The ICIS Purpose and Mission

Purpose

A small sample of the cityscape of New York City and its infrastructure.

ICIS is a research and education center for new information, ideas, and collaborations about civil infrastructure systems and their role in modern communities.

ICIS fosters collaborative and interdisciplinary exchanges to bring infrastructure facilities and services in transportation, water, energy, communication and waste management systems closer to the needs of the users, the communities that host or house them, and those who manage and design them. Fundamental to the mission of ICIS is the creation of networks and partnerships to support new initiatives in infrastructure services and the publics they serve, using interactive mechanisms such as internet technology, workshops and white papers.

The ICIS Mission

ICIS engages in research, education and outreach to expand knowledge about the social, environmental, and technological contexts of urban public infrastructure services for its users and providers, and bridges and integrates engineering and social science disciplines to address the critical problems of developing and managing infrastructure in 21st-Century societies. ICIS also engages these communities and their networks in defining problems and obtaining solutions. The focus is on service performance, social and environmental sustainability in urban settings, protection from natural hazards, and security in the face of catastrophes as a foundation for infrastructure policy and planning. 

Our mission is to engage the Civil Infrastructure Community - users, host communities, managers of infrastructure, financiers, researchers - in an ongoing dialogue about:

Advanced technologies that are socially and environmentally compatible, that is, sustainable.

Changing the way in which infrastructure professionals are educated so they appreciate the social contexts in order to incorporate them into their work.

Performance measures that can be shared among practitioners, and between practitioners and academics.

Best practices to enable diverse interests to talk to one another about infrastructure decisions.