Next-generation infrastructure for next-generation people

Abstract

The way in which people consider next-generation infrastructure needs to be rooted in the history of the planet and, in particular, its most troublesome inhabitant, Homo sapiens. This history has driven the development of infrastructure through the ages at an accelerating rate, from the incipient early cities of 10 000 years ago to the fast-growing metropolises of the twenty-first century. That history teaches people that human beings are essentially social animals and both require and crave social interactions. The need for this has been increasingly excluded from city design since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolutions and increasingly in the past 100 or so years, where the driver has been the development of infrastructure for its own sake rather than that of the everyday person. This paper proposes a refocus for urban engineering, on the concept of sociality, the propensity to interact freely with unknown others, so that infrastructure is directed to enhancing the ability of people to converse as a basic and initial form of the function of social interaction. The challenge is there, but is the infrastructure sector up to meet it? This paper proposes some initial lines of thought and ways forward to answer the challenge.