Deb Chachra is a professor of engineering at Olin College with expertise in materials science, equity and inclusivity in STEM, and engineering education. She has written about the intersection of technology and culture for outlets including the Guardian, Nature, and ASEE’s Prism magazine, and in her newsletter Metafoundry. In How Infrastructure Works, she shares her own affection for infrastructural systems, encouraging readers to appreciate these systems and boldly envision alternative futures.
In a wide-ranging conversation, we spoke about the values embedded in sociotechnical systems; the need for engineers to design with an ethic of care; and our mutual admiration for several infrastructural “charismatic megastructures.” Much like the networks that organize our water, transport, and communication, we ourselves are bound together, interconnected and interdependent, in ways Chachra urges readers to recognize and celebrate. In response to the challenges of persistent inequity and climate change, Chachra is hopeful that such communally imagined infrastructure may advance justice and sustainability.
Jenn Stroud Rossmann (JSR): An observation that you make and return to in the book is that networks are inherently collective, not individual. They are about doing things together. This observation feels like it is a little bit in tension with, even challenging, the rugged individualist myth that Americans and especially American engineers like to tell. How does that tension interact with the infrastructure we have?
Deb Chachra (DC): Infrastructure is inherently collective. Otherwise you’re just homesteading, right? Like Little House on the Prairie, where you’re doing it all yourself. I actually reread Little House on the Prairie as part of writing my book, so I noticed that it had detailed information on most aspects of building their house, like how to build a fireplace or dig a well, but not how to build an outhouse—I guess to spare the sensibilities of young readers? I’d also forgotten that they only lived a day’s ride from the nearest town and a train line. They’re not close to town, but they’re still part of the westward expansion and the infrastructure that supported that. So even as the book suggests they are homesteaders, it’s inherently unreasonable to think of them as lone individuals.
It’s possible to live by yourself and never interact with other people. It will not actually kill you. But humans, by and large, don’t do it, and infrastructure really is an instantiation of that implicit sociality.
The myth of individualism wasn’t true in the 19th century and it sure as hell isn’t true in the 21st. Virtually nothing that we use in our daily lives, however trivial or mundane, is something that we can make or replace by ourselves. And then of course, that’s true of things like medical care. What’s more, medical care can also be inherently collective. Take vaccines, for example, where there are public health implications attached to whether or not the people around us have access to vaccines or get vaccinated, just like there is for whether they have access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation. Your own health depends on the health of the people around you.
There is, of course, a tension in the idea that these systems, these collective systems, provide us with individual agency. I’m really interested in seeing both of those things—both the value of the individual agency and recognizing that this agency is underpinned by these collective systems. I don’t really see them as in competition so much as complementing and reinforcing.
JSR: Can you say more about the politics of infrastructure that you discuss in the book? So, like if your society has a libertarian, capitalist outlook, will you end up with fundamentally different infrastructure than if you have a collectivist one?
DC: Infrastructure reflects the social structure of the community that builds it. Having said that, it’s an argument that is being empirically tested, because there are some communities that reject the idea of working together to have infrastructure and they are not doing amazingly well. We have actual physical bodies that exist someplace on the actual physical planet that have actual material needs, and it is impossible not to have that relationship with the land—with the place where our bodies are—and that necessarily puts us in a relationship with place and the people around us.
This idea extends backward and forward through time. There are people who were in the place you are now before you, and there will be people there in the future. It has nothing to do with your political affiliation. It has nothing to do with your national citizenship. It has nothing to do with whether you are visiting briefly or live there for your entire lifetime. It has everything to do with the fact that we are embodied creatures in a physical world. I’ve been referring to this relationship as “infrastructural citizenship,” because it captures the idea that we are in a sustained relationship with other people through these systems.
There is always the possibility of building worlds that work better for more people. I don’t think any particular pathway is inevitable. But the potential to build systems that work, that are more equitable, more sustainable, more resilient, is there. There is nothing in the physical reality of our planet that prevents that from happening.
JSR: You mentioned these unincorporated cities that try to be off the grid and do things their own way, and we have several examples now of Silicon Valley folks buying up land in Solano County or elsewhere to create similarly off-grid compounds or “charter cities.” Such a move feels like the exact opposite of recognizing that infrastructure is collective, that it is for all of us and that we might owe one another something. Water has been especially fraught. What do we do about this phenomena of clearly technologically savvy and privileged people making the choice to break away or say that we have to start over?
