Toward adaptive infrastructure: the Fifth Discipline

ABSTRACT

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

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (Award No. SRN-1444755 and GCR-1934933) and Office of Naval Research (Award No. N00014-18-1-2393).

Notes on contributors

Mikhail V. Chester

Mikhail V. Chester Ph.D. is the Director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University where he maintains a research program focused on preparing infrastructure and their institutions for the challenges of the coming century. His work spans climate adaptation, disruptive technologies, innovative financing, transitions to agility and flexibility, and modernization of infrastructure management. He is broadly interested in how we need to change infrastructure governance, design, and education for the Anthropocene, an era marked by acceleration and uncertainty. He is co-lead of the Urban Resilience to Extremes research network composed of 19 institutions and 250 researchers across the Americas, focused on developing innovative infrastructure solutions for extreme events.

Braden Allenby

Braden Allenby is the Lincoln Professor of Engineering Ethics, and President’s Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering, and of Law, at Arizona State University. His areas of interest are design for environment, earth systems engineering and management, industrial ecology, sustainable engineering, and emerging technologies. He is a AAAS Fellow 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.