A Rural Lens on a Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure

A National Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure is not complete without explicit consideration of the needs of rural communities. While the American population has urbanized, the United States depends on rural communities for agriculture, fishing, forestry, manufacturing and mining. Approximately 20% of the US population lives in rural areas with a skew towards aging adults. Further, nearly 25% of Veterans live in rural America . And yet, when intelligent infrastructure is imagined, it is often done so with implicit or explicit bias towards cities. In this brief we describe the unique opportunities for rural communities and offer an inclusive vision of intelligent infrastructure research.