DC: Going fully off the grid presupposes that you have sufficient knowledge and resources to sustain these systems or more commonly, the resources to get other people to do labor and sustain infrastructure on your behalf—things like managing your water systems and electricity—and personal security, because you are going to need it. It’s not really that different from a medieval manor. But there is no starting over. If the idea is, well, “We’ll live on our little island that is totally self-contained”—good luck with that. Because even if you think you can replace human skill and labor with technology, you can’t untangle your interdependence, at least not indefinitely—you are still assuming that you are going to be able to bring in doctors and medicine, and get new filters when they clog or a new battery when your battery inevitably dies, because entropy is inevitable. So it’s actually a false proposition.
But I’m interested less in preventing those people from going off-grid, and more in building out everything that isn’t that. I’m interested in the work of creating and sustaining the larger collective systems that leverage the decentralized nature of renewable energy and that safeguard resources, like water supplies, for everyone. Seeing infrastructural systems for what they are requires us to understand them as the product of massive collective investment and to reflect on the value of that. So I’m looking at things like investments in renewable energy, and industrial policy for a decarbonized world, and how communities can make decisions about these systems.
It’s worth noting that, in a world with collective systems that serve the public good, there is going to be no shortage of economic upside for individuals and corporations. Historically, once infrastructure is public, it fosters incredible economic growth. But a deregulated, 19th-century robber-baron-style approach to infrastructure fundamentally does not work. These are network monopolies of basic human needs, and the entire early history of infrastructure is of private systems being replaced with public ones in order to safeguard provision and access at reasonable rather than extortionate rates—we see this over and over again, with water, with electricity, with transportation, and more. On the other hand, once you have collective public infrastructure, in whatever form—it doesn’t have to be a top-down, federally mandated thing, this includes municipal systems, cooperatives and more—it does what it’s supposed to do, which is underpin human effort and activity. By freeing people from daily survival labor and providing mobility, communication, energy, and more, it enables them—us!—to build and create and all of that stuff, that is actually what the economy is, right? It’s not dollars and cents. It’s human effort and ingenuity.
JSR: Yeah, I worry sometimes that when we have told the history of cool technology as individual efforts by individual tinkerers in their garages, we overlook the level of public investment in things like the electrical grid, railways, the internet, that mask how much we need that public buy-in and how much it is all of ours, and not just the barons’.
DC: The argument for public investment in infrastructure has always been that it underpins economic investment. And while I think we need a broader understanding of the value of infrastructure that frames it as a public good that contributes to health and well-being largely through nonmonetary externalities, that doesn’t change the fact that if what you care about is economic growth, investing in infrastructure is a stimulus. Infrastructure is what powers that flywheel. But you only get that full potential for economic growth with infrastructural systems that serve the public good, rather than ones that funnel resources into making investors very rich.
Somebody asked me recently about how you can get kids to care about infrastructure. And I said, I want kids to never have to think about it.
JSR: You write about the passage of time and the way we tend to build our systems on top of one another, partly for convenience—we already appropriated some land for the rail, let’s string the telegraph right next to it, and then when we need to lay fiber optic for the internet, well, we already have all this land and let’s use the railway stations for data centers, et cetera—it just feels like common sense.
But following this pattern risks reinforcing and further entrenching some of the problematic politics that as you say are built into the infrastructure we have. And we almost never, as you say, rip out our infrastructure networks and start from scratch. So, since we have some of our communities and society organized now inequitably, and since our infrastructure has been part of that organization, are there some systems we simply should rip out and start over with, or can incremental repair or fuel conversion, can those things get us to the more just and verdant future we want?
DC: When it comes to infrastructure, “rip it up and start again” is almost never the answer, but we count on these systems every moment of every day. I’m more about the “start again and then rip it up” approach. Do you know the idea of how you don’t get rid of bad habits by stopping doing the bad thing, that instead you try to crowd out the bad habits with better habits? For example, if you want to stop smoking—it’s really hard to just stop cold turkey and do nothing, but you can start chewing gum as a stepping stone. I do think that in general that is how these technological systems evolve and progress. We want to get to the point where it is like, oh, yeah, we all are using the trains, so now it’s time to convert the highway into a bike path or a right of way for trains or whatever, because it turns out that we don’t really use it anymore and we can do something better.
