Abstract
In 2003, the eminent National Academy of Engineering rated the 20 greatest engineering achievements that transformed our lives in the 20th century. Five infrastructures—electrification, water supply, the telephone, highways, and the internet—were among them. This is not really surprising. Modern infrastructure provides Americans with clean water to drink, reliable electricity to power their homes and businesses, instant connectivity almost anywhere on earth, and a highway network that allows them to drive safely and at high speed throughout a vast country. However, despite its importance, infrastructure can also be fragile and vulnerable to damage and disruption. Just two short years later, we watched as New Orleans was devastated by cascading infrastructure failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The events that unfolded in New Orleans made it abundantly clear that in our modern society, infrastructure really does matter. Simply stated, we cannot live the way we do without infrastructure. More accurately, we cannot live without the services it provides.
As someone who has spent the better part of 50 years working in and around the infrastructure business in practice, research, writing and teaching, I’ve often wished for a text that explained how technology, people, and institutions must come together to deliver these vital services safely and reliably. Although perhaps not an “uber text,” “Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure” written by Dirk van Laak and translated by Erik Butler, comes close to filling that bill. The author is Professor of History of the 19th to 21st Centuries at the University of Leipzig and he brings a welcome historical context to the infrastructure conversation.
In a Commentary written for this journal almost a quarter century ago (Little, 1999), I argued for the need of a new discipline to enhance the training of “infrastructure professionals.” My underlying premise was that infrastructure as then understood was mostly in the educational domain of university engineering programs where most infrastructure decision makers feared to tread. Concurrently, Susan Leigh Star provided valuable insights into what “infrastructure” signified in its broadest sense based on her training as a sociologist which aligned closely with my views (Star, 1999). Although Professor Star considered infrastructure “boring things” to study, Professor van Laak is quite right in stating that “The intervening decades have proved the very opposite.” I heartily concur.
He does not propose the book as “a systematic, comprehensive overview of the economic, political, and legal dimensions of infrastructure” but rather one that seeks “…to situate and examine infrastructure historically—in particular, their influence on (post)modern culture, everyday life, and cultural practices.” Because of their scale and cost, infrastructure networks are at some level, always political acts which serve to promote, among other objectives, social interaction and unification, He notes that without infrastructure, Bretons would not have become French nor the Catalans, Spanish. In the case of the US, infrastructure such as canals, railroads, and later, highways served to weave an enormous and diverse geography and populace into a nation.
He also makes clear that infrastructure historically did not emerge as the result of some grand plan but were, and continue to be, adaptive responses to changing times, sometimes with unanticipated consequences. Consider that climate awareness has led to efforts to reduce emissions which accelerated the development of electric vehicles which will require an enormous, yet unbuilt, network comprising millions of charging stations (S&P, 2023); potentially sourcing critical battery minerals from a geopolitical adversary (Deese & Bordoff, 2023); and at the same time, negatively impact gas tax revenues, the primary source for highway funding (Funt, 2023). Who knew?
The first three chapters trace the history of infrastructure from the dawn of the industrial age to the present. “The Classical Era of Infrastructure” supported the exploitation of natural resources and economic growth through increased manufacture, trade, and worker productivity. Eventually, steps were taken to improve the quality of life, particularly for workers and others at the lower end of the economic spectrum, through efforts to provide safe drinking water, rudimentary sanitation, and residential electrification and household appliances among others. However, because of a singular focus on economic benefits, the social and environmental “externalities” that accompanied massive infrastructure projects such as the management of the Colorado and Columbia Rivers through a series of dams and impoundments or the US Interstate Highway System were overlooked or ignored. The ecological and social devastation caused by such shortsightedness gave rise to the environmental movement and an on-going counterpoint effort from the political right against “job killing government regulation” that is claimed to unnecessarily delay or prohibit needed projects. This classic wicked problem does not have a binary guns or butter solution and these early chapters are an important reminder that infrastructure decision-making is best supported by thoughtful deliberation rather than single issue rhetoric.
The next five chapters introduce timely and important issues that can serve as a springboard for those interested in a deeper dive. Ownership and organization of the enterprise, the symbolic value of infrastructure as well as the challenges of its aging and maintenance, network vulnerabilities, and the impact of these systems on users and operators are all introduced, albeit at a length and breadth that some will find wanting. After all, infrastructure is news! Almost daily we can read about what some might euphemistically call “challenges” while others, more clear-eyed or cynical, call them failures. Deutsche Bahn, the German railroad system once considered an exemplar of Teutonic efficiency, has become a national embarrassment (Partridge, 2023). Due to cost overruns and delays, Britain abandons the northern portion of HS2, the once widely heralded solution to addressing the problems of its post-industrial north (Cumbo & O’Dwyer, 2023). In the US, freight trains carrying toxic cargoes almost routinely derail (EPA, 2023) while driverless vehicles, the supposed transportation wave of the future, run into and over people (Felton & Bobrowsky, 2023). In France, the “gilets jaunes” protested increased fuel prices and low wages for “working people,” many of whom have jobs in infrastructure (Chrisafis, 2018). As Kurt Vonnegut might have said, “And so it goes.”
Despite my overall positive view of the book, there are a few issues, some avoidable, some not. First is that book was originally written in German and, as such, many of the references cited are also in that language and likely beyond the ken of most English speakers. There’s not much that can be done about that. Second, but of no lesser importance, is that the German version, originally published in 2018, could not anticipate the profound impact that the COVID-19 pandemic would have on infrastructure as it wreaked havoc on the workforce (the human component of infrastructure) and ultimately, on global supply chains. These issues were unavoidable, and at least the Preface mentions the huge infrastructure program initiated by the Biden Administration in the wake of the pandemic. However, the impacts of climate change and sea level rise on all aspects of infrastructure have been recognized for years but “climate change” doesn’t merit so much as an Index callout. Similarly, the potential impacts of AI and the vulnerabilities of networked systems to cyberattacks are timely topics also not mentioned. Arguably, the period during which the translation was being done would have been an excellent opportunity to revisit the text and update it as appropriate.
In any event, this review began with the premise that “infrastructure matters” and Dirk van Laak and “Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure.” certainly make a case that it does.