How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

This wonderfully subversive book starts with deep dives into how infrastructure in our lives work. Water, sewers, electricity, information, and transportation require immense infrastructure. They are the background of our lives and allow us to function. Chachra eloquently explains how they are built, their history, and their operation.

But she then says, they were all built with biases, intentional or otherwise. And that these biases need to be remedied going forward or else all of us, the entire planet, is in trouble.

One bias is wealthier areas benefit greatly from infrastructure improvements while poor areas suffer through neglect, pollution, and lack of funding. This is often built into the system so deeply we hardly realize it is there. But really, why should Silicon Valley have blazing fast internet and garbage and sewage that ends up someplace else, while outlying California towns have way slower internet and maybe a trash dump or two for big cities to use?

The other bias is the assumption everything can continue to be powered by fossil fuels. No. it can't. Global warming will increasingly make that not feasible. Also. renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuel. We must move towards a widely distributed, flexible, and resilient infrastructure.

It's doable. Sure, it will require big changes. However, the cost of not acting is much bigger. Most of all, infrastructure needs to be run as a common good for society. If it makes a profit, fine. However, that shouldn't be the focus. Providing safe, reliable infrastructure that operates so well we don't even know it's there should be.

This book explains how we get there.