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.
