Enabling critical infrastructure through an intricate, values-based and whole-of-system approach

With increasing demand from a declining quantum of resources across our planet, we are confronted by the very real prospect of future generations being worse off than our own. We must act with urgency, re-thinking our choices and committing to achieving the required balance of economic, environmental and social prosperity. This provokes a crucial question: are the decisions we’re making today, leaving a positive legacy for tomorrow?

Encouragingly, collective awareness of our shared responsibility to “pay it forward” to the next generation has increased dramatically in recent years. Despite this awakening, delivering the desired balance of triple-bottom-line outcomes is becoming increasingly complex, frustrating social and environmental progress. Navigating through this complexity is particularly important in the context of critical infrastructure and the built environment, given its inherently social purpose as an enabler of connected, resilient, productive and inspired communities.

The “build it and they will come” approach of years gone by has been replaced with an understanding that successful places and spaces put ‘people’ and ‘planet’ at the heart of their purpose, which in turn delivers desired ‘profit’ outcomes. The way forward demands a more intricate, values-based and whole-of-system approach, requiring all layers of leadership – government, industry, business, community – to have clarity of the fundamental value drivers of all stakeholders. Once known, there is a clear need to collaborate more effectively across eco-systems, to accelerate and enhance the benefits of critical infrastructure investments.

Bringing timely empirical data to this important discussion is GHD’s new CROSSROADS research, a wide-ranging exploration of community sentiment with a focus on infrastructure preferences and priorities. Crucially, CROSSROADS reveals the multi-generational perspectives of citizens in different geographic and cultural contexts around the world. By sharing the hopes and concerns of a broad cross-section of society, we aim to provoke an informed conversation about how we can deliver fair and fit-for-purpose infrastructure, from one generation to the next.

In addition to offering fresh insights, CROSSROADS compels us to act: to embrace the challenge to look at infrastructure delivery through a truly intergenerational lens, confident in the knowledge that through diversity of thought and skillset, with an enhanced focus on ‘value in design’ and the adoption of human-centric technologies, we can create the positive legacy and lasting benefit our communities are counting on.