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Abstract Infrastructure are at the center of three trends: accelerating human activities, increasing uncertainty in social, technological, and climatological factors, and increasing complexity of the systems themselves and environments in which they operate. Resilience theory can help infrastructure managers navigate increasing complexity. Engineering framings of resilience will need to evolve beyond robustness to consider adaptation and transformation, and the ability to handle surprise. Agility and flexibility in both physical assets and governance will need to be emphasized, and sensemaking capabilities will need to be reoriented. Transforming infrastructure is necessary to ensuring that core systems keep pace with a changing world.
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Toward adaptive infrastructure: the Fifth Discipline
Modern infrastructure have been a relatively stable force for decades, ensuring that basic and critical services are met, without significantly changing their core designs or management principles. At the dawn of the Anthropocene it appears that accelerating and increasingly uncertain conditions are poised to result in a paradigm shift for infrastructure, where the environments in which they operate are changing faster than the systems themselves. New approaches are needed in the education, governance, and physical structures that constitute infrastructure systems that can respond in pace. Principles of agility and flexibility appear well suited to help guide how we transform the management and design of infrastructure. In changing how we approach infrastructure we will need to respond to increasingly wicked challenges. Infrastructure must become a Fifth Discipline, focused on learning about the rapidly changing environments and demands in which they operate, and agility and flexibility in both governance and technology reconfiguration. KEYWORDS: Infrastructure, Anthropocene, agility and flexibility, adaptive, resilience
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- PAR ID:
- 10171428
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure
- ISSN:
- 2378-9689
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/23789689.2020.1762045
