How infrastructure works Inside the systems that shape our world

Deb Chachra

Book - 2023

"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 mat...erials 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"--

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Subjects
Published
New York : Riverhead Books 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
Deb Chachra (author)
Physical Description
308 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780593086599
  • Behind the lights
  • Infrastructure as agency
  • Living in the networks
  • Cooperation on a global scale
  • The social context of infrastructure
  • The political context of infrastructure
  • How infrastructure fails
  • Infrastructure and climate instability
  • An emerging future of infrastructure
  • Rethinking the ultrastructure
  • Infrastructural citizenship.
Review by Booklist Review

Engineering professor Chachra takes readers through the series of marvels that leads to water flowing into a kitchen sink in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and through the risks facing critical networks as the impacts of climate change continue. Chachra examines the systems that many citizens in industrialized nations take for granted: sewers, electrical grids, high-speed internet. While many major infrastructure projects were built out of a sense of public good, Chachra also illuminates the social and political contexts that determine who benefits from infrastructure projects, and who deals with the negative externalities. For example, the spoke-and-wheel model of many U.S. public transit networks prioritizes commuters into central cities over inhabitants' ability to move across neighborhoods. Major highway systems have displaced minority neighborhoods in the name of efficiency. As the world deals with climate instability, Chachra offers a vision of inclusive design that reimagines what communities can become. Writing with enthusiasm and clarity, Chachra explains complex systems and human dynamics in this approachable, informative study of the world around us.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Materials scientist Chachra reminds readers of the ubiquity, endurance, and necessity of infrastructural networks while enthusiastically arguing for their public funding in her insightful debut. Weaving together travelogue, expert knowledge, and personal remembrances of her childhood in Canada and adulthood in various cities including Boston and London, Chachra describes the systems that provide people with water, electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, mobility, and sewage disposal. She explains that infrastructural networks not only "meet our basic biological needs," but also "increase our abilities and agency through access to energy, and... allow us to develop and foster social relationships with each other through communication and mobility." However, infrastructure can be used by the powerful to enhance their positions and exacerbate inequalities. Consequently, Chachra argues for infrastructure to be publicly and democratically controlled. She also emphasizes that new infrastructure must be designed with the adaptability and efficiency needed to withstand climate change. Examples of structures she admires include the Dinorwig Power Station in Wales, which draws power from an artificial waterfall during the day and at night utilizes unused energy to pump the water up again; and New York City's network of upstate reservoirs and aqueducts, which, making use of the natural incline of the landscape, are 97% powered by gravity. Written in a distinctive style that is both conversational and erudite, this is an accessible and enjoyable account. Readers will be engrossed. (Oct.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misquoted the book.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A welcome new entry in the how-stuff-works genre. Everyone knows that roads and bridges are pieces of infrastructure, but so are light switches, sewers, telephone poles, and mailboxes; this imaginative book tells us how they work and what they mean. Writing about her childhood, Chachra, a professor at Olin College of Engineering, chronicles how her middle-class family in urban India received running water for one hour, twice per day, which they collected in buckets for bathing and flushing toilets and boiled for drinking. Electrical brownouts were routine. The author delivers a fine education on the technology that provides a seamless life for the lucky "global 10 percent." All infrastructure requires energy. The automobile, which speeds us from place to place in a metal shell, requires enormous energy to manufacture and transport to the local dealership, but flipping a light switch makes us no less a human-machine hybrid. Infrastructure is "vast and collective," but it makes us free. Chachra criticizes the idea of "off the grid," a life that would be dominated by maintaining personal systems to deal with water, electricity, heat, cleaning, and producing and cooking food. The author devotes the second half of this superbly rendered book to the ongoing problems of her subject. A company can profit by building a pipeline or bridge; legislators boast of promoting it; the media celebrate its opening. Thereafter, like all infrastructure, it requires ongoing maintenance, which is boring and expensive and--all experts agree--wildly inadequate. Due to aging pipe systems, "15% of all clean drinking water in the U.S. is lost to leaks." Every decade or so, when a bridge collapses, we mourn the victims, but little changes. Turning to "plan for abundant energy and finite materials," Chachra is more optimistic than most, noting that "we are not doomed to a dystopian future of failing systems." A rare book on engineering and its economics that will satisfy general readers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.