Rebuild It, But This Time Better
A Science and Engineering Research Agenda for Rebuilding America’s Civilian Infrastructure in the 21st Century
The last major national-scale public infrastructure investment was the construction of the interstate highway system of the 1950s and 1960s. Reportedly designed for a 20 year lifetime, it has survived for over 60 years. It is showing its age, and it needs to be rebuilt in the context of contemporary challenges of climate change and sustainability. In the meantime, particularly in the last several decades, the private sector has made major investments in digital infrastructures, for telecommunications, cellular, and the Internet — the so-called “data highway.” Yet even this more modern infrastructure has shown its limitations during the pandemic, in terms of bandwidth, reliability, geographic reach, upgradeability, and access availability to the broad consumer community. As a society, we need a deep rethinking of how we build infrastructure for the 21st century.
Our particular focus here is civil infrastructure. It encompasses not just highways, bridges, and tunnels, but also buildings, air traffic control systems and airports, the electrical grid, water systems, and other societal systems for the world-wide production and distribution of the products necessary for modern existence. It is the nervous system of modern life.
Any thinking about its 21st century evolution must be viewed through the lenses of the rapid advances in information technology — e.g., autonomous and connected vehicles — and the impact of climate change — e.g., more extreme weather events. Furthermore, its industrial base must be reimagined, to be more sustainable — e.g., the circular economy — and more energy efficient, and to focus on optimizing the total cost of ownership.
Phrased differently, if you were to rebuild the multi-trillion dollar civil infrastructure of the United States from scratch, would you continue to use the approaches and industrial organization of the 20th century? The temptation is to focus on the near term job creation, and to treat the repair of a section of highway or replacement of a bridge as a one-time event, not an incremental approach to enhancing a system.
In the spirit of “build it back, better,” I believe the right approach is to deeply rethink everything about infrastructure: its design, costing, use of materials, embedding of technology, construction modularity and upgradeability, real-time monitoring and predictive data analysis to identify and correct catastrophic failures before they happen, and new industrial organizations that embrace innovation and are focused on reducing the cost of ownership.
But to undertake such a rethinking requires a commitment to a vigorous research and development program, one that encompasses new materials, new construction and manufacturing methods, simulation before building, incorporation of embedded intelligence within designs, new data analyses and predictive modeling approaches, and new industrial organizations. There is a tremendous opportunity for universities to contribute their research to understanding just how to rebuild it, but this time better. But we need to start now.