But we also need to recognize the opportunity in front of us, and the costs of not embracing it. If all we do in terms of decarbonizing transportation is to throw away every gas-powered car and replace it with an EV, then like, yes, technically we will have decarbonized, but there is this incredible missed opportunity, right, to basically build better systems. Rather than replacing cars with cars, why the hell didn’t we replace them with a train? If we’re building something new anyway, it can be something that works better, whether it’s mass transit that, unlike cars, scales up gracefully—it works better when more people use it, not worse. Or if we replace fossil fuel power stations with new, for-profit centralized power plants than run on solar or wind, when instead we can build new energy systems that can be distributed, smaller scale, and more locally situated to better meet human needs.
JSR: I am taken by your affection for the Solari board clacking with its updates and for the charming Victorian railroad at Snowdon Mountain. I’m wondering about the role of nostalgia in your work, and in our fondness for older forms of infrastructure. Is nostalgia somehow related to the idea of holistic technology, or the idea that at one moment it was possible to have a single person comprehend how this whole system worked, whereas now so much of our modern infrastructure is more complex and multifarious?
DC: To borrow an idea from Joan Didion, who used it to describe driving in Los Angeles, these older forms of infrastructure, especially charismatic megastructures like bridges and train stations, can be secular cathedrals. We recognize that these are things that we made for ourselves and for each other. People have been visiting the Hoover Dam in droves since it was brand-new, so I don’t think it’s nostalgia per se—I think it’s more about celebrating this idea of the collective, these collective or communal projects. If we’re nostalgic, I think it’s less about the physical structures and more about the idea of working collectively.
The other thing that is interesting to me about Solari boards is that you don’t have to pay attention to them until your ears tell you that something is changing, and because it can’t convey any other information other than text and letters. This makes it a really calm technology, as Amber Case calls it. Compare this with travel information conveyed on regular LCD screens, where it’s challenging not to look at different screens, or to miss the advertising, or to not feel like you have to compulsively check the screen to make sure that you don’t miss the change that you need to see.
JSR: I’m glad that you reframe nostalgia as being for that communal social connection through these technologies because sometimes that nostalgia for, say, Penn Station as it once was, feels like it is yearning for a time before technology was democratized, before everyone could take the train, or everyone could take an airplane, and people dressed up and the experience was glamorous. And it feels like instead of that communal feeling, you are actually having the opposite, where the glamour, the fond nostalgia is correlated with how limited the access was. Which is then a throwback to inequity, which is not romantic or charming. Is there anything like that at play here?
DC: For sure. When I’m nostalgic for beautiful airports, I’m personally not nostalgic for, like, Pan Am airline hostesses, as I imagine some people are. What I’m nostalgic for is a time when we recognized that building an airport was a remarkable human achievement that people had made together and the spaces that reflect this—expansive concourses with soaring windows, say—instead of airports that feel like a mall or rat tunnels.
JSR: Should we be exploiting this fondness for communal infrastructure more in our pitch for sustainability and racial justice and the maintenance of vital infrastructure? Does infrastructure need more or different mascots?
DC: Somebody asked me recently about how you can get kids to care about infrastructure. And I said, I want kids to never have to think about it. I want the grownups to do a good enough job that we all have infrastructure that works well, and kids only think about it if they choose to.
But one thing that I would offer as a good example comes from my home town of Toronto. Many cities that have combined sewage systems for historical reasons—mostly because we didn’t know better when they were designed—are now realizing that they actually really do want separated systems. So the city of Toronto did an enormous project to separate stormwater and sanitary sewage (the stuff from sinks and toilets) because, when I was growing up, basically every time there was a major rainstorm, there was a warning against swimming in Lake Ontario because there was too much disease-causing bacteria in the water from the stormwater overwhelming the sewage treatment facilities. Since it all went through the same system, the sanitary sewage was diluted but it was still contaminated when it was discharged, and it took a few days for the bacteria to break down in the lake. By separating them, the city could treat sanitary sewage deeply and properly and then separately treat stormwater, which gets a much lighter and different treatment.
So the city built this huge sewage separation project, and there is a beautiful public park with lovely public art, including a curtain of falling water where video projections can be displayed. The art is a visible manifestation of a project that became utterly invisible when it was complete—not only was it mostly underground, but it means no more beach bacteria days. So part of my answer is making public manifestations of infrastructure projects that are artistic and inviting.
