Dive into these talks about water and humanity’s relationship with this life-sustaining liquid.

Everyone's talking about the "Internet of Things," but what exactly does that mean for our future? In this thoughtful talk, economist Marco Annunziata looks at how technology is transforming the industrial sector, creating machines that can see, feel, sense and react -- so they can be operated far more efficiently. Think: airplane parts that sen...

The basic infrastructure that controls plumbing, electricity and more is vital to your individual agency, says engineering professor Deb Chachra. She offers a crash course on how these systems connect to shape our lives — and suggests some key improvements for providing long-term, sustainable energy to everyone.

Eduardo Paes is the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, a sprawling, complicated, beautiful city of 6.5 million. He shares four big ideas about leading Rio -- and all cities -- into the future, including bold (and do-able) infrastructure upgrades and how to make a city "smarter."

At the BIF innovation summit, Cat Laine draws on the Greek myth of Tantalus to explain the frustration developing countries face. She shows how we might help communities rich in human capital, but poor in resources and infrastructure, with cleverly engineered solutions.

Imagine a country with abundant power -- oil and gas, sunshine, wind (and money) -- but missing one key essential for life: water. Infrastructure engineer Fahad Al-Attiya talks about the unexpected ways that the small Middle Eastern nation of Qatar creates its water supply.

As the world's cities undergo explosive growth, inequality is intensifying. Wealthy neighborhoods and impoverished slums grow side by side, the gap between them widening. In this eye-opening talk, architect Teddy Cruz asks us to rethink urban development from the bottom up. Sharing lessons from the slums of Tijuana, Cruz explores the creative in...

Maps don't just tell you which street to turn left on. Maps convey information that shapes our lives, deepen our understanding of problems and our ability to create solutions, and whisk our imaginations to new lands. See what we mean, below.

When asked to build housing for 100 families in Chile ten years ago, Alejandro Aravena looked to an unusual inspiration: the wisdom of favelas and slums. Rather than building a large building with small units, he built flexible half-homes that each family could expand on. It was a complex problem, but with a simple solution — one that he arrived...

A billion people in the world lack access to all-season roads. Could the structure of the internet provide a model for how to reach them? Andreas Raptopoulos of Matternet thinks so. He introduces a new type of transportation system that uses electric autonomous flying machines to deliver medicine, food, goods and supplies wherever they are needed.

We can produce abundant, sustainable and cheap energy — for everyone, says physicist Julio Friedmann. He explores the infrastructure, innovation and investment needed to supply energy to 10 billion people, offering case studies from Chile's refurbished supply chain, built in partnership with Japan, to Namibia's budding clean hydrogen production,...

With what3words, Chris Sheldrick and his team have divided the entire planet into three-meter squares and assigned each a unique, three-word identifier, like famous.splice.writers or blocks.evenly.breed, giving a precise address to the billions of people worldwide who don't have one. In this quick talk about a big idea, Sheldrick explains the ec...

What if we could use existing technologies to provide Internet access to the more than 4 billion people living in places where the infrastructure can't support it? Using off-the-shelf LEDs and solar cells, Harald Haas and his team have pioneered a new technology that transmits data using light, and it may just be the key to bridging the digital ...

Energetic and thriving, cities are the heartbeat of society. These talks offer viable ways to reinvigorate and strengthen the metropolises we love.

Examine how the shape and angles of your surroundings can deeply influence the way you interact with the space and people around you.

Once the powerhouse of America's industrial might, Detroit is more recently known in the popular imagination as a fabulous ruin, crumbling and bankrupt. But city planner Toni Griffin asks us to look again -- and to imagine an entrepreneurial future for the city's 700,000 residents.

Worldwide, violence is on the decline, but in the crowded cities of the global south — cities like Aleppo, Bamako and Caracas — violence is actually accelerating, fueled by the drug trade, mass unemployment and civil unrest. Security researcher Robert Muggah turns our attention toward these "fragile cities," super-fast-growing places where infra...

Almost a billion people worldwide live in informal communities and slums, often without basic infrastructure like clean water, toilets or adequate roads. Urban planner Smruti Jukur Johari breaks down myths about these communities and shares examples of simple, common-sense solutions that arise when governments and architects work together with t...

The coronavirus pandemic put India's population of 1.3 billion into an extreme and sudden lockdown. Social entrepreneur Gayathri Vasudevan explains how the situation is impacting the country's migrant workers, who are stuck far from home with limited access to food and shelter, and calls for an overhaul of India's social infrastructure in order ...

In this funny and thought-provoking talk, Janette Sadik-Khan, transportation commissioner of New York City, shares projects that have reshaped street life in the 5 boroughs, including pedestrian zones in Times Square, high-performance buses and a 6,000-cycle-strong bike share. Her mantra: Do bold experiments that are cheap to try out.

From London to Tokyo, climate change is causing cities to sink -- and our modern concrete infrastructure is making us even more vulnerable to severe flooding, says landscape architect and TED Fellow Kotchakorn Voraakhom. But what if we could design cities to help fight floods? In this inspiring talk, Voraakhom shows how she developed a massive p...

In this passionate talk, writer and disability rights advocate Kings Floyd draws illustrates the personal costs of society's failure to implement accessible design, shedding light on the direct link between thoughtful infrastructure and an increased connection between friends, families and communities.

At Gradian Health Systems, Erica Frenkel works to bring safe anesthesia to hospitals all over the world.

In the US, people spend the overwhelming majority of their time inside buildings that burn fossil fuels, which are bad for both the environment and human health. (Think: breathing in air pollution from gas stoves, furnaces and water heaters.) If we're going to fix this problem, we need to retrofit millions of buildings with all-electric equipmen...

Design gives form to the future, says architect Bjarke Ingels. In this worldwide tour of his team's projects, journey to a waste-to-energy power plant (that doubles as an alpine ski slope) and the LEGO Home of the Brick in Denmark -- and catch a glimpse of cutting-edge flood resilience infrastructure in New York City as well as an ambitious plan...

Through his writing and his realized projects, Peter Calthorpe has spread the vision of New Urbanism, a framework for creating sustainable, human-scaled places.

The hallmark of a thriving city is the rich tapestry of communities that define it. But in some of today's rapidly expanding urban areas, the swift spread of slums tends to disconnect rather than connect, to the detriment of the overall health of a city. Antonella Mei-Pochtler believes transportation systems are the best way to re-engineer and r...

Designer Alastair Parvin presents a simple but provocative idea: what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? The concept is at the heart of WikiHouse, an open source construction kit that means just about anyone can build a house, anywhere.

In 2009, journalist and screenwriter Drew Philp bought a ruined house in Detroit for $500. In the years that followed, as he gutted the interior and removed the heaps of garbage crowding the rooms, he didn't just learn how to repair a house -- he learned how to build a community. In a tribute to the city he loves, Philp tells us about "radical n...

Three billion people in the world don't have access to a consistent water supply, due to issues not limited to infrastructure, supply or mismanagement -- and for some, water may flow every two days or even ten. Sustainability engineer Anu Sridharan launched an organization in India that wants to fix this using cellphones and the power of crowdso...