Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 194
Interview with Deb Chachra about Infrastructure
Deb Chachra’s, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape our World is one of those books where you wonder, “wait, was this written just for me?” In urban technology we like asking how things work, we love infrastructure, and playing a proactive role in shaping the world is what we train our students to do—with care, with collaborators, and with respect for the grand diversity of human needs and experiences. Recently Deb visited us for two days of classroom drop-ins and an evening talk. We huddled to revisit some of the themes of the book and her talk, focusing on the future of infrastructure and what it means for urban technology.
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that data, connectivity, computation, and automation can be harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words or this 90 second explainer video.
🧠 Interview with Deb Chachra - The Close, Small, Shared, Renewable Future of Infrastructure
To introduce Deb Chachra (official bio here) I have to borrow words from someone she often invokes, Professor Ursula Franklin. In 1989, Franklin wrote:
“Let us understand, and on the basis of our common understanding, protest. We must protest until there is change in the structures and practices of the real world of technology, for only then can we hope to survive as a global community.”
Understanding begins with legibility, and Deb is a virtuoso of making large systems legible. Reading Deb’s new book, How Infrastructure Works, you will be treated to vivid imagery from her infrastructural tourism in the American southwest, Wales, India, and points between, walking in, under, and through some of the largest machines and networks ever built by humans. As Chip Kidd once wrote, “designers eat the world with their eyes,” and Deb teaches us how to eat.
But it’s not just your eyes that Deb will call into action. She also teaches us to understand the built environment in some unusual ways when it comes to the words “hard” and “soft.” In Deb’s telling, the hardness of dams and pylons blends into the softness of caring for a loved one under the steady glow of electric light. Hard and soft are both important, differently. If technology is too hard, it’s someone’s job to make it also soft, and that someone is you, me, all of us. It’s our job to design, describe, and manifest the uses of technology that we desire. In addition to protests of politics, the urgency of the Anthropocene demands protests of productivity.
How Infrastructure Works is a manual for “change in the structures and practices of real world of technology” as Ursula Franklin put it, first by teaching us to see, then by challenging us to imagine. Deb’s writing shows that when we bring infrastructure back into proximity to us—the beneficiaries—we may better care for it, and by virtue of having strong infrastructure, we are better enabled to care for each other. That, I hope you will agree, is a future worth your protest and your productivity.
BRYAN BOYER: Last night at the talk you described a future of infrastructure that is smaller, closer to where people live, and more resilient. What’s important about this future?
DEB CHACHRA: The underlying premise is that we can't keep going with our [often monolithic] infrastructural networks as they currently exist. First, because most of the energy we consume is through these shared systems, like electricity and transportation, and they are mostly powered by the fossil fuels that contribute to anthropogenic climate change. But, less obviously, because the climate is already changing. I’m interested in these infrastructural networks that move resources like water and energy through the landscape to where they’re used, and since that landscape is changing, those networks are going to be affected. For example, when you see that floods have closed a highway or wildfires have caused power outages, that is an interaction between the changing landscape and our existing infrastructural systems.
So that's one piece of it: the systems can't continue to function the way they were meant to function. The second piece is that the actual technological affordances of a decarbonized energy system are really different than one based on combustion. For thermodynamics reasons, there's a benefit to centralizing power plants because they’re more efficient: it’s cheaper and more efficient to have one large fossil fuel thermal generation plant than a bunch of small plants. However, that is not true for many kinds of renewables, particularly solar. A solar plant is basically a bunch of individual solar panels hooked together, but a thermal generation plant is not a bunch of diesel generators daisy-chained together.
The third piece are ideas of sensors, networks, and communication that allow you to do things that weren't possible five or ten years ago. They make different forms of infrastructure possible – it’s what underlies the idea of the ‘smart grid’, for example.
So there are new possibilities and technological affordances as we move from combustion to renewable energy, which can move us away from centralized control and structure and toward systems that are more decentralized and distributed.
When the landscape is more unstable, having distributed infrastructure means it is intrinsically more resilient. A classic example of this are microgrids, where you have local power generation that is connected to a larger grid, so that even if something goes down on your grid connection, you still have local power. This gives you a decentralized model of generation, and it gives you resilience in the case of larger environmental events, but it also gets at equitability. It means that every community gets to make their own decisions, so that if there's a big power failure, it's not someone far away who is deciding which people should and shouldn't get power.
The argument is that the sustainability of decarbonization, and the resilience, equitability, and overall function of these systems benefit when it is smaller and more distributed, rather than the 20th-century model of building giant systems like the Hoover Dam.
BRYAN: So if the 20th century saw us generating energy in huge plants that were very smoky or produced noxious gasses, and therefore needed to be far away from population centers, now we’re talking about smaller energy production and storage that’s closer to us. So power becomes more urban, right? Literally in this case.
DEB: Right, and that’s what I mean about the relationship between infrastructure, its geography, and the communities in and around that geography. With many of these 20th-century examples, people just decided to impose large-scale systems without considering the abstract of who and what it was imposing on. If you build giant dams in the desert, the thing you care about is the engineering parameters of that location and what it means for the quantity and price of the electricity you’re producing. You're not thinking about the wellbeing of who lives there and what use they make of it.
When things are done on a smaller scale, and closer to where people live, it intrinsically means that there's more engagement and legibility in the local physical environment. Local communities are actually able to consider what makes sense for them, specifically. And these new technologies can have fewer noxious side effects, or an effort can be made to mitigate them.
