Equitable Infrastructure Management: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract: Transportation infrastructure can drive prosperity but may also disproportionately burden communities. This has led to a growing focus on equity in infrastructure management as a key area of research in recent years. Despite over a decade of research focusing on equity in infrastructure management, there remains a lack of a comprehensive review of the current state of the art and a defined research agenda spanning various infrastructures and topics. Key questions include: What are the primary research areas within equitable infrastructure management? What social parameters are employed to identify disadvantaged communities? Which social science theories are utilized to frame the impacts of infrastructure on communities? What are the common data sources used to quantify and evaluate infrastructure equity? This study undertakes a thorough literature review on equity in infrastructure management to tackle these questions. The process began by generating representative keywords to screen 1,405 articles from the Scopus database. A data-driven approach employing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques was utilized to filter relevant papers for further examination. Ultimately, 540 papers were selected for an in-depth review to address the posed questions
through thematic analysis and advanced text mining approaches, including topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The findings were significant to understand scopes and opportunities for equity related research in infrastructure management.