Infrastructure Resilience in an Age of Compounding Risk
Across the global construction and infrastructure sector, resilience has shifted from a specialist concern to a defining strategic priority. Extreme weather events, systemic climate pressures, cyber vulnerabilities, and ageing assets are no longer theoretical risks but lived realities for transport networks, utilities, and cities worldwide. From heat-stressed power grids in Southern Europe to flood-prone transport corridors in Asia and wildfire-exposed communities in North America, infrastructure systems are increasingly tested by simultaneous, interconnected shocks.
What makes this moment particularly complex is not the absence of technology. Advanced modelling tools, digital twins, climate science, and predictive analytics are more capable than ever. Yet infrastructure failures continue to cascade, often because systems were designed for a world that no longer exists. It is within this paradox that the work of Mikhail Chester has gained growing international attention.
Chester’s appointment as Helmick Professor of Infrastructure Resilience at Arizona State University comes at a time when resilience thinking is rapidly moving from academic theory into practical, policy-shaping influence. His work speaks directly to the infrastructure decisions now facing governments, asset owners, investors, and engineers grappling with long-term uncertainty.
Rethinking Infrastructure for an Uncertain World
Modern infrastructure was largely designed under assumptions of stability. Climate patterns were predictable, demand profiles relatively linear, and system failures considered isolated rather than systemic. Those assumptions no longer hold. Today’s infrastructure operates within what Chester describes as an accelerating and increasingly complex environment, where shocks compound rather than occur independently.
This shift has profound implications for how roads, railways, energy systems, water networks, and digital infrastructure are planned and financed. Infrastructure resilience is no longer about hardening individual assets but about understanding interdependencies across systems. A power outage can disrupt water supply, immobilise transport, disable communications, and undermine emergency response in a matter of hours.
Chester’s research focuses on these interconnections, examining how vulnerabilities propagate across infrastructure networks. His work bridges engineering, urban design, climate science, and public policy, an approach that reflects the reality that infrastructure failures rarely respect disciplinary boundaries. In practice, this means modelling not just how assets perform, but how communities experience disruption when systems fail.
From Technical Robustness to Societal Outcomes
A defining feature of Chester’s approach is the shift from asset-centric metrics to community-centric outcomes. Infrastructure resilience, in this framing, is not measured solely by structural integrity or speed of repair, but by how well essential services are maintained during crises and how quickly communities recover afterwards.
This perspective resonates strongly with infrastructure owners and policymakers who must balance capital investment, social equity, and long-term risk. Designing infrastructure that performs adequately under average conditions is no longer sufficient. Systems must function under stress, often in scenarios that extend beyond historical precedent.
Chester argues that resilience requires confronting uncomfortable truths about outdated design standards and planning frameworks. Many power, water, and transport systems were never intended to withstand the frequency or intensity of today’s hazards. Retrofitting resilience into existing networks is therefore as important as designing future-ready infrastructure.
Academic Recognition with Practical Consequences
The Helmick Professorship is more than an academic honour. It provides stable, flexible resources that allow Chester and his collaborators to pursue research areas that fall outside traditional funding models. These include emerging risks that lack established datasets, interdisciplinary challenges that do not fit neatly within single funding categories, and long-term infrastructure transitions that unfold over decades rather than grant cycles.
According to Professor Ram Pendyala, Director of the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, the professorship reflects both scholarly rigour and societal relevance: “The Helmick Professorship recognizes faculty members whose work is not only intellectually rigorous, but deeply consequential for society.”
This flexibility is particularly significant in resilience research, where the most pressing challenges often emerge faster than formal funding mechanisms can respond. By removing the pressure to pursue narrowly defined outcomes, the professorship enables exploratory work that can lead to transformative shifts in how infrastructure is planned and governed.
Addressing Cascading Failures and Systemic Risk
One of the central vulnerabilities Chester seeks to address is the cascading nature of infrastructure failure. Extreme weather, cyber incidents, or physical damage rarely affect a single system in isolation. Instead, failures ripple outward, amplifying their impact across sectors.
The Helmick Professorship supports expanded engineering simulations that explore future scenarios at scale. These simulations allow researchers to test how infrastructure systems respond under compound stress, identify the most critical points of failure, and evaluate which resilience strategies offer the greatest benefit relative to cost.
Crucially, Chester emphasises making these results accessible to infrastructure agencies and practitioners. Resilience research has limited value if it remains confined to academic journals. Translating complex modelling into actionable guidance is essential for agencies tasked with making real-world investment decisions under financial and political constraints.
Working with Communities, Not Just Systems
A notable aspect of Chester’s work is direct engagement with communities and infrastructure agencies. Rather than treating communities as passive recipients of infrastructure outcomes, his research often involves them as active partners in understanding risk and resilience.
This participatory approach recognises that communities experience infrastructure disruption unevenly. Vulnerable populations are often disproportionately affected by service failures, whether through lack of redundancy, limited mobility, or reduced access to recovery resources. Incorporating these social dimensions into infrastructure planning is critical for equitable resilience outcomes.
Infrastructure agencies, meanwhile, face their own constraints. Many are eager to adopt innovative solutions but lack access to cutting-edge data or the capacity to evaluate emerging risks comprehensively. Chester’s work aims to bridge this gap, aligning scientific insight with operational reality.
Educating the Next Generation of Infrastructure Leaders
Beyond research, the Helmick Professorship expands opportunities for student involvement across educational levels. Undergraduate and even high-school students are brought into projects that connect academic learning with practical infrastructure challenges.
These experiences help prepare a workforce capable of thinking holistically about infrastructure systems rather than specialising narrowly within disciplinary silos. As infrastructure becomes more complex and interconnected, this systems-level thinking is increasingly essential.
Students also gain exposure to real-world collaboration with infrastructure agencies and engineering firms, accelerating the transfer of research into practice. In doing so, the professorship contributes not just to knowledge generation, but to capacity building across the sector.
Infrastructure in the Anthropocene
Many of the themes underpinning Chester’s work are explored in the book Infrastructure in the Anthropocene, co-authored with Braden Allenby. The book examines how infrastructure is evolving in response to accelerating environmental and societal change, arguing that traditional planning paradigms are ill-suited to the conditions of the Anthropocene.
The central message is clear. Infrastructure must be designed not just for efficiency, but for adaptability. Uncertainty is no longer an anomaly but a defining condition. Planning for resilience therefore requires embracing flexibility, learning from failure, and continuously updating assumptions as conditions evolve.
From Research to Real-World Transitions
The ultimate ambition of the Helmick Professorship is to build what Chester describes as a community of practice. This involves connecting three elements that are often treated separately: generating new knowledge, preparing people to apply it, and working directly with those responsible for implementing change.
By aligning research, education, and community engagement, the professorship aims to move resilience thinking beyond theory and into operational systems that communities rely on every day. For the global infrastructure sector, this approach offers a pathway to more informed investment decisions, better risk management, and infrastructure systems capable of withstanding an increasingly uncertain future.
As governments and investors worldwide confront the scale of infrastructure renewal required in the coming decades, work of this kind highlights a critical truth. Resilience is not a luxury or an add-on. It is fast becoming a prerequisite for infrastructure that serves societies reliably in the face of accelerating change.
