Infrastructure in the Anthropocene: Second Edition

At the dawn of the Anthropocene the world appears to be much more complex than in the past, and our infrastructure systems appear unable to respond at pace and scale. This is the motivation for this book, which is designed to help bridge the gap between what our infrastructure systems can do and what we need them to do. The book describes concepts, framings, and new mental models that challenge normative assumptions of infrastructure, that these systems will continue to be reliable and meet our needs, despite growing evidence that the environments that they must function in as well as the systems themselves are rapidly changing and becoming far more complex. The book is organized into six sections.

In Section 1 it is argued that the scale and scope of human activities has grown so large that the dichotomy between infrastructure and the environment is shrinking and often nonexistent; reductionist approaches that approach infrastructure as hardware problems are insufficient. Section 1 is concluded with the perspective that infrastructure are becoming less about physical assets and more so a process for navigating wicked and complex challenges.

Section 2 focuses on the capabilities and opportunities for navigating infrastructure through increasingly complex environments. First, a reconceptualizing of what infrastructure need to do is presented, and then tenets of agility and flexibility are proposed to match the pace of change surrounding infrastructure.

In Section 3, attention is turned to the importance of innovative governance and leadership. The origins of current infrastructure governance and its success during a prolonged period of stability are first described. Governance models that dominate infrastructure today are ill-suited for complex and chaotic conditions. Governance models that can pivot between efficiency and exploration are described. The section concludes with a discussion of the need for the ability to pivot which infrastructure are considered critical during times of crisis.

Section 4 focuses on the challenge of changing climatic conditions and how they undermine normative assumptions about how we plan and manage infrastructure. In this section novel approaches for infrastructure to confront nonstationary conditions are presented, namely decision-making under deep uncertainty, safe-to-fail, and biomimicry.

The rapid implementation of cybertechnologies, novel data streams, and communications technologies into legacy infrastructure represent not simply new capabilities but more so an irrevocable integration into a broader cognitive ecosystem. This is the focus of Section 5 which challenges how we see the nature of infrastructure, and what this means into the future. The concept of the cognitive ecosystem is introduced –an ecology of massive data flows, artificial intelligence, and connected technologies – and what this means for infrastructure. These technologies are resulting in infrastructure becoming battlespaces in cyber and asymmetric warfare. This section is concluded with discussions on the challenges of managing infrastructure as cybertechnologies, and the potential for artificial intelligence to disrupt how we understand and control infrastructure.

Section 6 concludes the book with a synthesis of our arguments and perspectives into novel first principles for infrastructure in the Anthropocene. These first principles are a charge to the infrastructure community, a roadmap for operationalizing the book’s perspectives.