2023 book #68. 2023. Infrastructure is all around us but as long as it works we don't notice it. More a 10,000 foot level review (not nuts and bolts which I was expecting) it was still an interesting book. Biggest challenge to come: climate change. ( )

I'm an infrastructure nerd -- I love visiting water treatment plants, watching bridges get built or disassembled, seeing dams generate hydro power. I'm very much in Chachra's target audience.

She does a great job explaining why these systems matter, and why they're interesting. I knew about her pumped-hydro storage examples from before, but had never made the obvious leap to cranes-and-cables systems using weights to store power absolutely anywhere we want to do that. I was entertained and learned some things!

Her sections on investment and maintenance were good, but I liked most of all her long discussion of sustainability. She explains both the very important social goals that should underlie our thinking there, and the value and benefits we derive from building robust, flexible and adaptive systems as we work through the effects of two hundred years of burning fossil fuel and generating other pollutants.

Chachra isn't naive about the risks and challenges, but she's hopeful. She's also convincing! ( )

The publisher names the author as Deb Chachra. Her Wikipedia entry is indexed as Debbie Chachra. She is a professor at the Olin College of Engineering, a writer, and a lecturer.
Her 2023 book How Infrastructure Works discussed infrastructure, climate change, and inequality. It includes some material about her life as the child of immgrant parents in Toronto, her residence in London in the UK, as a graduate student, her residence in Cambridge, Massachusets, some of her hobbies and interests, She often begins her descriptions of infrastructure sites with reminiscences on her visits to the sites. While her stories ramble and sometime serve to make her work more relatable, she also uses each site and each visit to make a point about infrastructure.
She refers to dystopean themes in modern speculative (i.e. science) fiction, and to a some works and writers.
She mainly discusses infrastructure built in the 19th and 20th centuries. She discusses it in chapters that address concepts about networks and infrastructures. Her approach is discursive and elliptical.
She favours investing resources in durable infrastucture that operates under the stress of nomal loads and expected loads, and when rare events affect operations. She has slogans about design and standards. She appreciliates that robustness, redundancy and resilience make systems reliable. She also maintains that carbon dioxide and climate change have affected design, and emphasizes that systems should be diffuse, diverse and distributed.
She describes her life as privileged, contrasting her life to lives of women who lived and laboured at other places and times. She use the language of critical theory, feminism, envirommentalism and social justice. She argues that infrastructure should empower everyone who is on a network with agency. She refers to writiings by liberal and progressive writers.
She argues that the principles of finance, neo-liberal (or neo-classical) economics and the market distorted planning and design. She maintains that infrastucture construction involves using resources to build networks that serve the interests of the wealthy and impose cost, risks and other externalities on less affluent persons, whether part of the same political nation, or a foreign place. She argues that financial "optimization" is a political and economic name for cutting costs, shifting risks onto human beings who are not "owners" or "investors", or simply taking risks.
The last chapter of the book proposes "Rethinking the Ultrastructure" - i.e. envision a future, and and choose to work towards it. She make the point that the earth has been exposed to abundant energy for millions of years. Human beings have been taking energy from matter, generally by chemical reactions, particularly combustion of hydrocarbons. She notes that energy is abundant while using matter to "create" (release) energy has drawbacks. Some of her rethinking expands on ideas about recycling. Glass, steel and aluminum can be recycled. "Disposable" plastic is mainly waste.
The chapter becomes utopean. On the last few pages Dr. Chachra discusses how thin metal objects - the example is paper clips - can be stressed to point of breaking by repeated bending, but can be repaired after stress but before breaking by being heated. Dr. Chachra says she uses this a mental model for "how we can transform and recommit to our infrastructural systems". This obscure metaphor can inspire magical thinking by woke and green leaning persons about politics and public decisions.
On the whole, the book is informative about the history, engineering, economics and politics of infrastructure. ( )