
“Infrastructure is everything you don’t have to think about”. Until you do.
Culture is a foundational aspect of everyday life, but like other infrastructures it has been gradually eroded. In the last few decades, a combination of underinvestment, privatisation and financial extraction have brought much of our public infrastructure - energy, mobility, water, waste, public space, housing — into crisis. This can be seen in the “soft” infrastructures of healthcare, social services, education and, we argue, culture. Infrastructures provide public goods, intended for everybody to use, and help construct our shared social fabric. In making decisions about infrastructure, we are making decisions about our shared future together.
Yet from a narrow cost-benefit perspective the impacts of public infrastructure are diffuse, difficult to predict, and generate activities down the line which are hard to quantify in bottom line terms. They are real, nonetheless. Public infrastructures provide the systems and cultures that allow us to flourish collectively. They help create the shared idea of the public. Infrastructure investments are also made with an eye to future generations who will also reap the benefits. They are a pact with the future itself.
Join us for a panel involving three global experts on infrastructure, from the worlds of engineering, urban design and cultural policy to discuss how we can rethink culture as a foundational part of our society, rather than just a consumer good, and what this would mean for a new kind of public policy.
Panellists

Dr Debbie Chachra
Author of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World and Professor of Engineering at Olin College.
Dr. Chachra’s work and ideas have been supported by the Sloan Foundation, the Autodesk Foundation, and others, and she received an NSF CAREER Award for research on engineering education. She has written for outlets including the Atlantic and Nature and a regular column for the American Society for Engineering Education’s Prism magazine, as well as her own long-running online newsletter, Metafoundry.

Professor Justin O’Connor
Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia and a Visiting Professor at the School of Cultural Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University. Between 2012-18 he was a member of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on Diversity of Cultural Expressions. He is currently working with the Reset Collective and with a coalition of cultural policy experts to promote the idea of culture as a global public good and as a Sustainable Development Goal.
He recently co-authored Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (2020), and Culture is Not an Industry (2024), Manchester University Press.

Professor Dan Hill
Professor Dan Hill is Director of Melbourne School of Design, the graduate school in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia. A designer and urbanist, Dan's previous leadership roles include the Swedish government’s innovation agency Vinnova in Stockholm and Arup in London and Sydney.
Dan is also a Visiting Professor of Practice and Advisory Board member at UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Practice. He is the author of the books Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: A strategic design playbook (Strelka Press, 2012) and Designing missions (Vinnova, 2022).
More events in The Future & Beyond program (Sat 15 & Sun 16 Feb 2025)
Reclaiming Tomorrow – Short Films (Sat 15 & Sun 16 Feb 2025)
The Future & Other Fictions
Exhibition | 28 Nov 2024 – 27 Apr 2025
From cyberpunk megacities and first knowledges to rewilded landscapes and sci fi renegades, The Future & Other Fictions showcases the people, artworks and ideas that shape tomorrow.
More events

Plan your visit
Visitor guidelines, information on accessibility, amenities, transport, dining options and more.

Not an ACMI Member yet?
Experience ACMI in the very best way. Get a range of discounts and invitations to exclusive previews.

Read, watch and listen
Explore essays, interviews, videos and more about the screen works that shape us.