Greetings,

A Letter from the Director

"Infrastructure is at the foundation of our quality of life, economy, jobs, and environmental sustainability.

The Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems fosters collaborative and interdisciplinary exchanges to promote new thinking and practice in civil infrastructure systems. We do this in a number of ways: by convening, communicating, educating and researching. We promote interaction among a broad constituency ranging from users and communities to those who design, finance, manage and operate infrastructure systems.

The Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS) is funded by the National Science Foundation. We opened our doors at NYU's Wagner School in January 1998. We are a partnership of New York University, Cornell University, Polytechnic University of New York, and the University of Southern California.

ICIS convenes experts from diverse disciplines and organizations to collaboratively seek solutions to the most challenging urban infrastructure problems in order to improve infrastructure and the investment in it.

ICIS communicates a new philosophy and approach to infrastructure that is systems oriented and interdisciplinary.

ICIS promotes innovative educational models that incorporate the needs of infrastructure users and communities.

ICIS fosters collaborative and systems oriented frameworks for research to produce interdisciplinary infrastructure research agendas.

Our mission is to engage the Civil Infrastructure Community - users, host communities, managers of infrastructure, financiers, researchers - in an ongoing dialogue about:

• Advanced technologies that are socially and environmentally compatible, that is, sustainable.
• About changing the way in which infrastructure professionals are educated so they appreciate the social contexts and incorporate it into their work.
• About performance measures that can be shared among practitioners, and between practitioners and academics.
• And about best practices to enable diverse interests to talk to one another about infrastructure decisions.

—Rae Zimmerman ICIS Director