Modern infrastructure that invisibly delivers water and power is often held up as a norm. Yet in reality, it often fails, or fails to exist, depending on where it's located and who it's intended to serve. In the face of climate change and inequality, disruptions to modern infrastructure systems are becoming more frequent. This suggests the need for a paradigm shift in how built environment practitioners envision, plan and design for sustainable settlements. This course will begin with a grounding in sustainability, interrogating what previous framings have achieved and how sustainability interfaces with the current emphasis on resilience. We'll then tap into current infrastructural theory, gleaning useful concepts for thinking through infrastructural interdependencies, disparities, cascading failures and exchanges between the Global North and South. We will bring these concepts to contemporary cases of failures, from power outages to water system disruptions, examining the role of policy, technical, and physical limitations as well as underlying structural processes such as racism and colonialism. Building on this foundation, we'll turn to emerging solutions from theory and case studies. We'll engage with current discussions of passive survivability, safe-to-fail methods, and decentralization to envision alternative approaches to sustainable infrastructure. In the final project, students will propose a pathway for scaling up an emerging alternative of their choice.