Brookings

Now with a major congressional negotiation on infrastructure underway and a new presidential administration in place, federal leaders have a historic opportunity to revisit past policies to better support today’s metropolitan leaders and their contemporary ambitions. That process, though, must start with a clear understanding of what regional leaders need—and not just infrastructure agencies, but also the business leadership and community groups that all collaborate to build competitive, inclusive, and resilient economies.

While the digital divide is now a globally understood phenomenon, service designers are still designing and building public technology systems that depend on the internet, preferencing the well-connected and embedding the digital divide. The tendency to design services for the internet—in both technology adoption and in the services that depend on them—are the digital services design divide. Service by service, the people underserved by technology are categorically and cumulatively marginalized by public services.

Hopes persist that a burst of relocations by tech companies and remote workers will revitalize the American heartland. Maybe remote work and pandemic-spurred moves really are going to redistribute economic vitality more evenly across the country after a decade of excessive concentration in coastal “superstar” cities, or maybe not; while aspects of the corporate relocation story may be real, new evidence raises questions about the true potential of the remote-work-driven renewal storyline.

COVID-19 demonstrated the need for speed in digital broadband connections. As more and more members of a household were online simultaneously doing schoolwork or working from home, the need for bandwidth increased.