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Abstract Our urban systems and their underlying sub-systems are designed to deliver only a narrow set of human-centered services, with little or no accounting or understanding of how actions undercut the resilience of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Embracing a SETS resilience perspective creates opportunities for novel approaches to adaptation and transformation in complex environments. We: i) frame urban systems through a perspective shift from control to entanglement, ii) position SETS thinking as novel sensemaking to create repertoires of responses commensurate with environmental complexity (i.e., requisite complexity), and iii) describe modes of SETS sensemaking for urban system structures and functions as basic tenets to build requisite complexity. SETS sensemaking is an undertaking to reflexively bring sustained adaptation, anticipatory futures, loose-fit design, and co-governance into organizational decision-making and to help reimagine institutional structures and processes as entangled SETS. 

Pervasive and accelerating climatic, technological, social, economic, and institutional change dictate that the challenges of the future will likely be vastly different and more complex than they are today. As our infrastructure systems (and their surrounding environment) become increasingly complex and beyond the cognitive understanding of any group of individuals or institutions, artificial intelligence (AI) may offer critical cognitive insights to ensure that systems adapt, services continue to be provided, and needs continue to be met. This paper conceptually links AI to various tasks and leadership capabilities in order to critically examine potential roles that AI can play in the management and implementation of infrastructure systems under growing complexity and uncertainty. Ultimately, various AI techniques appear to be increasingly well-suited to make sense of and operate under both stable (predictable) and chaotic (unpredictable) conditions. The ability to dynamically and continuously shift between stable and chaotic conditions is critical for effectively navigating our complex world. Thus, moving forward, a key adaptation for engineers will be to place increasing emphasis on creating the structural, financial, and knowledge conditions for enabling this type of flexibility in our integrated human-AI-infrastructure systems. Ultimately, as AI systems continue to evolve and become further embedded in our infrastructure systems, we may be implicitly or explicitly releasing control to algorithms. The potential benefits of this arrangement may outweigh the drawbacks. However, it is important to have open and candid discussions about the potential implications of this shift and whether or not those implications are desirable. 

Abstract Infrastructure must be resilient to both known and unknown disturbances. In the past, resilient infrastructure design efforts have tended to focus on principles of robustness and recovery against projected failures. This framing has developed independently from resilience principles in biological and ecological systems. As such, there are open questions as to whether the approaches of natural systems that lead to adaptation and transformation are relevant to engineered systems. To improve engineered system resilience, infrastructure managers may benefit from considering and applying a set of “Life's Principles”—design principles and patterns drawn from the field of biomimicry. Nature has long withstood disturbances within and beyond previous experience. Infrastructure resilience theory and practice are assessed against Life's Principles identifying alignments, contradictions, contentions, and gaps. Resilient infrastructure theory, which emphasizes a need for flexible and agile infrastructure, aligns well with Life's Principles, addressing each principle and most sub‐principles (excluding “breakdown products into benign components” and “do chemistry in water”). Meanwhile, resilient infrastructure practice only occasionally aligns with Life's Principles and contradicts five out of six principles. As resilience theory advances, Life's Principles offer support in broadening how infrastructure managers approach resilience, and by using biomimicry, infrastructure managers can be better equipped to deploy resilience for complexity and uncertainty. 

Abstract Traditional infrastructure adaptation to extreme weather events (and now climate change) has typically been techno‐centric and heavily grounded in robustness—the capacity to prevent or minimize disruptions via a risk‐based approach that emphasizes control, armoring, and strengthening (e.g., raising the height of levees). However, climate and nonclimate challenges facing infrastructure are not purely technological. Ecological and social systems also warrant consideration to manage issues of overconfidence, inflexibility, interdependence, and resource utilization—among others. As a result, techno‐centric adaptation strategies can result in unwanted tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and underaddressed vulnerabilities. Techno‐centric strategies thatlock‐intoday's infrastructure systems to vulnerable future design, management, and regulatory practices may be particularly problematic by exacerbating these ecological and social issues rather than ameliorating them. Given these challenges, we develop a conceptual model and infrastructure adaptation case studies to argue the following: (1) infrastructure systems are not simply technological and should be understood as complex and interconnected social, ecological, and technological systems (SETSs); (2) infrastructure challenges, like lock‐in, stem from SETS interactions that are often overlooked and underappreciated; (3) framing infrastructure with aSETS lenscan help identify and prevent maladaptive issues like lock‐in; and (4) a SETS lens can also highlight effective infrastructure adaptation strategies that may not traditionally be considered. Ultimately, we find that treating infrastructure as SETS shows promise for increasing the adaptive capacity of infrastructure systems by highlighting how lock‐in and vulnerabilities evolve and how multidisciplinary strategies can be deployed to address these challenges by broadening the options for adaptation.