How Infrastructure Works

Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works considers infrastructure like water, electricity and internet from many angles, taking a critical feminist approach to services often rendered invisible to us unless they stop working. Beginning from a perspective of infrastructure as a social good and a care role, Chachra introduces an interesting angle that draws from her work as an engineer and her upbringing in Canada as the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Entangled within this are anecdotes about how infrastructures were built, and how they are often socially maintained. The perspective reads almost like social philosophy that takes a well considered perspective pushing against accepted political norms, and it is great for this. The conclusion and some of the chapters drag out a little in the writing, but that doesn't take much from the magnificent argumentation.

Readable tour through infrastructure's reflections of our collective cultures, in its histories, dependence on social pasts and futures, and the agency it gives us individually and en masse to reduce labor and lessen daily focus on basic needs. Maintenance and the shifting baselines of climate bring our attention now to the need and opportunity to redesign infrastructure to address a larger collective future.