FREDERICKSBURG, VA - APRIL 6: In an aerial view, vehicles on Interstate 95 travel past a construction project to add three lanes to the I-95 Rappahannock River Crossing on April 6, 2021 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The site of the work is a vital chokepoint for cars and freight trucks moving both north and south along the East Coast. At the end of March, President Joe Biden introduced a $2 trillion plan to overhaul and upgrade the nation's infrastructure. The plan aims to revitalize the U.S. transportation infrastructure, water systems, broadband internet, make investments in manufacturing and job training efforts, and other goals. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Getty Images City leaders love a big reveal. Whether it’s a ribbon-cutting for a gleaming new transit hub or a pilot fleet of self-driving buses, the projects that make headlines are almost always the ones with a physical presence and a photo opportunity. But ask the people tasked with keeping a city running under the strain of extreme weather, tightening budgets and aging infrastructure, and they will tell you the real determinants of urban resilience are much less glamorous. The most important question isn’t how shiny the new bridge is. It’s whether the city knows exactly what it owns, what condition it is in, how long it will last and what it will cost to keep it working. That requires not just engineering expertise but a shift in perspective: treating infrastructure as an asset portfolio whose value and viability must be actively managed over its lifetime. From Climate Shock To Asset Shock The need for that shift is growing urgent. A 2025 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers found the U.S. faces a $3.7 trillion infrastructure funding gap by 2030 at current funding levels. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded 28 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the U.S. last year alone — the highest ever. Each event damages public assets, shortens asset lifespans and compounds maintenance backlogs. Nigel Hughes, head of product at Brightly Software, a Siemens company, has spent his career building tools to make proactive planning possible. “Sustainability means the ability to keep doing something,” he says in an interview. “It’s sustainable if you can keep doing it. I think we all enjoy living in this world, so sustainability and the kind of modern lives and freedoms of travel and experience we have are getting harder. Extreme weather is changing everything and that puts a focus on our infrastructure and how it can probably not solve but deal with this changing environment.” From Filing Cabinets To Predictive Models For Urban Resilience Brightly’s work begins with creating an accurate, unified inventory of assets, from wastewater treatment plants to road surfaces to street furniture. The starting point can be messy. “In an ideal world we have some kind of digital data already, but it’s absolutely not unheard of that it’s in this Excel spreadsheet. Even worse, they walk over to the filing cabinet,” Hughes says. “Step one, get that consolidated view of assets. Step two is condition assessment. Here is the asset. There is a collection of facts about it. Here is its condition.” MORE FOR YOU That data is then linked to operational behavior and maintenance records. If crews are repeatedly called out to the same patch of road, that information feeds into the capital planning process. The company’s predictive planning software allows municipalities to model multiple investment and maintenance scenarios, adjusting spending priorities and time horizons to see how those decisions would affect overall asset condition. “What this technology enables you to do is explore more scenarios,” Hughes explains. “Our software won’t help you with whether it’s the perfect balance. What it does let you do is understand, as I change my investment portfolio, what does that do to the overall asset condition over time? And if we’re talking about something like a road surface, that means, if it floods, how likely is it that the surface is torn off and now we’ve got a critical part of our strategic road network compromised.” Closing The ROI Loop For Urban Resilience For cities, the ability to run those scenarios and communicate them clearly to decision-makers can be as valuable as the analysis itself. Budget constraints often mean big renewal projects are politically difficult to approve. A clear case for preventive maintenance or staged replacement can make funding more achievable and spread costs more evenly over time. The approach also forces a rethink of how infrastructure ROI is measured. Most investment appraisals focus on immediate financial return and direct cost savings, with disaster risk reduction and wider social benefits relegated to the narrative section of a funding proposal. Hughes sees a gap between the sophistication of asset-level analysis and the broader systems perspective needed for resilience planning. He says, “Knowing the asset’s condition and having a plan is great. But does the plan actually get executed? And if it is, did it deliver the outcomes we expected? Too often, I see an ROI calculated on the investment without ever closing the loop. Did we get the result? And if not, how do we adjust? What will we do differently in the next funding period?” Failing to close that loop has financial consequences. In the municipal bond market, credit rating agencies are beginning to factor climate risk and infrastructure resilience into ratings. Poorly managed assets can raise borrowing costs, while credible, data-backed maintenance plans can reassure investors. The challenge is that most municipalities lack standardized methods and data to quantify these elements. “One of my experiences is that data sources are often not complete,” Hughes says. “There is a disconnect.” Some cities are already showing what is possible however. Edinburgh has developed what Hughes calls a “very, very sophisticated implementation” of Brightly’s asset management platform, with a detailed model of everything from its road network to its street furniture. “They’ve been able to drive significant operational savings as a result of that,” he says. “Sustainability is about operational efficiency, so you can keep doing what works.” Why Asset Management Drives Urban Resilience But Sustainability Stalls Part of the reason asset management may succeed where overtly branded sustainability projects stall is political. Hughes notes that assets are almost always owned and managed locally, but money and policy are set nationally. “The money and the political agenda is very much set at the national, federal level, but almost none of the assets are at that level,” he says. “A more asset-centric view would drive better policy decisions. At the moment, what’s the flow back up of all of that data through state or county, up to national and federal? How do we close that loop?” Closing that loop is as much about culture as technology. Hughes jokes that Excel might be his biggest competitor, because many local authorities still rely on elaborate spreadsheets built on institutional knowledge and heuristics. That experience is valuable, but the fact base is changing rapidly. Climate impacts, new materials, evolving regulations and demographic shifts mean rules of thumb can quickly become outdated. Do The Boring Stuff First: The Hidden Work Of Urban Resilience Brightly’s philosophy is to “build to integrate,” breaking down the silos that keep data on roads, power lines, water systems and public buildings separate. “You’ve got to really have a philosophy and belief and trust in your own products and push that through, because otherwise we’ll just sit there hugging our little data and nothing moves forward,” Hughes says. Technology plays a role, but Hughes cautions against being seduced by high-profile projects at the expense of less visible but more foundational work. “All of those sensors are the big, flashy projects that everyone gets excited about,” he says. “I always think I do the boring stuff first. You’ve got crews going around with mobile devices recording that data and ensuring we’ve got a clear view of our assets and their conditions. That will probably get you further for less than a flashy infrastructure project. As cool as they can be, I’m a nerd, I love cool, but the grunt work of the everyday is what makes change happen.” The Cities That Will Build Resilient Futures Looking ahead, Hughes believes the cities that will be considered resilient in the next 10 to 15 years will be those with an accurate and constantly refreshed view of their assets and their condition, supported by investment planning that takes the whole network into account. “It will be the cities that look at their networks and assess the vulnerabilities and the redundancies of each individual element that will be the more desirable places to live, because they’re the places that are able to carry on in challenging circumstances.” In other words, the future of urban resilience may hinge not on what gets built next, but on how well we manage what we already have. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions