About IFR

What are Infrastructure Futures?

Infrastructure Futures is an emerging field of inquiry and practice, though it can be hard to define precisely. We understand what infrastructure is quite well—the networks, systems, and facilities that underpin modern life. Most of us spend time thinking about the future as well. Futures, as a field, refers to systematic approaches for exploring, imagining, and shaping what might come next, moving beyond simple prediction to embrace uncertainty, human agency, and multiple possibilities.

Infrastructure Futures, then, is about thinking systematically about alternative futures and how they might affect infrastructure planning, policy, and design today. In fact, everyone involved in infrastructure policy, planning, and design thinks about the future every day and are therefore futurists, even if we don't consciously frame our work in those terms. Every time a transport planner projects traffic volumes, a water engineer designs for population growth, or a policymaker commits to a multi-decade investment, they're making assumptions about what's coming.

After six years of PhD research, The Infrastructure Futures Review is my continuing contribution to this discussion—a discussion that is really about civilisational futures through an infrastructure lens.

Why Now?

We stand at what historians might one day call a "Great Bifurcation"—a moment where infrastructure decisions either lock humanity into rigid, fragile systems inherited from the past, or open pathways to more adaptive, regenerative futures. The traditional "predict and provide" approach to infrastructure planning—inherited from an extraction-growth ethos born in the Neolithic period—is increasingly unfit for purpose.

We face what scholars call "post-normal times" and "radical uncertainty"—an era marked by climate change, ecological crisis, technological disruption, and social transformation happening simultaneously at unprecedented speed. The World Uncertainty Index shows we're living through sustained high uncertainty, yet our infrastructure planning methods still assume we can forecast the future with reasonable confidence.

This matters profoundly because infrastructure decisions made today will shape our world for decades, often generations, sometimes millennia. Roman aqueducts still carry water. Victorian sewers still serve modern cities. The infrastructure we build now will either enable or constrain how our descendants respond to challenges we can barely imagine.

The Infrastructure Futures Review presents and links to articles at the intersection of infrastructure, futures thinking, and civilisational transformation. Rather than focusing on specific infrastructure sectors (though roads, energy, water, and telecommunications will certainly be discussed), the deeper patterns and shifts shaping how we think about infrastructure's role in society will be highlighted.

Some key themes include:

Regenerative systems: Moving from infrastructure that extracts and consumes to infrastructure that restores and regenerates
Distributed resilience: Shifting from centralised mega-projects to networked, adaptive, local-scale systems
Equity and access: Ensuring infrastructure serves as an engine of equity rather than reinforcing division
Material consciousness: Understanding infrastructure as temporary custodian of materials in constant circulation
Cognitive infrastructure: Exploring how digital intelligence and physical systems merge into unified "phygital" layers
Optionality: Designing for multiple possible futures rather than relying too heavily on forecasting
Planetary stewardship: Aligning infrastructure decisions with Earth system boundaries and natural wellbeing

Emerging technologies, social movements, policy innovations, and philosophical shifts that challenge our conventional infrastructure thinking will be identified. Your input into the conversation is welcome too, as we make sense of what is to come together.

Who This Is For

This newsletter speaks to infrastructure professionals—planners, policymakers, engineers, financiers—who sense that business-as-usual is no longer sufficient. It's for academics exploring futures methodologies and sustainable development. It's for civil society advocates working on equity and climate justice. It's for anyone curious about how the systems that shape our daily lives came to be and how they might evolve.

You don't need technical expertise in infrastructure or futures studies. What matters is curiosity about how we got here and where we might be heading.

Final Thoughts

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Richard MacGeorge
MacGeorge & Co., Limited