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Lightweight Infrastructures
Lower coordination costs and smarter and lighter components create flexible infrastructures that focus on local needs and enable urban revitalization.

Explore how this evolves in the 2020 Forecast in Lightweight Community-Based Manufacturing, Learning Grids, and Shadow Schools.

Infrastructures are flexible and localized In a world of rapid urban growth, constrained urban resources, and increasing mobility, building and maintaining basic infrastructure will be an ongoing challenge. The concept of permanent, large-scale infrastructure will likely give way to more temporary, localized, and ad hoc solutions—in effect creating temporary structures for bounded purposes or lightweight, portable, and personalized infrastructures. This is true for infrastructures like telecommunications and energy, but will be increasingly true for social, economic, and political structures as well like micro-finance and micro-insurance, home-based health care, small schools, and even micro-learning structures. Technologies and structures that were once intended to provide independence for rural areas could well become tomorrow’s urban solutions.

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Map Legend

Drivers   Drivers
The vertical side of the left column of the map. These are six categories driving all trends, hotspots and dilemmas. Click on the purple bar for a definition of that driver.
Impact areas   Impact Areas
The horizontal axis of the map. These are five key areas of activity where major trends are revealed from different perspectives. Click on the purple bar for a definition of that impact area.
Hotspots   Hotspots
These are key trends that we think have broad impact on education and often make good starting points for exploring the map.
Dilemmas   Dilemmas
These are issues that can't be solved with either/or thinking but require new strategies that go beyond simple problem solving.

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