Virtually everything we do involves infrastructure in one way or another. The lifestyles of most people, especially in high-income countries like the U.S., would not be possible without constant and reliable access to infrastructure. Yet, operating and maintaining existing infrastructure requires more energy and resources than the Earth can provide. Our society has never been so technologically advanced, yet it has never been so unsustainable and vulnerable.
In this talk, we will take a tour of seven infrastructure systems—water, wastewater, electricity, gas, solid waste, and telecommunications. We will discuss how these systems work and why they fail. We will see that they are all deeply interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent. Although these interconnections are intuitive, we will see that they are complex and often overlooked. We will finally look at international successes in the world to help guide us and determine how infrastructure should be in the future.
Sybil Derrible is a professor in urban engineering and the director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research is at the nexus of civil engineering, urban metabolism, and data and complexity science to help design livable, sustainable, and resilient cities. He is the author of the popular science book The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives (Prometheus Books 2025) and the textbook Urban Engineering for Sustainability (MIT Press 2019). He received a U.S. NSF CAREER Award for his work and the Huber Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Infrastructure Systems and for Scientific Reports, and he is a Fellow of the ASCE.