Since infrastructure is the embodiment of long-term investments, its impact in determining the organization of flows extends well into the future, both for developed and developing countries. Whereas the former are confronted with the need to maintain and renew highways, electrical grids, sewage systems, and the like, the latter are scrambling to meet the needs of their own expanding populations. In both cases, massive investments for retrofitting or for new infrastructure are key to sustaining the human habitat. This topic: “Infrastructure Space” will be the focus of the 5th International Forum for Sustainable Construction in Detroit, USA from April 7 to April 9, 2016.
Faced with the challenges of unsustainable practices on a world scale, infrastructure must be seen as key to reorienting our ways of inhabiting the planet. It must therefore be regarded as more than a mere servant to utility, become responsive to cultural and contextual distinctions, and be reclaimed as a truly public resource. For this to happen, infrastructural systems – whether centralized or decentralized – must be viewed as more than a technical issue alone and treated as equally social in scope and design, that is, as a common good in an ecology of interrelationships vital to furthering life. This is to say that infrastructure development and renewal is a powerful but greatly under-exploited agent for making and altering space.
