The final conference of the interdisciplinary Research Training Group KRITIS at TU Darmstadt will focus on the Dynamics of Critical Infrastructures. We will explore how these dynamics shape urban capacity for development, resilience, and quality of life, offering a fresh perspective on this crucial topic.

Since 2016, Research Training Group KRITIS has been a Group of Professors and PhD candidates from various disciplines including history, civil engineering, planning, philosophy, computer science, political sciences, sociology and architecture who have made significant contributions to conceptualising critical infrastructures. In the first phase, the RTG defined five key concepts for critical infrastructures – criticality, vulnerability, preparedness, prevention, resilience – and used them as a basis for analysing networked socio-technical infrastructures, enabling the RTG to gather new findings in connection with functional crises. In the second and third phases, the key concepts were further explored and expanded with dynamics as a characteristic of critical infrastructures, now focusing on the three phenomena of transformation, circulation, and system of systems. All of these concepts have been shown to be in tension between stability and dynamics. Dynamics are especially challenging in the research and practice of infrastructures.

Traditionally, technical infrastructures have been conceived as factors of stability, causing lock-in and path dependency. However, recent research has shown the importance of dynamic processes of infrastructures. These processes are expressed in material and social transformations that change the form and fluctuation of new and existing infrastructural systems. However, recognizing the dynamic nature of infrastructures also requires adjustments in planning and maintenance and demands flexible security measures. We want to discuss and bring together these challenges and findings with local and global perspectives of critical infrastructures in cities in a broader interdisciplinary context of research and practice.

Critical infrastructures, which we understand as socio-technical systems that are crucial to the functioning of our modern urban society, are characterized by both, their continuity and tendency to dynamic change. Due to their high degree of cross-sector interdependence, urban infrastructures are to be understood as a system of systems, which in turn is to be understood as a system-inherent cause of dynamics. In turn, external events and processes are also responsible for infrastructures’ dynamics, such as climate change, security threats and social developments such as increasing urbanization and the rise of digital networking.

Processes of change manifest themselves through space and time. Time serves as a unit of measure to gauge the speed and intensity with which changes take form. Eventually, these incremental systemic changes materialize in spaces of existing and new infrastructural systems. Thus, time and space provide a perspective that allows recognition of different change patterns.

In a different sense, critical infrastructures also function dynamically, circulating goods, services, and people through their work. This feature of infrastructures makes cities a particularly interesting focus for infrastructural research due to their high density in population and infrastructure systems forming a highly dynamic environment.

To discuss the dynamics of critical infrastructure, we are inviting abstracts in English language within 100 – 300 words. Please submit the abstract with a short academic CV in a single PDF file. For details regarding individual or panel submissions, please check out the Call for Abstracts (24.06.24). The submission deadline is now extended to 31.10.24.

Accepted submission will be informed by November 2024. We offer a bursary that covers travel expenses and overnight, to the successful applicant only.

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Status: 26.03.25

⬤ The submission period is now over