Concepts and practices for transforming infrastructure from rigid to adaptable

ABSTRACT

Infrastructure are increasingly being recognized as too rigid to quickly adapt to a changing climate and a non-stationary future. This rigidness poses risks to infrastructure service delivery and public welfare. Adaptivity in infrastructure is critical for managing uncertainties to continue providing services, yet little is known about how infrastructure can be made more agile and flexible for improved adaptive capacity. A literature review identified approximately fifty examples of novel infrastructure and technologies which support adaptivity through one or more of ten theoretical characteristics of adaptive infrastructure. From these examples, several infrastructure forms and possible strategies for adaptivity emerged, including smart technologies, combined centralized/decentralized organizational structures, and renewable electricity generation. With institutional and cultural support, such novel structures and systems have the potential to transform infrastructure provision and management.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• agile
• flexible
• adaptation
• smart systems
• resilience

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Urban Resilience to Extreme Events Sustainability Research Network (grant 1444750).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [1444750].

Notes on contributors

Erica J. Gilrein

Erica Gilrein grew up in upstate New York and was fortunate to stumble upon the wonderful career field of civil engineering. Her career goals are to expand the scope of civil engineers’ work to include considerations for resilience, climate adaptation, and social justice issues.

Thomaz M. Carvalhaes

Thomaz Carvalhaes is a PhD student in the School of Sustainability at the Arizona State University in Tempe AZ. His research interests are in urban infrastructure as complex socio-technical systems in terms of resilience, sustainability, and climate change.

Samuel A. Markolf

Dr. Samuel Markolf is a research fellow within the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) and the School for Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. His research broadly focuses on urban infrastructure resilience to extreme events. In particular, current projects include characterizing vulnerabilities that arise in transportation systems via interdependencies with other infrastructure systems (e.g. the electricity grid.); critically assessing the role of risk analysis in infrastructure resilience and the exploration of alternative approaches; analyzing the extent to which integrated social-ecological-technical systems (SETS) are present in cities and the extent to which SETS can enhance the resilience of cities to extreme events; and investigating the influence that historical extreme events have had on the design, implementation, and governance of infrastructure over time

Mikhail V. Chester

Mikhail V. Chester is an associate professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. His research laboratory studies the resilience to climate change and sustainability of urban infrastructure systems. He and his team identify infrastructure vulnerabilities to climate hazards and work with cities and infrastructure agencies to identify and deploy adaptation strategies. More broadly he is interested in transitioning and designing infrastructure for the Anthropocene. He is co-leader of the National Science Foundation Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, a consortium of roughly 120 researchers across 17 institutions in North and South America focused on developing novel strategies for preparing urban infrastructure for climate change.

Braden R. Allenby

Braden Allenby J.D. is the Lincoln Professor of Engineering Ethics and Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering, and Law, at Arizona State University. His areas of interest are design for environment, earth systems engineering and management, industrial ecology, technological evolution, and the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and communication technology, and cognitive sciences. He is a AAAS Fellow, a Batten Fellow in Residence at the University of Virginias Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, and a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures & Commerce. He was the U.S. Naval Academy Stockdale Fellow in 2009-2010, a Templeton Fellow in 2008– 2010, and the J. Herbert Hollowman Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering in 1991-1992. During 1995 and 1996, he served as the director of Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Margaret Garcia

Dr. Margaret Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering & the Built Environment at Arizona State University in Tempe AZ. Her research investigates the factors influencing the sustainability and resilience of water infrastructure systems and identifies design and policy options to improve outcomes.