The Social Sustainability of Infrastructure: Constructing for Justice

Abstract

Socially sustainable infrastructure eliminates unfreedoms that reduce human choice and agency. These unfreedoms include the lack of clean energy, clean water, clean air, sanitation, mobility, information, or safe shelter, which collectively impact billions of people today, and the lack of a stable climate, which impacts everyone on earth and everyone who will be born in the coming decades. The built environment can be collaboratively built and collaboratively used to solve collective problems like these; in this sense, construction is a feminist project of creation. In this paper, I argue that the goal of all engineering projects and organizations must be a built environment that provides every person on the planet a greater ability to lead a life they value, recognizing that the diversity of those chosen lives is both the enabler and the outcome of what we pursue.