China’s communications, as well as the managing of its fragile environment – dependent on water, threatened by floods – required an unusual degree of bureaucratic liaison between centre, province and district.

Category Shift Overview

Traditional paradigm: Infrastructure as hard, fixed, spatially bound provision — singular, monumental assets (bridges, power stations, roads, pipelines).

Emergent paradigm: Infrastructure as dynamic, distributed, and temporally adaptive provisioning — a continuous service maintained through autonomous, renewable, and

In an age of accelerating volatility, the act of decision has changed character: from a single commitment made once and held for decades to a continuous process of sensing, adjusting, and re-allocating.