With $1.2 trillion in government spending on infrastructure now filtering into the construction economy, it’s a good time to think about, well, “How Infrastructure Works.” In this excerpt from her love letter to the built environment, engineering professor Deb Chachra traces the systems, networks and supply chains that make roads, dams, bridges, power plants, sewer lines and other infrastructure possible:
What makes infrastructure, infrastructure?
“All of the stuff that you don’t think about” turns out to be a surprisingly good starting point. For something to be considered infrastructure, its presence and characteristics are taken as a given. My bedside lamp needs electricity to function, and it plugs into an outlet, but I don’t have to think much about the specific characteristics of the electricity: the voltage, the current, the frequency. The washing machine I use for my clothes needs not only electricity but also a supply of clean water. Some of that water comes from a hot-water heater, which itself relies on a piped-in supply of natural gas, and the dirty water drains into a sewage line. Four different infrastructural systems converge when I do my laundry. My ability to take these infrastructural systems for granted implies that there are underlying social agreements about what systems will be present and how they will function.
What electricity, water and sewage, telecommunications and transportation—these familiar infrastructural systems—also have in common with each other is that they’re technological systems. They’re rooted in physical phenomena—the characteristics and behavior of matter and energy—and so require some kind of engineering to harness those phenomena. It might be as simple as digging a ditch to channel water flowing downhill into a slightly different direction, or it might be as complex as all the multitudinous technologies, from metallurgy to meteorology, that go into building a commercial jet plane and keeping it safely in the air.
