Living infrastructure is a practice of bringing together built, natural, and social systems in ways that help people and places thrive.
This approach is based on the idea that the built and natural features of a place, along with its social and cultural fabric, can all work together instead of separately or in opposition to each other. This connectedness makes a place feel vital and alive — and helps keep it that way, even as things change. In other words, living infrastructure creates resilience.
Living infrastructure can be any size or scale. It could be as simple as a bench shaded by a tree where people gather on a corner to catch the bus. Or it could be as complex as the stormwater system for an entire neighborhood, where water treatment facilities work alongside community rain gardens to filter pollution, prevent flooding, and recycle moisture back into the local watershed. The communities that rely on and tend to this infrastructure are also a vital part of it.
And that’s what makes living infrastructure different. Whatever the particular elements happen to be, they’re all connected in a dynamic, ongoing, mutually reinforcing relationship that’s unique to the place they’re in. These relationships are what makes living infrastructure “alive.” They regenerate and pull communities together.
These relationships weave together different types of infrastructure, including:
- Built (gray) infrastructure, which refers to things like roads, channels, and dams—anything that tends to be made of concrete. (Thus the “gray”.) Born out of 20th-century industrialization and engineering approaches, gray infrastructure is often engineered to control natural processes with single-minded solutions. For example, massive flooding in 1938 prompted the city to channelize the Los Angeles River with concrete. On their own, these solutions can have ripple effects that cause long-term problems. They treat places like machinery, and often ignore their living aspects.
- Natural (blue-green) infrastructure, which refers to things like green roofs, rain gardens, and planting trees. It’s designed to work with natural resources—primarily water and foliage—by sustaining them or regenerating them. It is often literally alive, which makes it more connected to the local ecology than gray infrastructure. But if it’s not deployed in a way that invites long-term care from the community, it can quickly wither away.
- Social infrastructure, which refers to a set of organizational arrangements and investments in society’s systems, relationships, and structures that enable us to create a more resilient, just, equitable, and sustainable world. It includes social, economic, environmental, and cultural assets.