How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a beautiful crossover science and technology studies (STS) book. It speaks to scholars by offering several novel descriptions and frameworks of infrastructure as sociotechnical systems and introduces the concept of “infrastructural citizenship” at the end. For public interest readers, those academic ideas are made accessible thanks to accessible stories covering the history and context of specific examples of “charismatic megastructures” and the ways they touch us personally. The author Deb Chachra makes infrastructure helpfully human-scale by presenting her own connections to infrastructure in autobiographical vignettes. Her visit to the Dinorwig Power Station in Wales is a standout example. If you are a fan of the podcast 99% Invisible, as I am, you can imagine such stories as excellent episodes.
There are two ideas in the book that changed how I see the world. The first is that “energy is the currency of the material world” (p. 40), and we have an opportunity with renewable energy sources to think not in terms of scarce energy but abundant energy, and address the fact that the material we have to work with is finite (Earth is essentially a closed system of matter). People need energy to survive: food, heating/cooling, mobility, etc. Infrastructure systems generate and deliver energy and also mediate the ways energy and power can be accessed and used. Humanity’s energy consumption has been growing tremendously in recent decades. Our production of energy has relied on finite materials, primarily fossil fuels, and we have produced pollution that corrupts other material resources. We must be stewards of those finite resources, and we have that opportunity if we harness the full potential of renewable energy, which is dramatically more than conceivable consumption when you account for all sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface.
My other favorite idea comes from the metaphor of the “Black Start” (pp. 200–201), which is an emergency system for generating power and getting things online when there is a blackout of all the conventional power generation systems. Chachra argues that fossil fuels, like coal and crude oil, were humanity’s “black start”—”a transition phase.” They enabled our rapid advances in technology and society, “[lifting] us out of darkness, literally and metaphorically, giving us the time and resources to create our global, connected, highly cooperative, technological civilization.” And now that we are at this point, able to invent renewable energy technologies, it’s our duty to transcend “the pollution and inefficiency of our black start.”
The book’s title is punchy, but it would be more accurate if it read How Infrastructure Should Work. Chachra is really making a normative argument through her chapters. Rather than being overly concerned with how infrastructure works technically, she is really trying to describe the social, political, historical, and economic contexts that produce certain infrastructure and also mediate how it works and what it can do. The book is also future-oriented, taking stock of our current infrastructure, whether it serves us well or not, and imagining the future we should be building together. In Chapter 10, “Rethinking the Ultrastructure,” Chachra enumerates 6 actionable principles for new infrastructure that distill several of the key insights of the book:
1. Plan for Abundant Energy and Finite Materials
2. Design for Resilience
3. Build for Flexibility
4. Move Toward an Ethics of Care
5. Recognize, Prioritize, and Defend Nonmonetary Benefits
6. Make It Public
The concluding chapter on “Infrastructural Citizenship” is particularly exciting to me as a scholar of citizenship and civic engagement. Chachra defines it as the “idea of being in an ongoing relationship with others simply by virtue of having bodies that exist in the world and which share common needs […] it carries with it the responsibility to sustainably steward common-pool resources, including the environment itself, so that future communities can support themselves and each other so they all can thrive” (p. 276). This form of citizenship is well aligned with my own writing on civic professionalism in engineering, but it dramatically expands the scope of accounting for the public interest: thinking locally and globally simultaneously and imagining our distant descendants and the Earth we want to leave for others.
Confession: I’m biased. Deb Chachra is a colleague of mine on the faculty of Olin College of Engineering and longtime friend. I observed her develop some of these ideas in earlier writing and a course she taught on Infrastructure Studies for first year students. And I believe the book is truly great. I am impressed by how accessible she makes her ideas and see the value of the work as a scholar.
I unabashedly recommend this book!
