MetaInfrastructure (in partnership with The Bartlett, UCL) is pleased to announce the publication of a new paper in Nature Communications: “Rethinking infrastructure design from component failure to systemic resilience.”
The study asks: Should all critical infrastructure be built equally? It argues that we must design and value infrastructure based on its systemic impact, geo-economic role, and recovery potential across interdependent systems.
Using the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse (Baltimore) as a case study and the “TranSight” regional economic model, the paper shows that combined bridge-and-port failures generate substantially larger losses in GDP, employment and income, with some indicators not recovering until 2040.
The work marks a major shift from traditional load-based design standards to a resilience-based framework for critical interconnected infrastructure.
Read the full paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64683-6
Thanks to all co-authors: Sam Dulin, Stergios-Aristoteles Mitoulis, Alexandre Bredikhin, Eric Treyz, Billy Leung, Jeffrey Dykes, Owen Karpeles, Shreeya Gurav, Alex Karhunen & Igor Linkov and to The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, UCL.
