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.

Real World Application

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.