Infrastructure Resilience in a Changing Society and Culture (Part 2)

Understanding infrastructure interactions with Society and Culture

Infrastructure is a critical component of society and culture, namely because it functions as an enabling factor for society and culture to exist. The quality and distribution of infrastructure provision for services such as waste management, freshwater, natural gas, energy, etc. have a significant impact on the quality of existence for people living within cities, neighbourhoods and local communities. As societies demands on infrastructure change, the infrastructure must change and adapt; in many cases, these changes are driven by externalities outside of the control of society itself. In a sense, for infrastructure to be resilient to changes in society and culture, it is for infrastructure to view societal and cultural change as a proxy for other externalities against which infrastructure must be resilient. Some current examples of societal and cultural change being driven by externalities include changes in behaviour resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in different energy usage patterns (Cheshmehzangi, 2020; IEA, 2020), and consumer demand for greater renewable energy being driven by greater awareness of climate change (Ofgem, 2020).

Traditionally, infrastructure resilience has been viewed from the perspective of the infrastructure asset (as was the perspective for section 1 of this report). However, to unquestioningly adopt this perspective to neglect that infrastructure exists to serve society and people, not the other way around. In mind of this, there have been several efforts made to create more holistic frameworks for resilience which have sought to capture the broader elements of community resilience (The Rockefeller Foundation and Arup, 2015; Cimellaro et al., 2016; Thomas, Eisenberg and Seager, 2018). One such framework set out by Cimellaro et al. presents seven dimensions for measuring community resilience as part of the PEOPLES framework: population and demographics, environmental and ecosystem, organised governmental services, physical infrastructures, lifestyle and community competence, economic development, and social-cultural capital (Cimellaro et al., 2016). From the perspective of this framework, infrastructure can be viewed as just one component of many that are highly interlinked with communities, and by extension with society and culture. With this perspective in mind, the below sections explore the external and internal considerations relating to infrastructure resilience to societal and cultural change.

External view of Resilient Infrastructure

As described above, infrastructure is fundamentally about the provision of services that support society. In this section, infrastructure resilience will be discussed through three lenses: societal and cultural behaviour, inequality and inclusivity.

Behaviour 

Society acts as the consumer of infrastructure services, and as a result, wide-scale shifts in the behaviour of people within society can have significant consequences for infrastructure resilience. A good example of a very recent shift in society wide behaviour has been as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to extreme measures to prevent the spread of disease, people have been encouraged to work from home rather than the office. This directive has implications both in terms of a short-term shift in people’s behaviour to working from home, and also a long-term alteration in people’s preference for a more diverse work/home work culture (BBC, 2020).

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, city energy provision infrastructure had been largely focused on providing an energy supply to offices and places of work. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the possibility of a wholesale instantaneous shift to working from home simply had not been a key consideration when designing these buildings or the energy systems that supply them. The implications of this change has resulted in a drastic shift in energy consumption away from office buildings and towards residential home consumption (Frontier Economics, 2020). Alongside this, general energy consumption across the UK and globally has decreased, as shown in Figure 1, but the contribution from renewable energies to the energy mix has actually grown (IEA, 2020) (see Figure 2). Furthermore, with the restriction’s placed of people’s movements, CO2 and NOX generation has also fallen significantly (IEA, 2020; Mofijur et al., 2020). While none of the above-discussed consequences are negative, they raise questions surrounding the preparedness of existing infrastructure to support the continued delivery of positive gains made and exemplified as a result of the pandemic. Unlike in section 1, where the focus was primarily on adapting to risk and disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic poses the reverse question; how can infrastructure be resilient to changes within society in order to support positive alterations in behaviour and demands (albeit in the absence of government-enforced restrictions)?

Figure 1 -   Reductions of electricity demand after implementing lockdown measures in selected regions (IEA, 2020).

Figure 2 – Global Generation Shares from Coal and Low-Carbon Sources, 1971-2020 (IEA, 2020).  

