Knowingo
The cover of How Infrastructure Works

How Infrastructure Works

Deb Chachra, 2023

Discover how shared systems expand human agency, encode political choices, and can be rebuilt for reliable, equitable, and climate ready collective life.

Get the app Read on the web

10 parts, about 23 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Argues that water, power, roads and data networks are shared agreements that quietly extend what each person can do
  • Trains you to see the hidden systems behind an ordinary dinner or commute, and who they serve or exclude
  • Written by an engineer who ties technical detail to colonial history, maintenance work and climate risk

Who it is for

  • Urban planners and engineers rethinking what systems should serve
  • Readers who take tap water and electricity for granted
  • Climate minded people looking past gadgets toward whole systems

What the summary covers

  1. Learning to See the System2 min
  2. Agency Arrives Through Networks2 min
  3. Networks Require Cooperation2 min
  4. Shared Provision and Public Value2 min
  5. Cooperation Can Also Dominate3 min
  6. Reliability Is Active Care2 min
  7. The Climate Double Bind3 min
  8. Rebuilding for Resilience and Abundance2 min
  9. Changing the Ultrastructure3 min
  10. Infrastructural Citizenship2 min

Recommended by

  • Ed YongPulitzer Prize winning science journalist
    Revelatory, superbly written, and pulsing with wisdom and humanity, How Infrastructure Works is a masterpiece.

About the author

  • Deb ChachraMaterials scientist and professor at Olin College
    • Grew up in Scarborough, Ontario, where her parents had settled as immigrants from New Delhi, India
    • Earned her PhD in materials science at the University of Toronto in 2001
    • Worked as a postdoctoral associate at MIT before joining the faculty of Olin College
    • One of the earliest faculty members at Olin College, deeply involved in undergraduate engineering education
    • Received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for engineering education research, held from 2010 to 2015
    • Received the American Society for Engineering Education William Elgin Wickenden Award in 2009
    • Received a 2020 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to fund research and writing for a forthcoming Riverhead Books title on infrastructure and society, provisionally called Public Utility
    • Writes the newsletter Metafoundry and has written for the Atlantic and Nature

More books like this