Out of interest in the sustainability of civilization on earth, I'm interested in the adaptability of infrastructure.
"Infrastructure" is a slippery term, and I am not interested in making it any less complicated. There are some classical ideas of what "hard" infrastructure looks like: roads, railways, dams, energy grids, water systems, etc. Soft infrastructure manifests as procedures, norms, and regulations. There's something in-between, too, assemblages of physical and cultural systems that uphold cultural narratives, or orchestrate their parts to maintain resilient collections of ideas (memes!). From this lens, institutions are infrastructure, inasmuch as they become integral parts of cultural activity and archive. I like this definition, from a Real Life Mag article:
"Infrastructure" is a slippery term, and I am not interested in making it any less complicated. There are some classical ideas of what "hard" infrastructure looks like: roads, railways, dams, energy grids, water systems, etc. Soft infrastructure manifests as procedures, norms, and regulations. There's something in-between, too, assemblages of physical and cultural systems that uphold cultural narratives, or orchestrate their parts to maintain resilient collections of ideas (memes!). From this lens, institutions are infrastructure, inasmuch as they become integral parts of cultural activity and archive. I like this definition, from a Real Life Mag article:
One early 19th-century definition was “the installations that form the basis for any operation or system.” But another approach is to view infrastructure as context — that which establishes a relationship between one thing and other things. Infrastructure creates adjacency where it wouldn’t otherwise exist, frequently in the form of a physical connection. For instance, the massive Denver International Airport, opened in 1995, put an otherwise relatively remote city at the doorstep of the world, replacing a small regional airport with a major international hub. Urban street systems link houses, stores, and workplaces, defining neighborhoods and cities as coherent entities. Airports and roads, however, are only the most tangible examples of infrastructure. Organizational schema like geographic coordinates or the Dewey Decimal System are also infrastructure, as is the internet and everything it comprises, at a global scale.
My only adjustment to "infrastructure is that which provides context" is to require some level of scale: I don't think infrastructure is that which provides for only one person, it needs to be broader, something identifiable at a cultural level.
With a high pace of civilizational change—whether by internet communication, global trade, or climate change—our infrastructure must change, too. This is why the prototypical "hard" definition of infrastructure will be stressed and forced to change in the 21st century; it's difficult, expensive, and slow to reassemble our built environments in response to year-to-year changes. Sometimes, destruction is what's necessary—while at the USGS, I learned about Elwha River Restoration, a trailblazing project in dam removal and ecosystem processes. Other times, it's about careful re-purposing. University of Western Australia is pushing research on how to decommission offshore oil platforms, and it looks like some of them can be responsibly turned into artificial reefs. (It boggles my mind that end-of-life of many systems is not explicitly planned. Absolutely idiotic. I worry that the costs of decommissioning may be offloaded to federal funds, rather than paid for by those who profited from the platforms.)
In short, the 21st century looks exciting when it comes to infrastructure adaptation. This topic is not well-structured to me, now... I'm interested to learn more about Japan's relationship with turnover in the built environment; about how to think about what infrastructure means to nomadic civilizations; about what more dynamic and fungible "hard" infrastructure could actually look like; and about how we may first see it coming out of less wealthy countries. (There are people working to keep our organizations adaptable with the pace of change, too. Super fascinating—more on that some other time.) This brings us back to familiar territory, again. I love going in loops.
Providing context,
Lukas