Inequality

The distribution, resilience and cost of infrastructure provision also has a significant impact on equality within society. Focussing again on the example of the COVID-19, due to the shift toward working from home, average energy bills for households has significantly increased (up to £16 extra per month) (UK Energy Research Centre, 2020). This has represented a net increase in household bills, as people would have traditionally been at work and not consuming energy at home during the day. This compounded with the negative impact COVID-19 has had on people’s financial position has driven up the prevalence of fuel poverty within the UK (UK Energy Research Centre, 2020). While this is not explicitly a technical failure of the energy supply infrastructure, it is a failure of the wider system governing the energy infrastructure and so represents a consequential failure of the infrastructure to be resilient to a changing need of its users. After all, a system that is cost-prohibitive to its users is not fit for purpose. 

Inclusivity is also closely aligned to equality within society, and so inclusive design of infrastructure is an important consideration for reducing inequality. Society is intrinsically in a constant state of change; people age, the climate changes, new technologies become available, the economic conditions of a country change, etc. In mind of inclusivity, projects such as 8 80 Cities (8 80 Cities, 2020) were created to encourage more inclusive city design through being mindful of the disparate and changing needs of those within society.

Internal view of Resilient Infrastructure

In addition to the externalities discussed above, there are important internal factors within the infrastructure and construction industries that can be determinants of infrastructure resilience.  

Culture of Change and Innovation

Within some industries, particularly those relating to the built environment, innovation and change is not the norm. For example, while significantly improved, the construction industry is acknowledged as a slow adopter of new technologies and novel methods (World Economic Forum, 2016). The reasons for this are largely beyond the scope of this discussion but can be broadly put down to risk aversion, low motivation alignment and the slow cycles of construction (World Economic Forum, 2016). The effect of this laggard behaviour ultimately prevents the industry from adopting technologies and process that could potentially deliver greater resilience, equality and inclusivity.

Bibliography

8 80 Cities (2020) 8 80 Cities | Creating Cities for All. Available at: https://www.880cities.org/ (Accessed: 6 November 2020).

BBC (2020) Coronavirus: How the world of work may change forever - BBC Worklife. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201023-coronavirus-how-will-the-pandemic-change-the-way-we-work (Accessed: 6 November 2020).

Cheshmehzangi, A. (2020) ‘COVID-19 and household energy implications: what are the main impacts on energy use?’, Heliyon. Elsevier Ltd, 6(10), p. e05202. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e05202.

Cimellaro, G. P. et al. (2016) ‘PEOPLES: A Framework for Evaluating Resilience’, Journal of Structural Engineering, 142(10), p. 04016063. doi: 10.1061/(asce)st.1943-541x.0001514.

Frontier Economics (2020) How is COVID 19 impacting the UK electricity system? | Frontier Economics. Available at: https://www.frontier-economics.com/uk/en/news-and-articles/articles/article-i7214-how-is-covid-19-impacting-the-uk-electricity-system/ (Accessed: 6 November 2020).

IEA (2020) Rate of change of global primary energy demand, 1900-2020 – Charts – Data & Statistics - IEA. Available at: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/rate-of-change-of-global-primary-energy-demand-1900-2020 (Accessed: 6 November 2020).

Mofijur, M. et al. (2020) ‘Impact of COVID-19 on the social, economic, environmental and energy domains: Lessons learnt from a global pandemic’, Sustainable Production and Consumption. Elsevier B.V., 26(September 2020), pp. 343–359. doi: 10.1016/j.spc.2020.10.016.

Ofgem (2020) ‘Consumer Opinion about Climate Change and Decarbonisation’. Available at: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2020/10/consumer_opinion_about_climate_change_and_decarbonisation.pdf.

The Rockefeller Foundation and Arup (2015) ‘The corneal endothelium following 20 years of PMMA contact lens wear’. Available at: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/city-resilience-framework/.

Thomas, J. E., Eisenberg, D. A. and Seager, T. P. (2018) ‘Holistic infrastructure resilience research requires multiple perspectives, not just multiple disciplines’, Infrastructures, 3(3), pp. 1–18. doi: 10.3390/infrastructures3030030.

UK Energy Research Centre (2020) COVID-19: The implications of the pandemic on the UK energy sector | UKERC | The UK Energy Research Centre. Available at: https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/covid-19-the-implications-of-the-pandemic-on-the-uk-energy-sector/ (Accessed: 6 November 2020).

World Economic Forum (2016) ‘Shaping the Future of Construction A Breakthrough in Mindset and Technology’, (May).