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FutureStructure is a new framework for thinking through and solving the challenges faced in building economically and socially robust communities. The aim of FutureStructure is to overcome the constraints inherent in haphazard and silo'd approaches that communities often take when conceiving, investing in and building their futures.
FutureStructure starts from the premise that a community or region is best envisioned as a large system of deeply interdependent smaller systems. These systems include "hard infrastructure" for things like transportation and utilities to "soft infrastructure" that support human capital, like education and economic development.
Harnessing developments in technology, like powerful analytics and the "internet of things" combined with designing communities as systems, FutureStructure is about what gets built, but more importantly how it's built and especially how what gets built connects with everything else.

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A new approach is needed for 21st century city and community building. This session will give examples and describe the many challenges and opportunities associated with a design process that integrates transportation, education, infrastructure, economic vitality, jobs, finance, social quality, environmental quality and governance. Embracing a long-term view while responding to near-term demand for action these systems will need to be:

• connected and well integrated
• smarter with greater responsiveness to community needs
• supportive of and less destructive to the environment
• energy efficient with systems themselves designed to be maximally efficient
• responsive to new technological opportunities in design and construction
• less expensive to build and operate

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America's 21st century infrastructure renewal will cost billions of dollars, involve government leaders at all jurisdictional levels and engage the best minds of our planning, design, construction and finance professionals. It will also require the expertise of technology professionals to make our water/waste systems, roads, lights, buildings, energy, buildings and transportation systems smarter, less expensive to operate and more adaptive to our needs. Technology promises to transform how we build, view and interact with the physical structures in the world around us. Smart infrastructure makes more efficient use of resources and improves the quality of life for the people who use it.

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Energy is the foundation of our modern society. It drove the industrial revolution, energized the digital age and today powers our communities. Vital to the future of the country is ready access to domestic energy sources with reduced environmental impacts. Equally important is a smart distribution system that ensures that power is available when and where it is needed - including at the local community level during times of disaster. The US is poised to be a net exporter of energy in the near future. As significant as this is it doesn't reduce the need to optimize the production, distribution and use of energy as a high priority. Equally important is the need to better understand energy's connections to our water, waste, building, and transportation systems as well as the evolving role of utilities in this changing landscape of supply and demand.

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Supply challenges coupled with an aging infrastructure and increasing costs of treating, delivering and disposing of water (wastewater systems) make smart systems attractive solutions. Challenges include finding adequate supply sources, improving efficiencies and leak detection as well enhancing system accuracy and customer satisfaction. There's also an energy-water nexus to manage. It takes water to produce energy and it takes energy to move water. Pumping systems are often the largest users of energy in a community. On the other side of the connection, second only to agriculture, the electricity industry is the largest user of water in the United States with electricity production accounting for almost 40% of all freshwater use in the nation. Finally, there are wide variations in water availability across the country that make water a critical issue to manage as populations increase in regions like the Southeast and Southwest.

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In 2010, according to the US EPA, Americans generated about 250 million tons of trash and recycled and composted over 85 million tons of this material, equivalent to a 34.1 percent recycling rate. On average, we recycled and composted 1.51 pounds of our individual waste generation of 4.43 pounds per person per day. Through reduction, recycling and composting this figure represents a steady improvement from mid-20th century rates. These statistics are for non-hazardous municipal material and exclude the flow of chemical, pharmaceutical, electronic and other hazardous waste that end up contaminating our air, water and land when improperly disposed of. Ending the 20th century paradigm of managing waste is a huge challenge. The cradle to grave approach is slowly giving way to a new concept of seeing waste as a resource. Steps to creating a new model will include better tracking and analysis of our waste flows followed by incorporating lessons learned from resource harvesting successes on the way to a new paradigm of cradle to cradle management of our natural and manmade materials.

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New types of job skills will be needed to develop, build, deploy and operate connected systems in our communities. Creating jobs, renovating infrastructure and improving communities will challenge government, academic, and business leaders to develop a workforce to match evolving requirements. Yesterday's silo'd water, energy, waste systems gave rise to specialists - sanitary engineers, energy managers and urban planners. Tomorrow's connected and interdependent communities will require specialists with an understanding of how to integrate a system of systems and keep it dynamically functioning.

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Developing integrated infrastructure requires an understanding of its key leverage points. We need to identify mutual points of dependencies, catalyze integration of functions and bring disparate parties to the table to buy into new designs. New government collaborations to manage these systems will need to put in place. Everything is connected to everything else. There isn't an element within a community that won't be touched by this renewal process.

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