It’s really interesting to be here talking to you about urban technology because I’m focused on the physical side, but there absolutely are sensors, networks, and communication that must be understood in the context of locally distributed infrastructure. It gets at the questions of: How do we communicate this information to ourselves and to each other? Instead of having a big, top-down system, how do we create a model of infrastructure where you're in communication with the people around you about what's happening?
I like to talk about California sending out a text to everyone prompting them to reduce their energy consumption when they were at the limits of the grid on a super hot summer day a few years ago, and how they collectively averted blackouts. It's a great example of something that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. It's prosocial and it's actionable. When you get that text, you understand what the benefit is, not only for yourself, but for everyone, and exactly what to do. In that moment, it’s clear that complete strangers are capable of working together in ways that make things better for everyone. Humans are actually good at helping other humans. And broadly, asking people who live in a particular area to reduce their consumption now to accomplish a clear goal is remarkable. It worked!
BRYAN: Despite having power grids and power plants for decades, we were not texting everyone to prompt usage changes. So let's do an experiment. I’m curious if we fast forward 10 years and imagine taking a walk from your front door down the street, what other new experiences might we find?
DEB: I live pretty close to Cambridge City Hall, which now has a charger for cars. In five or ten years I would expect to see more municipal charging infrastructure. The neighborhood where I live actually has significant amounts of bike infrastructure, such as physically separated bike lanes, but currently I still feel intrepid when I'm a cyclist and have to be constantly navigating with cars. So I would suspect to see more multimodal transport. I would also expect more granular information about public transit, specifically buses. In the UK, you see things like real-time displays that show the status of the next few buses, which allows you to decide if you have time to grab a quick coffee, send an email, or stand there waiting. I imagine them leveraging GPS and communications to have more information readily available for transit users.
BRYAN: You’re describing more choices in transit, and in a world with more choices, we need more information. There's a shift from, “just trust us the bus will be there” to, “here is the real-time performance of this bus.” That allows people to navigate things more easily. I’m not going to spend 10 minutes waiting in the cold at the bus stop now, because I don’t have to.
DEB: Those types of real-time updates can mitigate genuine harms, like safety (whether real or perceived) and overall comfort using public transportation. We are seeing this happen with EV chargers. Instead of filling up your car in 75 seconds, it now may take 75 minutes, so people are worried about how they will occupy themselves or stay safe in that time. So there's a bunch of different things these changes will affect: visibility, planning, safety…
BRYAN: …And trust? I’m interested in the ways technology helps us build trust in systems and in each other. Did people who turned off their AC in response to a text message feel “seen” for their contribution?
DEB: I really hope that someone closed the loop for those who received the text message – “Yes, we met our goal because of you. Thank you!”
BRYAN: How do we say thank you? It's a beautiful thing to think about. How do you say “thank you” to infrastructural systems?
DEB: There is a truism that infrastructure is most visible when it fails. I'm always a bit torn by that because I do think infrastructure should be something we don't think about. It's always about finding the right balance between, “Yeah, you really should just take these systems for granted,” and “Because that's what enables you to go do other things, you should have ways of appreciating and valuing infrastructural systems.” We should have ways of working collectively to be engaged in the system, rather than the model of, “we are individuals served by a collective system.”
So what is the right balance between These are collective systems and We have ways of engaging with them collectively so that you are not responsible for providing these things yourself? That's precisely why the systems exist, right? It makes more sense for a smaller number of people to have this as their full-time focus and all of us to benefit from the systems existing, which then enables us to do other things.
BRYAN: The energy transition you described last night is exciting because it calls a lot of people into small actions. If you have a city of microgrids, suddenly you have a city of seams between those microgrids, and on top of that you have new decisions about who is sharing power, when, and under what conditions. Eventually that means that you have a whole set of interfaces— people are going to interface with software, and the way they do that will have a big impact on the city.
DEB: I definitely care about embodiment and materiality, and the thing that is most interesting (and important) is where these digital devices and digital interfaces interact with the real, physical world. When we talk about infrastructure, we understand that we are physical beings that have physical needs. The stakes are a lot higher and the possibilities are much richer than a purely digital environment… I'm not big on the “smart city” rhetoric, but I like the idea of the instrumented city, the learning city, the city where you have insight and do so collectively. My models really come from concepts of mutual aid, rather than models of surveillance and control.. We can do things together, but in order to do them we need to have ways of talking to each other. The same goes with cities – in order to do things with cities, we need ways of talking to our cities.
BRYAN: That’s beautiful. To wrap up: what’s your favorite city and why?
DEB: I never have just one answer, because I love a lot of cities! But today I'm going to say Los Angeles. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which might be the anti-Los Angeles, but I spend a lot of time in LA because I have friends and family there. One of the things I love about Los Angeles is that it wears its infrastructure on the outside. In Cambridge, almost everything is hidden and underground, but in LA you really see the systems. I’ve spent a lot of time in cities that were designed when the amount of energy available to us was very low, and then I go to a place like LA which was laid out when the amount of energy available was very high. So I love it in part because of that contrast – because I can see the very different kinds of challenges and opportunities that different places have.
🖼️ Postcard from Los Angeles
Does your Friday evening need a soundtrack? Try the video below, invoked by Deb as a tour of Los Angeles infrastructure.
These weeks: Winter semester town hall. Lunchtime talk with Ron Bronson. First admitted students campus day. Polishing presentations for final reviews next week. More intensive planning. We are in the home stretch for winter semester. Hello, tulips. 🏃
Love this. I will definitely get Deb’s book.