On How Infrastructure Works

I’m a bit of an infrastructure junkie. I love learning about it, observing it, seeing how it all fits together. I came of age at the peak of NUMTOTs — New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens — and lived in Boston in that same period, and both surely colored my admiration for, and desire for, strong infrastructural systems; one of the first things I look at anywhere I go is how the infrastructure works. The trouble, of course, is that it’s largely invisible, and Chachra’s book does an admirable job of illuminating this veiled layer of modern life. The intended reader seems less infrastructure-aware than I am, but I enjoyed her effusive passion for the subject and her push to make these systems better, both for our communities and for the generations after us.

In Chachra’s reading, which I think is correct, infrastructure is inherently social: it has a network-node structure, and it makes no sense to talk about one piece of it in isolation, because the whole point is that it lights up the entire map. Only a holistic view of it makes any sense at all; no quantity of visible megastructures does that work. The book is full of interesting anecdotes — bridges, dams, sewage systems, nuclear plants, roads, transit lines, oil pipelines — and I was especially taken with her discussion of the Dinorwig Power Station in Wales. She gives extensive attention to the need for equitable infrastructure and to what makes it fail: neglect. Infrastructure isn’t sexy, so the budget lines for its maintenance get cut and the structures fail, which is a far more common occurrence than cyberattacks or bombings. The real problem is the same as the real strength: its invisibility. There’s also a good discussion of climate change’s role in maintaining and planning these systems, and of what the infrastructure of the future might look like. Worth the time for anyone curious.