BE Magazine Volume 5, Issue 2 - (Page 9) Buddy Cleveland Bentley I nfrastructure provides the basic facilities, services, and installations required for a community or society to function. As infrastructure assets, they include not only public works like roads, bridges, water, and sewer, but also private utilities, communications networks, facilities for manufacturing, housing, education, and healthcare, among others. Given the scope of infrastructure and the central importance of infrastructure to society at large, infrastructure is necessarily a central factor in achieving our sustainability objectives. Our collective quality of life, the sustainability of human society, and the sustainability of the planet are directly dependent upon the services provided by infrastructure. Perhaps the first definition of sustainability was given by a report from the Bruntland Commission in 1987. In this report, sustainable development was defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Another definition comes from The Natural Step, a nonprofit research, education, and advisory organization. Formed in 1988, it an equitable, healthy future for all people and the planet.” Meeting the basic human needs of everyone on the planet and the generations to follow inevitably implies development— Infrastructure provides the basic facilities, services, and installations required for a community or society to function. uses a science-based framework to help individuals, organizations, and communities move toward sustainability. There are currently Natural Step chapters in 12 countries, with a number of significant Bentley users among its members. Natural Step’s simple definition of sustainability is “creating new ways to live and prosper while ensuring electricity, clean water and sanitation systems, shelter, and transportation and communication systems to provide access to critical services. In short, meeting the basic human needs of all people in the world means more and better infrastructure. All too often, however, these twin objectives—being good stewards of the planet while developing the infrastructure to meet the basic needs of a growing global population—are seen as being at odds with one another. However, the logical result of this limited view—constraining development to achieve sustainability—either denies a large portion of the developing world the opportunity to live with the quality of life to which we in the developed world are accustomed, or requires those in the developed world to live with a significant reduction in the quality of life they now enjoy. Not only are these alternatives unworkable, they can easily become totalitarian if carried to their logical conclusion. Meeting these twin objectives thus depends on how we choose to grow. It requires that we apply all of our human ingenuity, adaptability, and pragmatism to a project of possibilities, not limits. As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has observed, all of our commendable efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the developed world will be “devoured” by the “exponential growth” in Asia. Only “a transformational breakthrough in the energy space” will suffice. Societal issues BENTLEY USERS SUSTAINING SOCIETY Improving Services Provided by Infrastructure Assets For L&T-RAMBØLL Consulting Engineers, designing the civil infrastructure for a new airport to be built on a greenfield would have been enough of a challenge. The challenge became a Herculean task with the client revising the scope substantially halfway through the project without extending the project commissioning date. This revision of scope came about to make the airport fit for a phenomenally large increase in the traffic projection based on its client’s new traffic studies. Located east of the Bangalore-Hyderabad National Highway (NH7), the new airport is 37 kilometers away from Bangalore and four kilometers south of Devenhalli. This is the first greenfield airport to be developed in India through a public/private partnership. The new Bangalore International Airport will alleviate airport congestion in India’s third busiest airport, serving 7.5 million passengers each year. Under the current development plan, the new airport is designed to handle 27 aircraft per hour. It features 42 Code C aircraft stands, a terminal building, and cargo-handling facilities for 300,000 tons of cargo each year. Clearly, infrastructure is fundamental to maintaining and improving quality of life on a global basis. However, it is just as clear that today’s infrastructure is globally Volume 5, Issue 2 | BE MAGAZINE 9 http://www.naturalstep.org/com/Start/ http://www.naturalstep.org/com/Start/ http://home.att.net/~slomansonb/Bruntland.html http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/bemagazine/vol4issue4/index.php?startpage=27
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