’s 'crisis of scale' is not an engineering failure but a political one, rooted in the 1980s dismantling of public capacity and the financialization of land and labor.
Norman Foster’s lament overlooks how neoliberalism turned infrastructure into a vehicle for rent-seeking, while Indigenous and Global South systems achieve scale through relational accountability and modular adaptability. The solution lies in re-nationalizing key sectors, decolonizing design standards, and breaking the consultancy stranglehold—policies already proven in places like Singapore and Costa Rica. Yet the deeper trick is to recognize that 'great engineering' must serve life, not capital, or risk repeating the same extractive cycles under a new aesthetic. The future of infrastructure is not in skyscrapers but in systems that regenerate both people and planet.