Deb Chachra’s “How Infrastructure Works”

Mutual aid, the built environment, the climate, and a future of comfort and abundance.

This Thursday (Oct 19), I’m in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. On Friday (Oct 20), I’m at Charleston’s Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Engineering professor and materials scientist Deb Chachra’s new book How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical — even beautiful — hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It’s a book that will make you see the world in a different way — forever:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other “charismatic megaprojects,” connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn’t merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning.

Infrastructure isn’t merely a way to deliver life’s necessities — mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on — it’s a shared way of delivering those necessities. It’s not just that economies of scale and network…