Name: Katy Watkins's review of How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra
Item: How Infrastructure Works
Rating: 5
Author: Katy Watkins

Deb Chachra

A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, and all around us Infrastructure is a marvel, meeting our basic needs and enabling lives of astounding ease and productivity that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. It is the physical manifestation of our social contract—of our ability to work collectively for the public good—and it consists of the most complex and vast technological systems ever created by humans. A soaring bridge is an obvious infrastructural feat, but so are the mostly hidden reservoirs, transformers, sewers, cables, and pipes that deliver water, energy, and information to wherever we need it. When these systems work well, they hide in plain sight. Engineer and materials scientist Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, just how much we rely on them—but also whom they work well for, and who pays the costs. Across the U.S. and elsewhere, these systems are suffering from systemic neglect and the effects of climate change, becoming unavoidably visible when they break down. Communities that are already marginalized often bear the brunt of these failures. But Chachra maps out a path for transforming and rebuilding our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. The cost of not being able to rely on these systems is unthinkably high. We need to learn how to see them—and fix them, together—before it’s too late.

Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

How Infrastructure Works

Katy Watkins

Infrastructural networks could be fairly described as vast constructions whose purpose is to centralize resources and agency to a small fraction of extremely privileged humans and to displace the harms to many others.

Infrastructural systems have been an important means of empowering groups to have full civic and economic participation, so they're not just the result of politics—they embody and enable politics. That also means that they're not just about benign or nearly benign norms about tea and flush toilets. They are manifestations of power, of structural inequities, and of systemic biases around who deserves access and agency, and who does not.

The most radically important promise of infrastructural systems is not just that they underpin our individual agency but that they can do so in a way that is democratic and universal.

It's easy to take artificial light for granted and never think about what an enabling technology it is to be able to see equally well whether it's day or night or, for that matter, in any closed interior space. It's not a survival need, but seeing in the dark is effectively a superpower.

Alone at home I am a continent-spanning colossus, reaching out for my tiny share of these communal systems, whether it's a few drops of water from my local reservoir via the municipal treatment plant or a few electrons getting a push from a dam in northern Quebec, thousands of miles away. If driving my car makes me a cyborg because it augments my individual body with a more powerful machine, then these systems make me part of, in the words of infrastructure researcher Paul Graham Raven, a "cyborg collective."

Interesting when coupled with one of her previous observations about a shawl she bought in the Faroe Islands. The artisan who made the shawl reared the sheep, sheared it, spun the wool, and knitted the shawl. They could create that from scratch. But the black plastic buttons that the shawl also features are a different story: no one person knows how to drill the oil, refine it, make the plastic, create the injection mould, and create the buttons.

Doug Belshaw

In many ways, this is what we think of as being “modern,” particularly as residents of a wealthy, economically advanced country. It means that our way of life isn’t constrained by the resources that are found in the immediate environment, and that everything we do is embedded in and enabled by global systems of energy, trade, communications, migration, food production, and supply chains. Because the existence and nature of these systems shape the kinds of things we can do and how we do them, the possibilities that are available to us on a daily basis, how we feed ourselves and stay warm or cool or move around or have water for drinking and hygiene, that means that we literally don’t know how to live without them. If you’re reading this book, you’ve almost certainly had the feeling of glimpsing the systemic sublime, the human systems of the world that, in Helen’s words, operate on scales too small and too large and too complex for us to apprehend, vast and seemingly unknowable. The brain-exploding insight, the one that we all live with whether we acknowledge it or not, is this: for a large fraction of humanity, the ways we meet our most basic needs, the ways we carry out the most routine and quotidian activities of our daily lives, and the material culture in which we are embedded are all beyond our capacity to understand, or even fully apprehend.

Good example to use when introducing the idea of a situation as a system which depends both on the boundary which is drawn and the framework which the practitioner is using.

A forest is home to trees, plants, fungi, and lichen, as well as to birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, small and large mammals, and more, each of which is in an ongoing ecological relationship with the others. Every forest is an enormously complex environment that's shaped not just by its location, landscape, and climate but also by the history of humans in that place. If you go on a walk in the woods, what you see depends on the season and the particular path you take through it. More than anything, though, what you see in the woods depends on the eyes that you are seeing it through. A birder, a hunter, an entomologist, a soil ecologist, a real estate developer, and an artist will all see different things. 

Nothing mention of things such as impact of colonialism and capitalism that haven't crept up much in my systems thinking studies yet. Also term 'hyperobject'.

Collective infrastructures are a good candidate for the most complex systems created by humans. They are planetary in scale, build on their own histories, are entangled with each other, and have impacts that extend far into the future. Their design, construction, and operation require a wide range of technical disciplines - civil engineering, obviously, but also electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, environmental engineering, and the science of systems and of networks. All of these fields incorporate not just technologies but practices, ways of thinking, doing, and building. The decision-making and funding around these systems, particularly public systems, is the province of policy, finance, and economics. Finally, as systems that require land and resources, it's impossible to extricate infrastructure from a larger history of conquest, colonialism, and capitalism and, particularly but by no means exclusively in the U.S., from racism and white supremacy. The theorist Timothy Morton coined the word "hyperobject" for just these sorts of systems that span multiple time scales, length scales, and social settings.

Note idea of 'path dependence' and the way Chachra talks about systems. Also Laura, if you're reading this, thanks for the gift! :)

Because these networks are so important to the ways we do things, they have unparalleled continuity. We almost never rip them out and start over from scratch. Instead, infrastructural systems are repaired it rebuilt in modular increments, like starting working through the replacement of water mains in a neighborhood or fixing potholes every spring. But that continuity has a flip side: it locks us into these ways of doing things. The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to keep fast typists from jamming the keys on manual typewriters, but it's still in use on smartphone touchscreens. Decisions made decades or even centuries ago - how we treat wastewater, the use of alternating current instead of direct current for electricity grids, pipelines laid for fossil fuels - all of these shape not just the technologies and systems in use today but those that haven't yet been built. That continuity means there's a path dependence - that the kind of systems we have today depend on the characteristics of the systems that came before - in addition to growth and accumulation, as these systems build on each other. 

Loved this. Infrastructure is interesting, and this looks at it from a human and cultural perspective, not just pure practicality. It gives you a useful and hopeful perspective for the future. And next time I’m in Boston I need to keep an eye out for “don’t dump” signs that have fish on them. Apparently the shape of the fish is specific to the body of water each storm drain drains too, and this little detail brings me so much joy and satisfaction.

Doug Belshaw &
How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra

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Doug Belshaw &
How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra