How Infrastructure Works

This book is a fascinating look at different infrastructural systems and the general principles that underlie their development, use, and impact. While there's a bit of engineering detail here, it's utilized to illustrate particular points, and Chachra doesn't review how specific systems work in their entirety. This can get a bit frustrating as I did want to know more about those inner workings, and the book jumps around between different systems rather than sticking with a specific system for a chapter. This book does, however, demonstrate how true infrastructure is fundamentally a public good, built for both the present and the future but inextricably linked with the past, and how myopic, short term economic calculations are comically bad at conveying the value of these systems. Chachra also convincingly shows that these mostly ignored systems can drive huge quality of life and economic differences and that those differences need to be accounted for when considering who and what is responsible for individual, firm, or country success. Highly recommend

"Universal provision via collective systems is how we provide agency and autonomy to everyone, and limiting the freedoms of those around you is unethical and unsustainable, not least because it's almost always enforced through violence."

Such a great and inspiring book! Come for the technical aspect of infrastructure and its hidden worlds of interconnected networks, and stay for the politics and the aspirational social project that the very idea of a collective infrastructure represents and embodies!

Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works considers infrastructure like water, electricity and internet from many angles, taking a critical feminist approach to services often rendered invisible to us unless they stop working. Beginning from a perspective of infrastructure as a social good and a care role, Chachra introduces an interesting angle that draws from her work as an engineer and her upbringing in Canada as the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Entangled within this are anecdotes about how infrastructures were built, and how they are often socially maintained. The perspective reads almost like social philosophy that takes a well considered perspective pushing against accepted political norms, and it is great for this. The conclusion and some of the chapters drag out a little in the writing, but that doesn't take much from the magnificent argumentation.

Readable tour through infrastructure's reflections of our collective cultures, in its histories, dependence on social pasts and futures, and the agency it gives us individually and en masse to reduce labor and lessen daily focus on basic needs. Maintenance and the shifting baselines of climate bring our attention now to the need and opportunity to redesign infrastructure to address a larger collective future.

I thought this one started off a bit slow and anecdote-heavy which is a complaint I've had about several recent nonfiction books I've read. Fortunately this time those anecdotes were just laying the emotional groundwork for a treatise on how our (humans in general, but particularly humans in wealthier countries) lives are only possible as we know them because of big investments in infrastructure made decades ago.

I appreciated the author's emphasis on needing not just to invest in maintenance of what we have but a hopeful tone about what's possible if we rethink our tendency toward large centralized structures and consider smaller, more localized solutions that can be combined (like a series of smart micro-grids for power that use wind in windy areas or solar in sunny areas but also use storage and interconnects to let those solutions complement and supplement each other).

I guess at first blush it might sound a bit strange that a book about utilities, roads, and drainage can change your perspective on the world, but Deb Chachra's does just that.

I have both a personal and professional interest in this stuff, but not huge knowledge in the area. I expected lots of cool technical detail, hooks into the fascinating intricacies of water treatment, electricity generation and distribution, transport. All of that is there, but every sentence is embedded in a fabric of social and cultural awareness. The whole point of infrastructure is social, the technicalities are just...well.. the technicalities. It is the bigger picture that Chachra is interested in here. The result is a not so much a disorientation, as a reorientation. It's a recognition of the ways in which the infrastructure that we take for granted every day (that is designed to be taken for granted), gives us roots that go deep into the earth, and power that reaches right across it.

So often, the built environment, and the systems that provide for basic survival needs are thought to separate us from the natural world. What Chachra shows is, essentially, that that is not possible. We are unavoidably, necessarily connected to the world through these systems. Indeed, there is an ethical demand that we recognise this, and the massive costs that come with it. But also we are connected to one another, family, neighbours, fellow country people, humanity at large, through them - they are literal and figurative foundations of civilisation and community.

The point of this recognition is not to undermine those foundations, but to empower us to be better citizens through them. To take ownership and responsibility of the relationships to the world and to others that these systems provide, and to appreciate how the ways that these systems are designed, built, and maintained, impact on those relationships.

I was excited to read this book because I have some appreciation and interest in this stuff anyway. I have got much more out of it than I expected, and believe that it is a book that would repay readers of many stripes who might not be primed in the same way. Highly recommended.

Two potential chasers for this shot: An obvious one, a light, fun, quick, but insightful graphic introduction to these kinds of systems (in this case, the internet, water, and electricity specifically). bookwyrm.social/book/1083387/s/hidden-systems

A wonderful book that does a similar kind of job in highlighting how measurement and observation of the world around us is something achieved in a necessary web of social and cultural relationships. Measurement as infrastructure for our communication and collaboration about the world in every domain of life. bookwyrm.social/book/604021/s/beyond-measure