For many of us, the word infrastructure means mega-projects wrapped in weighty business cases. An epic bridge, a hydro-powered dam, fast trains or the pipes and poles that sit under the next vast sprawling sub-division.

Yet the infrastructure we need to collectively live well is much more. It spans housing, health, education, green spaces, diverse transport options, telecommunications, sports and cultural facilities and beyond.

When we rethink infrastructure through a wider lens many questions arise.

How do we rethink our inherited infrastructure, centuries in the making, but which are often engrained with disadvantage and ideologies that are more properly part of our history?

How do we plan for a future that more genuinely reflects the needs of an increasingly diverse society?

How do we account for rapidly changing environmental conditions?

How can we approach a new era of infrastructure, where data, information and interactivity is embedded into buildings, health care systems and even social interactions?

It is clear that these questions hold profound implications for how we live and whose interests are served by the visible and invisible infrastructures around us.

Infrastructures of Life will be an opportunity to radically rethink the layers of assumptions that sit behind the conventional infrastructure business case.

Infrastructure will instead be examined as a reflection of the public interests and values of all living entities - people, cultures and ecosystems – a system around which a more equitable, sustainable and inclusive society is organised.