Book Review: How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World
by Deb Chachra
The subtitle of this book, referring to systems that shape our world, describes the understated significance of infrastructure. Deb Chachra takes material that is fascinating from an engineering perspective alone, and presents it in its essential societal significance. Infrastructure drives culture more than many are willing to admit, as it underpins essential functions of daily life while hidden in plain sight and often not noticed—until it stops functioning. Very few people have been unaffected by an outage of power, water, or telecommunications service, or been stranded when planes are grounded, trains aren’t running, or roads are closed.
Chachra clearly describes why infrastructure must be functional, resilient, sustainable, and equitable—with today’s climate and population challenges, this also requires infrastructure to be of a smaller scale, distributed, and reversible. And the author aptly points out that there is abundant energy available from sustainable renewables. To achieve a practical solution, Chachra suggests six actionable principles for a new ultrastructure. Those are:
1. Plan for abundant energy and finite materials
2. Design for resilience, rather than efficiency
3. Build for flexibility, including being decentralized but federated
4. Move toward an ethics of care, including provision for maintenance
5. Recognize, prioritize, and defend non-monetary benefits—we are each more than our economic capacity
6. Make it public—no short term profit and negative externalities
The question is: why is this essential foundation of our very culture kept in the hands of those whose purpose is profit over the public good? The answer is both obvious and ugly—governments that abdicate their civic duty and serve primarily the bank accounts of oligarchs allow infrastructure to function foremost as a means of extraction of wealth from those not wealthy enough to influence public policy. The obvious correction to that ugliness is popular pressure for public policies that prioritize public services over oligarchic demands—this will require a population that is both educated on the issues and with common agency for the common good. In countries with functioning democracies, elections are the means of doing that once candidates and proposals are available to vote on. In any country, whether or not its democratic, no government has withstood a nonviolent campaign that mobilized at least 3.5% of the population in sustained protest at its peak and with effective organization—it’s time to put that theory into practice toward the infrastructure goals Chachra presents.