Crowdfunding our cities: Three perspectives on stakeholder dynamics during innovative infrastructure delivery

Infrastructure is the lifeblood of our cities and towns. While communities benefit from and are impacted by water and sanitation systems, energy and transportation networks, and public buildings and parks, they have limited involvement in the delivery of these infrastructure assets. Crowdfunding is allowing communities and other stakeholders to participate in infrastructure delivery in new ways, by leveraging crowdsourcing science and electronic payment systems. Crowdfunding's emergence has been enabled by declining and stagnating investment in infrastructure construction and maintenance at federal, state and local levels. Crowdfunding is being used to a greater extent for all types of infrastructure assets, but there is limited understanding of its implications. The necessary and historical involvement of local government agencies in infrastructure delivery adds a layer of complexity that other crowdfunding ventures do not have to consider. This dissertation uses a multimethod, qualitative approach to explore the multifaceted impacts of using crowdfunding for infrastructure delivery in a variety of settings. This dissertation looks specifically at how traditional infrastructure delivery is impacted by crowdfunding. In Chapter 2, I look at the emergence of crowdfunding platforms focused on infrastructure assets. Stagnated investment in infrastructure assets can, in part, be attributed to information asymmetries between local actors who understand the asset's social, economic, and physical geography and nonlocal investors. These crowdfunding platforms have the capabilities and potential to identify and communicate implicit asset characteristics, thereby facilitating more infrastructure investment. In Chapter 3, I use a matched-pairs case study to compare a traditionally delivered vs. a crowdfunded protected bike lane in Denver, Colorado. This analysis highlights the use of crowdfunding as a consensus-building social movement tactic. As such, the stakeholder that initiates the crowdfunding campaign (the project sponsor) becomes the social movement organization and interacts closely with the local government throughout the infrastructure delivery process. This intimate relationship shifts decision-making power and legitimacy between these two stakeholder groups. Building on the work in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 uses a similar approach to compare two crowdfunded protected bike lanes in different economic and political contexts. Although similar in size and scope, one project in Denver, Colorado was successfully constructed and the other project in Memphis, Tennessee remained unbuilt five years after its successful crowdfunding campaign. This chapter shows how stakeholders, with varying levels of resources and expertise, identify and incorporate crowdfunding into infrastructure delivery. The use of crowdfunding highlights a new type of cross-sector partnership for infrastructure delivery. Using the public administration and partnership literature, I find that the unsolicited and informal nature of this partnership is mismatched to the resource-intensive, phased, and networked characteristics of infrastructure delivery. Together, these three chapters provide a set of propositions, developed through three different theoretical lenses, for how we can understand the impact of crowdfunding infrastructure assets. Further, this body of work shows us that, as project sponsors and local governments consider new ways to fund much-needed infrastructure delivery, innovative tools (including crowdfunding) must be explored through in-depth, deep analyses that illuminate the dynamics between stakeholders and their impacts on project outcomes.