<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/10/17/how-infrastructure-works-deb-chachra/>
"To understand what infrastructure is, advises engineer Deb Chachra, start with
your commute. You drive on a road network, or take transit that’s part of a
larger public system, or simply disengage from your networked
telecommunications by turning off your computer. As evening falls, you turn on
the lights, whose power comes from the electrical grid. You cook dinner with
piped-in gas from another grid; you drink water from the faucet that is just
one of many nodes on a vast water system whose contents might come from three
states away.
As Chachra explains in her essential book “How Infrastructure Works: Inside the
Systems That Shape Our World,” you are living in the lap of luxury without
realizing it. All the difficult work of collecting fuel and water is taken care
of invisibly, and you can traverse great distances — on the road or online — in
very little time. The great gift of our infrastructure is that it gives us
agency over our lives, liberating us from everyday drudgery. Chachra argues
that access to the grid has become a political right; indeed, many local
governments will not allow heat and water to be shut off, even when customers
can’t pay.
The problem is that when our infrastructure works, we never think about it. We
don’t vote on our infrastructure every two years, and we don’t honor our
utility workers as guardians of our lives, the way we do first responders. We
forget the importance of maintaining and caring for it, leading to disasters
like bridge collapses, blackouts and floods from overtopped dams. With climate
change threatening many of our cities and towns, this needs to change, and
fast.
Written in an engaging, personal style, “How Infrastructure Works” combines
engineering history and science with Chachra’s witty anecdotes about traveling
to power plants and cities across the world. Reading it is like taking a stroll
with a friend who knows exactly what every obscure marking on the street means:
underground sewage pipes, century-old markers left by U.S. Geological Survey
workers or buried electrical cables. But this book isn’t a “how it works”
manual to your city. Instead, it’s a passionate argument for the political
necessity of functioning infrastructure."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-domestic-violence-australia-malaria-rwanda-whales-dominica/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
