Future Here Now: People-structure?

Try It On

This week’s Future Here Now installments will focus on the question of building (or re-building?) how people connect and develop the capacity to work together — not just ad-hoc, like we do in our daily lives, but intentionally and effectively. I’m drawing on the analogy of Infrastructure — those systems of pipes and wires and roads and bridges that we know are necessary to keep our society and our economy moving.

When I was a newish urban planner, “infrastructure” was one of our jargon words — when I said it to normal people, I got a glassy stare. But now it’s a regular news article word, and Reuters or Forbes or Axios talk about infrastructure policy the way they talk about anything else. I think that has changed because we’re more acutely aware of the deterioration of so many elements of our infrastructure - and the very real risks to us when parts of that infrastructure break.

But we know already that the technological and cultural era is going to value human creativity as the key driver of value and wealth creation. And that means that our