Invisible (Working) Infrastructure: Book Excerpt
Most of us have the luxury of ignoring the infrastructure that serves us. That’s because it’s working. Infrastructure that’s working is made more invisible to the general public by our tendency to view the entire built environment as naturally occurring and therefore neutral. We don’t see it as changeable or changing, so we assume it’s always been what it is, arising at some primordial time and remaining inert throughout human history. It’s just the background, so how could it favor anyone or any place over anyone else?
This is, of course, nonsense. Anyone who’s worked in any job related to design, planning, or construction can tell you that an enormous amount of effort goes into shaping the built environment. Anyone responsible for the facilities or physical plant of an organization can tell you that an enormous amount of effort goes into merely keeping their portion of the built environment the same — that holding off decay and deterioration is a full-time job for lots of people. Any property owner can tell you that about their little piece of the physical world, too.
Historical “then and now” photos of streets or points of interest are entertaining precisely because they show how the built environment we know has changed, often dramatically, more quickly than we imagine. Perhaps the appeal of these photo pairs is that they contradict an unconscious yet near-universal fallacy: that nothing ever changes with the built environment, and things have always been just as they are today.
The comforting belief that “nothing ever changes” leads us to the even-more-comforting assumption that no maintenance is needed and that if we ignore maintenance, nothing will actually fall apart. The bill won’t come due. The piper will never need paying. This is an appealing assumption — who doesn’t want that free lunch? — which makes it all the harder to resist. And it’s false, in infrastructure as in so many things. You know what they say about a free lunch.
Excerpted from “Chapter 2: Invisible Infrastructure,” in Design by Deficit: Neglect and the Accidental City, on sale now in paperback and ebook. More information: https://deftspacelab.com/design-by-deficit/
