The world has a great deal left to build. Housing at a scale several generations have deferred, transport networks that must carry cities through the next century, and the minerals and energy systems that make both possible. Every one of those things is planned by people, decided by people, and built by people.
This is a collection of writing about that human interface — the point where a planning system meets the workforce, the community and the supply chain who enact it. It takes the view that project outcomes are set by behaviour, culture and communication as much as by engineering, and that this holds whether the work is a rail corridor, a housing programme or a resources operation.
Some of it concerns method: how operating procedures are written, proved and taught. Some concerns evidence: what the research shows about how people learn a plan and carry it out. Some concerns technology, and where simulation, digital twins and machine intelligence earn their place inside a planning system.
Call it Urban 2.0 — a sustainable, digital and thoroughly human way of building. Read across infrastructure planning, stakeholder engagement, industry training and digital twins technology.
Optioneering, approvals and engagement absorb most of the cost of carrying an infrastructure project to a decision. Twenty places where simulation in an urban BIM context takes time and rework out of that process.