Engineering professor and materials scientist Deb Chachra’s new book
How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical – even beautiful – hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It’s a book that will make you see the world in a different way – forever:
Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other “charismatic megaprojects,” connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn’t merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible
meaning.
Infrastructure isn’t merely a way to deliver life’s necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it’s a
shared way of delivering those necessities. It’s not just that economies of scale and network effects don’t merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It’s also that the
lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us
without being part of a collective, public project.
Think of the automobile versus public transit: if you want to live in a big, built up city, you
need public transit. Once a city gets big enough, putting everyone who needs to go everywhere in a car becomes a Red Queen’s Race. With that many cars on the road, you need more roads. More roads push everything farther apart. Once everything is farther apart, you need more cars.
Geometry hates cars. You can’t bargain with geometry. You can’t tunnel your way out of this. You can’t solve it with VTOL sky-taxis. You can’t fix it with self-driving cars whose car-to-car comms let them shave down their following distances. You need buses, subways and trams. You need transit. There’s a reason that every plan to “disrupt” transportation ends up reinventing the bus:
