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Chargement... How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (édition 2023)par Deb Chachra (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreHow Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World par DEB CHACHRA
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. A masterly explanation of the structures, large and small, economic and social that shape our lives and relationships. Chachra's background is in Engineering, specifically materials engineering, but the explanation is easily accessible to us all. The chapter headings are informative and their sequence is quite well ordered. The steps whereby an artefact is at first an invention, then an innovation, a useful product and then finally a utility, are now clear to me. This book leaves the reader the idea that while more work will be forthcoming from Dr. Chachra, this aspect of our lives has been adequately dealt with. ( ) I'm an infrastructure nerd -- I love visiting water treatment plants, watching bridges get built or disassembled, seeing dams generate hydro power. I'm very much in Chachra's target audience. She does a great job explaining why these systems matter, and why they're interesting. I knew about her pumped-hydro storage examples from before, but had never made the obvious leap to cranes-and-cables systems using weights to store power absolutely anywhere we want to do that. I was entertained and learned some things! Her sections on investment and maintenance were good, but I liked most of all her long discussion of sustainability. She explains both the very important social goals that should underlie our thinking there, and the value and benefits we derive from building robust, flexible and adaptive systems as we work through the effects of two hundred years of burning fossil fuel and generating other pollutants. Chachra isn't naive about the risks and challenges, but she's hopeful. She's also convincing! The publisher names the author as Deb Chachra. Her Wikipedia entry is indexed as Debbie Chachra. She is a professor at the Olin College of Engineering, a writer, and a lecturer. Her 2023 book How Infrastructure Works discussed infrastructure, climate change, and inequality. It includes some material about her life as the child of immgrant parents in Toronto, her residence in London in the UK, as a graduate student, her residence in Cambridge, Massachusets, some of her hobbies and interests, She often begins her descriptions of infrastructure sites with reminiscences on her visits to the sites. While her stories ramble and sometime serve to make her work more relatable, she also uses each site and each visit to make a point about infrastructure. She refers to dystopean themes in modern speculative (i.e. science) fiction, and to a some works and writers. She mainly discusses infrastructure built in the 19th and 20th centuries. She discusses it in chapters that address concepts about networks and infrastructures. Her approach is discursive and elliptical. She favours investing resources in durable infrastucture that operates under the stress of nomal loads and expected loads, and when rare events affect operations. She has slogans about design and standards. She appreciliates that robustness, redundancy and resilience make systems reliable. She also maintains that carbon dioxide and climate change have affected design, and emphasizes that systems should be diffuse, diverse and distributed. She describes her life as privileged, contrasting her life to lives of women who lived and laboured at other places and times. She use the language of critical theory, feminism, envirommentalism and social justice. She argues that infrastructure should empower everyone who is on a network with agency. She refers to writiings by liberal and progressive writers. She argues that the principles of finance, neo-liberal (or neo-classical) economics and the market distorted planning and design. She maintains that infrastucture construction involves using resources to build networks that serve the interests of the wealthy and impose cost, risks and other externalities on less affluent persons, whether part of the same political nation, or a foreign place. She argues that financial "optimization" is a political and economic name for cutting costs, shifting risks onto human beings who are not "owners" or "investors", or simply taking risks. The last chapter of the book proposes "Rethinking the Ultrastructure" - i.e. envision a future, and and choose to work towards it. She make the point that the earth has been exposed to abundant energy for millions of years. Human beings have been taking energy from matter, generally by chemical reactions, particularly combustion of hydrocarbons. She notes that energy is abundant while using matter to "create" (release) energy has drawbacks. Some of her rethinking expands on ideas about recycling. Glass, steel and aluminum can be recycled. "Disposable" plastic is mainly waste. The chapter becomes utopean. On the last few pages Dr. Chachra discusses how thin metal objects - the example is paper clips - can be stressed to point of breaking by repeated bending, but can be repaired after stress but before breaking by being heated. Dr. Chachra says she uses this a mental model for "how we can transform and recommit to our infrastructural systems". This obscure metaphor can inspire magical thinking by woke and green leaning persons about politics and public decisions. On the whole, the book is informative about the history, engineering, economics and politics of infrastructure. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
"A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, and all around us Infrastructure is a marvel, meeting our basic needs and enabling lives of astounding ease and productivity that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. It is the physical manifestation of our social contract-of our ability to work collectively for the public good-and it consists of the most complex and vast technological systems ever created by humans. A soaring bridge is an obvious infrastructural feat, but so are the mostly hidden reservoirs, transformers, sewers, cables, and pipes that deliver water, energy, and information to wherever we need it. When these systems work well, they hide in plain sight. Engineer and materials scientist Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, just how much we rely on them-but also whom they work well for, and who pays the costs. Across the U.S. and elsewhere, these systems are suffering from systemic neglect and the effects of climate change, becoming unavoidably visible when they break down. Communities that are already marginalized often bear the brunt of these failures. But Chachra maps out a path for transforming and rebuilding our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. The cost of not being able to rely on these systems is unthinkably high. We need to learn how to see them-and fix them, together-before it's too late"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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