Terry D. Bennett, LS LPF MRICS ENV SP LEED AP, is the senior industry program manager and lead strategist for civil infrastructure at Autodesk. He is responsible for setting the company’s future vision and strategy for technology serving the infrastructure industry as well as cultivating and sustaining the firm’s relationships with strategic industry leaders and associations.
In addition to being a practicing professional for close to 30 years, Bennett is a global author and lecturer, and currently serves as a Board Member of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design’s Sustainable Infrastructure Advisory Board, is a charter member of the Institute of Sustainable Infrastructure and a member of its economics committee, and is a council member on the Urban Land Institute’s Public Development and Infrastructure Council. Additionally Bennett is an editorial Advisory Board member of Informed Infrastructure magazine, and was a founding editorial board member of Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure magazine.
Holding the Public’s Attention
The last time we had a true infrastructure vision for the U.S. that got the American people’s attention, and held it, was back when Eisenhower did the highway system. Since then we have never really updated that vision. We never made it part of the national narrative.
Focusing on the Solution, Not the Problem
After numerous discussions with other company executives at various meetings, we decided to focus around providing answers rather than the problem itself, and let’s look at how to look at infrastructure holistically as a system, not as a series of individual components…
Making the Grade Report: A Blueprint For The Future
[Making the Grade] was a comprehensive approach not to focus on one funding source for one particular infrastructure type for one state, but a blueprint that every state can use for all their various infrastructure so that we start getting synergies between these processes and not just one-offs every single time…
Using the Report to Increase Public Involvement
It’s one of the things to make sure we keep the drum beat going about the need to update this, and that’s both in the public sector, that’s both with policy makers, it’s also with congress to get people to bring back sort of the core of what we can do when everybody’s aligned behind an idea.
Technology: Making Civic Engagement Possible
We know that design has, for a long time, been the driver and shaper of human change, and now with the advent of things like cloud mobile and social computing, the ability to get information out in real time allows the American people, not just the select few of the engineers and designers, to become active in the planning process…
Bringing Infrastructure Back into the National Dialogue
…Many of the answers will be found by reconnecting the American people with the many economic, social, and even environmental aspects of infrastructure and its investment. Today’s challenge is really about renewing our vision for how to balance natural and man-made infrastructure, and how to leverage both to enhance our future condition…
Taking a Beginner’s Approach
…In the mind of the beginner there are few opinions; in an expert their are many, and all the innovations really come from the beginner’s mind because they are open to doing things differently…Let’s take a beginner’s mind, look at all of the things around us, and then figure out the best and the most opportune way to get to where we want to go.
Download full transcript (PDF): Terry Bennett on The Infra Blog
Tags: Autodesk, Civic Engagement, Making the Grade, Terry Bennett
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