Welcome to The Works, Next City’s latest column. My name is Stephen Smith, and I’ll be focusing on infrastructure — from transportation to energy, trash to water — in the U.S. and occasionally abroad.

As the country re-urbanizes, we must relearn how to build the sort of mass transit networks that once moved us around. From decisions about technologies and modes — buses or trains, light rail or streetcars, car sharing or electric cars — to problems like skyrocketing construction costs and operating methods, we face tough issues about how to build and maintain transportation networks that serve growing cities. The Works will help guide you through them.

We’ll have to make similarly hard choices about the accelerating effects of climate change. Do we focus on prevention or mitigation? Are individual cities even large enough to affect outcomes, or will they have to deal with the consequences while the national government tries (or doesn’t try) to reduce carbon emissions? To what extent are our solutions hi-tech, and when are they old-fashioned policy levers that get back to the basics, like energy conservation and redundancy? However we choose to answer these questions will define the nation’s next generation of infrastructure — the systems that will take into the next millennia.

Finally, a little about myself: I came to Next City from the New York Observer, where I wrote about real estate and transportation. Before that I’d written for Forbes and Bloomberg View on similar topics. I graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 2010 with a degree in International Political Economy, studying things like trade policy, capital controls and foreign direct investment.

If you have comments, questions or suggestions about what you’d like to see on the blog, feel free to shoot me an email at smithsj@gmail.com.