Another example I recently heard is that, in Paris, they decided that they are going do as much of the Olympics as possible on the Seine, and so they are using it as an opportunity to invest in making it cleaner, as well as a floodwater control project. I am 100 percent down with using the Olympics to do a massive bread and butter (pain et beurre?) water infrastructure project for the river at the heart of Paris. Many cities have their, like, disused Olympic stadium or other facilities, but France is using the Olympics to climate proof the Seine—what’s not to love? We need more of these big, public, high profile cultural projects, that make visible the long-lived investments in our invisible infrastructure.
JSR: Could you talk about the relationship between this book and your own teaching?
DC: The roots of the book of course go back to when I was a child, but a lot of the gestation of the book was in the last 10 or so years. As I started thinking more deeply about the ideas in the book—especially the idea that these systems are inherently collective and value laden—I realized that it made sense to share them with my students, and I created first an experimental course and then a fully fledged course about infrastructure. Both of those classes were rooted in the idea that engineering students should understand the infrastructural systems that they would otherwise just take for granted. The metaphor I always use is that teaching engineering students about infrastructure is like teaching fish about the water they’re swimming in.
I taught it as a first-year humanities course, not as an engineering course, and like many professors before me, I realized that lots of things I wanted to talk about, I couldn’t find resources for; in particular, the way the physical and engineering considerations of these systems—matter, energy, and networks—inform the social considerations. So I wrote the teaching resource that I needed for my class.
In the process of colearning with my students, having them go off and do their own projects and bring their own ideas back, my own understanding of infrastructural systems was enriched. I know that the act of teaching it, of thinking through infrastructure studies with my students over the course of several successive years, was a contributor to what found its way into the book.
Another motivator is the fact that I’m always thinking about the future, and my students’ future—what world are they going to be living in, and what world are they going to have agency in? What are they going to be contributing to and in what ways?
JSR: Do you have ideas about ways that engineering curricula could better prepare students to think about infrastructure in this more communal way?
DC: My engineering students are really challenged to interrogate ideas of infrastructure that they have been taking for granted. They are forced to see that infrastructure is not a natural or static system, that it was created and that it can be changed. And in fact, we want to change it.
A lot of my students are overwhelmed by the narrative that we are careening toward catastrophe, and that they will have to clean up the mess before it is too late. That narrative is really demoralizing. What I try to stress to my students is that the goal isn’t just to avoid catastrophe but to actually build out a just, resilient, decarbonized future—solving climate change is just going to be a side effect. A lot of that is helping students to comprehend the reality of our planet—that we have this much sunlight coming in and it’s more than we can use as a species, but that we have planetary limits in terms of moving matter and dumping it into ecosystems. And, today, we have the technology to actually recognize this and do something about it.
It’s about that shift in perspective—and emotional affect—from “crisis response” to “here’s what we are actually doing to build this other world.” Many of my students tell me that they actually feel better about the future, not least because it’s way more fun to build something new and great than it is to avert catastrophe, especially one that you inherited. And this is particularly important since our students—young, globally privileged, technologists in training—could just decide to build literal or metaphorical bunkers instead of facing up to the climate crisis. I get to help my students consider that, instead of just focusing on protecting ourselves, we could actually be part of this great humanity-scale project to make this second big energy transition.
The other thing that is really useful for my students is this helping them to go beyond the idea that there are groups of people who benefit and groups who are harmed—that everyone is either a winner or a loser, and they are in opposition. Instead, we use a concept that came out of the work that I did around infrastructure: thinking about technology as containing a set of benefits and a set of harms, and that those benefits and those harms are unevenly distributed across communities, but it’s not either/or. As students begin to consider how these distributions go along with existing inequalities, it gets them to think about a more relational ethics of care for technologies and technological systems.
And this goes beyond just my own infrastructure courses. For example, I coteach a user-oriented collaborative design course, in which students work with a group of people over the course of an entire semester to conceive of and specify designs for that user group—artifacts and systems that incorporate their values and needs. It’s a way of doing design that really builds in that relational ethics of care, against the straight utilitarianism that’s embedded in a lot of engineering. Collaborative design gives you a framing for thinking about why we do things in particular ways, because we can’t just make decisions without any community input, we need a relationship, we need to understand the relationships and the relational ethics of these people that we are working with. Whether it’s infrastructure, or engineering, or just as a member of their community, these approaches start getting them into the habits of mind and practice of thinking about the larger social context of their work. 
This article was commissioned by B. R. Cohen.
Featured-image photograph: Deb Chachra © Leise Jones