Sustainable development

Our world is changing, trending, even. It has always been changing, as has human society. Each generation through history built its world with half an eye on the future. This is most evident in infrastructure development. By its nature, infrastructure extends capability into the future, defining the world that our children will inherit, as we live in the world that our parents built for us. The infrastructure can either harm or benefit them. It is not just the built environment. It applies to all aspects of development across the natural, built and virtual infrastructure domains influencing human health and behaviour. The need for development to be sustainable is implicit in this dynamic. So, while we may instinctively understand the idea of sustainable development, it isn't always reflected in the ways that we have pursued individual development projects. When we bring financial sustainability metrics to the fore and lose sight of the societal impact or environmental damage, we skew the calculus and our holistic understanding. In pursuing production metrics, we lose sight of the outcome. Our instinctive understanding of what should be is overtaken by our desire to simplify and focus on a single aspect. The challenge is, has been and will always be, that to plan our development in context to future generations’ benefit involves a complex calculus. As Professor Jowitt (2004) points out, it is just a more complex calculus, and the profession can adapt, as it has in the past. Until recently, we have preferred the simpler calculus, the familiar models and a comforting blindness to our actions’ consequences – our development outcomes.