The first day of finalist presentations at Bentleys’ 2026 Year in Infrastructure proved how far the industry has come in doing more with less. If there was a single word that captured the spirit of the entire event, it was efficiency.
During the morning of the first day, Chris Luebkeman took the stage and opened with the ease of an old friend rather than a formal host. “Take a look around,” he said. “You’ll see friends, colleagues, competitors, perhaps even a few frenemies – people you have no idea who the heck they are, but you won’t know until this is over that you really needed to know them.”
The engineers, planners, architects, builders, and innovators that filled that room are, in a real sense, silent heroes. The paradox of infrastructure is that nobody thinks about the people who make it work until something doesn’t. The water flows expectedly until it stops, and the grid hums in the background until the lights go out. These professionals carry the weight of a civilization of ease on their daily decisions, and some of the world might not know their names. As Luebkeman put it, many of the people they build for don’t even think about what they do “until something doesn’t quite work.”
Infrastructure and the world are becoming more and more efficient. That point echoed through the finalist presentations, each one a testament to what happens when brilliant minds turn their attention to systems the rest of us take for granted.
Kaushik Chakraborty, Senior Vice President at Bentley and based in Singapore, spoke with the pride of a local about a city “designed and built with intention.” He pointed to Singapore’s master planning, its hundred-year climate adaptation plans, and its sustained public-sector investment. This is the kind of long-term thinking that makes infrastructure a multi-generational commitment. Singapore has plans on public domain for the year 2100. How many other countries, Luebkeman later asked, have a fifty-year plan?
When you’re in a melting pot like Singapore that acts as a crossroads of cultures, talent, and technology from all over the world, there is bound to be innovation and efficiency. This is most likely due to the many different perspectives and life experiences that are brought together. The city’s public transport is one of the best, most efficient, safest, and cleanest anywhere in the world. Its airport is a marvel of design and connectivity, and its skyline weaves vertical forests into futuristic architecture. None of that happens by accident. It happens because people from everywhere, with different ways of seeing problems, collide and collaborate and create something none of them could have built alone.
Dr. Parag Khanna, a global strategist and author, stretched the conversation to its widest frame. He laid out four layers of geography — natural, political, functional, and human — and argued that the future belongs not to the largest nations but to the most connected. He spoke of a world reaching peak humanity before 2050, of nearly ten billion people clustering into roughly twelve thousand cities, where the decisive question is no longer how to build, but where and why. He challenged the room to think beyond infrastructure maximalism and to weigh demographics, debt, climate adaptation, and the zero-sum game of migration. His biomarker for a country was simple: “Are young people voluntarily moving to your country or your city? If yes, you must be doing something right.”
Throughout the day, the theme of efficiency resurfaced in AI-driven design tools, in data platforms that turn fragmentation into clarity, and in urban planning that makes a city of six million function like a machine for living. Singapore itself, as Khanna noted, is a laboratory for efficiency, a place where so many minds from so many backgrounds converge on the same small island and refuse to waste a single advantage.
So the question becomes: what will be done with the time that has been saved? When connected data platforms eliminate weeks of redundant coordination and smart infrastructure makes cities run so smoothly that residents never think about it at all, what happens with the surplus? Do we build more? Build better? Turn attention to the places being left behind, the red zones on Khanna’s climate maps, the countries that cannot afford their own adaptation? Or perhaps invest in the human side of infrastructure, affordable housing, the thing Khanna called “priority number one” in every country he visits.
Although the word for the day was efficiency, the work for the years ahead is deciding what that efficiency is for and how best to use it to advance and preserve our communities and planet.
