Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from the book "The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives" by Sybil Derrible that will be published by Prometheus Books on March 4, 2025.
What you are doing right now, reading these lines, whether you are holding a physical book or using an electronic device, would not be possible without the essential infrastructure that surrounds us and enables our lives.
Our society has become so reliant on the seamless and silent operation of infrastructure that it is hard to imagine a time when that infrastructure did not exist (and it still does not exist in some parts of the world). In fact, modern infrastructure has such a ubiquitous presence in our society that we easily forget it is even there. This is the infrastructure that is at the center of The Infrastructure Book.
I often say that infrastructure is the greatest physical manifestation of civilization. All over the world, and since we started to settle together in cities, humans have built infrastructure to engineer the environment they live in and make it more favorable to them. Already about ten thousand years before our common era (BCE), during the Neolithic period, humans built roads, canals, and buildings to make life easier for them. In Politics, Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BCE, provides this insight: “The city-state comes into being for the sake of living, but it exists for the sake of living well.” This aspect of “living well” is fundamental, and it explains why cities form and grow in the first place. It also explains why so much effort and energy is put into building and operating gigantic infrastructure systems that have become so big and complex that it is impossible to understand fully how they work as a single entity.
What is mind-boggling is that even though our lives depend on infrastructure — and when it breaks down we are sent back to the dark ages — most of us have little to no idea how it works. We expect light to come on when we flip a switch, and we expect water to flow when we open a tap. But do you know where your electricity comes from and how it is generated? Do you know where your water comes from and how it is treated and distributed? We are very good at cursing and complaining when we are stuck in traffic, but do you really know what traffic congestion is and how to ease it? We are amazing at consuming stuff and throwing waste in the dumpster, but do you know how it is managed and where it ends up after the garbage truck picks it up? And when you make a call, watch television, or browse the Web on your computer, phone, or tablet, do you know how the information is transmitted, seamlessly, instantaneously?
This last point is important. After tremendous technological progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the twenty-first century seems to be the century of the instant. Everything is instantaneous. In many countries, people can wash instantly by turning a knob instead of having to fill up buckets of water at a well. Water can be drunk readily from the tap; it does not need to be boiled first. Light comes on at the flip of a switch, and the use of candles has become reserved for romantic gestures. Most often, we do not even need to think about space heating and cooling; it is all taken care of automatically for our comfort. Even in terms of knowledge, thanks to the internet, most people have instantaneous access to the universal body of knowledge that is stored on servers around the world and reaches users at light speed. Everything has become so instantaneous that many people now feel the need to travel to the countryside, to disconnect, but to disconnect from what? How does the infrastructure that provides this instantaneous life work in the first place?
Having instantaneous access to these services also comes at a great cost. Planning, designing, building, and operating all this infrastructure requires a tremendous amount of energy and resources, often more than what the Earth can provide sustainably, at least as of this writing. Moreover, the sheer complexity of infrastructure has also become so great, and our lives depend so much on it functioning well, that this comfort we have gained has come at the expense of resilience. In the news it seems that there is always a region of the world that is experiencing an extreme weather event, destroying cities and infrastructure and catastrophically impacting people’s lives. Sustainability and resilience are two important concepts that we will discuss throughout the book, as they require us to rethink completely what infrastructure is and how it works.
Funnily, despite being a societal necessity, the term infrastructure itself is relatively new—it only first appeared in France in the 1870s. As the combination of infra (meaning “below”) and structure, infrastructure was originally defined as “an underlying base or foundation especially for an organization or system.” By the twenty-first century, the use of the term infrastructure has become so broad that it is impossible to come up with a proper and complete definition. Infrastructure is most often associated with public utilities (whether publicly or privately owned), and that is the view I will take in this book. Specifically, we will discover seven types of infrastructure: water, wastewater, transport, electricity, gas, solid waste, and telecommunication. Our focus will be on the planning and operation of specific infrastructure, whether physical (e.g., water conduits) or an offered service (e.g., public transport). Along the way, we will also identify their biggest flaws and discuss how they are or may evolve to become more sustainable and resilient.
Broadly, my goal is to provide a general understanding of the engineering principles that govern the seven infrastructure systems listed above. These engineering principles often impose constraints on what can and cannot be done in our communities. Understanding them can also help us figure out how we can become more sustainable and resilient. We will cover many engineering principles but will not use any equations (although I list some in the footnotes for those interested).
You do not require any prior engineering knowledge to read this book. In fact, I use this book to teach first-year university students, many of whom have no engineering knowledge and despise math. As I tell my students, after reading this book, you should be able to walk in on any technical conversation about infrastructure and get the gist of it. You should be able to correct that cranky person who complains that there is too much traffic and claims they have the solution for it (most often they don’t). Most important, you should be able to stand on any street in any city in the world and have some idea of how the infrastructure that surrounds you works and what its merits and flaws are. I promise you that by the time you are finished with this book, you will not see the world around you the same way ever again.
Before we start, we must have a discussion that some readers will find thorny. There is no engineering without numbers, and there are no numbers without units. I use only the metric unit system since this is the system used internationally and often in the industry (even in the United States). For fans of the imperial unit system, I have added its equivalent in parentheses . . . but you know it is only a matter of time before the United States fully converts to the metric unit system. The metric system is simply better and much easier to use.
The seven infrastructure systems listed above are covered over sixteen chapters. For each infrastructure system, we will travel to a different city in the world to illustrate how the engineering principles work in practice. For example, we will travel to Hong Kong to learn about water distribution, Copenhagen to learn about stormwater management, Los Angeles to learn about traffic and roads, Cape Town to learn about electricity generation, and San Francisco to learn about digital telecommunication. Finally, we will travel to Singapore to summarize everything we have learned. Except for this chapter on Singapore, each chapter is independent enough that you should not have to read them sequentially (although I recommend you do).
In addition to the sixteen cities that we will travel to, a second infrastructure is featured at the end of each chapter to see how the engineering principles that we will learn about work in different contexts. For example, we will also learn about Bogotá’s TransMilenio at the end of the public transport chapter in London and about Oaxaca’s solution to mobile telecommunication at the end of the analog telecommunication chapter in New York City.
Are you ready? We are about to embark on an amazing journey together to explore seven essential infrastructure systems. A journey around the world. A journey that will probably transform your understanding of infrastructure and give you a new appreciation for it.
Our first stop is Rome. That’s where we will learn about water collection. Let’s go.
URL: More information about the book on the Prometheus Bookswebsite, along with the links to buy it from all major retailers and directly from the publisher is at https://www.prometheusbooks.com/9781493086641/the-infrastructure-book/
Sybil Derrible is Professor of Urban Engineering and Director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a world-renowned scholar on infrastructure and Lead Author of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) Seventh Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7) report.
He is the recipient of a US National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award and a Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Since 2019, he has been recognized in the top 2% researchers in his field of urban engineering and data science by Elsevier.
He has published over one hundred publications and is the author of the popular science book, "The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives" (Prometheus Books, 2025), and the textbook, "Urban Engineering for Sustainability" (MIT Press, 2019).
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