C2 reading: In praise of maintenance

Every city keeps a photograph of a ribbon being cut. A mayor in a hard hat, a pair of oversized scissors, a crowd applauding a new bridge, library or tram line. What no city archive holds is a photograph of the same bridge being repainted twenty years later, or of an engineer replacing the bearings that keep it standing. Nobody cuts a ribbon for maintenance.

This imbalance is not merely a matter of ceremony. Across much of the developed world, public money flows far more readily to new projects than to the upkeep of existing ones. A new hospital wing is something a politician can stand next to; a repaired roof on an old one is not. The result is a familiar pattern: things are built with great fanfare, left to deteriorate quietly, and eventually replaced at far greater cost than it would have taken to look after them. Engineers have a polite name for repairs that are put off to save money. They call it "deferred maintenance", which sounds like prudence but often turns out to be a debt that grows with every year it is left unpaid.

The bias extends well beyond concrete and steel. In the technology industry, writing new code carries prestige, while the unglamorous work of fixing, updating and documenting old code is often left to whoever cannot avoid it. Some of the software on which banks, airlines and governments depend is decades old, kept alive by a dwindling number of people who still understand it. When it fails, the headlines speak of a "glitch", as though the failure had come out of nowhere rather than being the predictable outcome of years of neglect.

Why should this be? Part of the answer lies in how we recognise success. An innovation produces something visible that did not exist before. Successful maintenance, by contrast, produces nothing at all: its reward is the absence of disaster, and absences are notoriously hard to celebrate. A water engineer whose pipes do not burst this winter will receive no thanks, because nobody will notice that anything has happened. Indeed, nothing has.

There is also a question of status. Historians who have studied the subject point out that the people who keep things running, from cleaners and mechanics to nurses and archivists, have rarely been the ones whose names end up in history books. Innovation is associated with genius and risk; care is associated with routine. We may say that we value reliability, but our habits of praise suggest otherwise.

None of this is to argue that novelty is overrated, or that we should stop building. Many of the services we now take for granted were once somebody's bold experiment. The point is rather that a society which only knows how to begin things will find itself surrounded by things that are falling apart. A growing number of planners and engineers now argue for budgets that ring-fence money for upkeep, so that it cannot be raided whenever a more photogenic project comes along.

Perhaps the change has to begin with attention. The next time a train arrives on time, a website loads or clean water runs from the tap, it is worth remembering that none of this is the natural state of things. Somebody, somewhere, made sure it would happen. They will not be cutting any ribbons.