There is a growing maintenance debt of ageing and critical infrastructures in many municipalities in European welfare states. In this article, we use the multidimensional concept of local capacity as a point of departure to analyse how and in what ways Swedish municipalities work with the routine maintenance of infrastructures, including municipal road networks as well as water and sewage systems. For the road networks, maintenance is generally outsourced to contractors and there is also a large degree of tolerance for various standards on different road segments within and between the municipalities. Less used road segments are not as prioritised as those with heavy traffic. For the water and sewage systems, in-house technical capacity is needed as differences in water quality are not tolerated. Economies of scale mean that in-house capacity is translated into the creation of inter-municipal bodies. As different forms of capacities tend to reinforce each other, municipal capacity builds up over time in circular movements. These results add knowledge to current research by pointing to the ways municipalities are overcoming a run-to-failure mentality by building capacity to pay off the infrastructural maintenance debt.

在欧洲福利国家的许多城市中，老化和关键基础设施的维护债务不断增加。在本文中，我们使用本地容量的多维概念作为出发点，分析瑞典市政当局如何以及以何种方式进行基础设施的日常维护，包括市政道路网络以及供水和污水处理系统。对于道路网络，维护工作通常外包给承包商，而且城市内部和城市之间不同路段的各种标准也有很大程度的容忍度。较少使用的路段不像交通繁忙的路段那样优先。对于供水和污水系统，由于不能容忍水质差异，因此需要内部技术能力。规模经济意味着内部能力被转化为城市间机构的创建。由于不同形式的能力往往会相互加强，市政能力会随着时间的推移以循环运动的方式建立起来。这些结果通过指出市政当局通过建设偿还基础设施维护债务的能力来克服不断失败的心态的方式，为当前的研究增加了知识。