In this paper, we explore co-creative processes between researchers, art institutions and artists and new roles emerging for engineers in that process. The modern infrastructure ideal of universal, uniform, networked infrastructure has dominated the imagination of planners and engineers in the Global North and South for over a century. However, the dawn of the Anthropocene has triggered new concerns and challenges for critical infrastructures (water, electricity roads etc.) disrupting the modernist imagination. Somewhat unsurprisingly, these concerns have been translated into academic and policy discourses about the development of more resilient and socially inclusive critical infrastructures. 

In the ongoing project entitled Examining nature and society through urban infrastructure (NATURE) we develop an art exhibition in collaboration with the art institution Färgfabriken, in south of Stockholm. Sketches from the co-creative dialogues and interviews are used to illustrate how art can have a more central role the intellectual and public policy deliberations that shape new imaginaries of critical infrastructures.  Future development of infrastructure may once again become trapped into a (less resilient and less inclusive) modernist pathway. In other words, today’s infrastructure challenges pose a threat to critical infrastructures but also a window of opportunity for environmental humanities propose strong and novel ideas shaping future infrastructures. In this paper, we will explore how the arts can help draw attention to the importance of the role of previously unarticulated socio-natures and the role of the non-human in infrastructure imaginaries. The aim of the paper is also to initiate a discussion about how arts can become catalytic for translating key insights on critical infrastructures from the environmental humanities into more widely accessible and publicly deliberated.