The laundry room in the building where I live just got a new washing machine. It is both perfectly ordinary and utterly extraordinary in the way that it is a nexus of infrastructural networks. For the washer to function properly, it needs be connected to five distinct utilities: Pipes deliver clean water to the machine and drain the dirty, sudsy water to the sewage system; the hot water comes from a heater than burns methane; a data connection to the telecommunications network enables electronic payments; and, of course, the whole system is powered by grid electricity.
While paying with a debit card might be convenient, what’s transformative is the motor, which converts electrical energy into mechanical energy—the movement of the agitator and the drum—replacing the wet drudgery of hand-laundering clothing with just a few moments spent pushing buttons and transferring the wrung-out clothes to the adjacent dryer.
One definition of infrastructure is that it’s all the underlying systems whose presence we take for granted when we start on something new. For the washing machine, it’s the power outlets and pipes in the laundry room. For a building, it might be the local electricity grid, a utility gas network, water and sewage mains, the telephone and cable links that allow the inhabitants to communicate with the larger world, and local transportation systems that connect to national and international ones.
We tend to focus on the nodes and the interfaces, on the points where we connect to the networks and how—and not on the networks themselves. But whether it’s a new washing machine, or an induction stove, or how we heat a building, or whether our next car is an EV or a conventional car (or whether we buy a car at all), the decisions we make about those connections and their potential uses are shaped and constrained by the infrastructural networks that are already in place.
Networks are intrinsically collective. Municipal water and sewage pipes are like an artificial watershed of streams and rivulets overlaid on a city, bringing clean water to buildings and allowing waste to flow away. Every time you flip on a light switch, you are closing an electrical circuit that extends out tens, hundreds, or even thousands of miles from the tip of your fingers to the plant where the power is produced.
Much of the value of transportation and telecommunications networks lies in the nature and number of connections between nodes: The more people who are connected together, the more valuable the networks become for each user. It’s a myth that we make individual decisions about how we equip our buildings and homes; any decision we make is embedded in the social and technological standards of these shared systems, in other decisions that have already been made.
These infrastructural utilities are the product of decades or even a century or more of investment and entrenchment. In the northeast United States, where I live, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, municipal distribution grids delivered locally produced “town gas” for lighting, heating, and cooking (think gaslight, those old-fashioned streetlights with candle-like flames). With the outbreak of World War II, a consortium of oil companies, funded by the war office of the federal government, crash-built pipelines to bring petroleum products from the oil fields of Texas to the industrial regions of New York and Pennsylvania, there to be refined into fuel and transshipped to the European theater to power the machineries of war.
After peace was declared, the pipelines were mothballed. But a bright spark in the office of the president of Standard Oil of Ohio had realized that they could be modified to deliver the methane that was released as an unwanted byproduct of oil production in Texas, where it was routinely flared off at the wellhead, to the energy-hungry northeast, generating profits by arbitraging the price difference at each end of the pipeline. The long-distance transmission pipelines were retrofitted and connected into the local gas grids. As the use of natural gas expanded, home heating and cooking became easier and cheaper (and safer—the suicide rate for women fell sharply when carbon monoxide-rich coal gas was no longer used in kitchen stoves).
Methane burns much hotter than coal gas, so, as part of the conversion, technicians were sent out to buildings, going block by block and door to door, throttling down every single burner in preparation for the switchover. Similar histories of intense public and private investment lie behind all the other major technological systems that support people and their development, such as water and transportation.
But these systems, built to provide for basic human needs, necessarily make it challenging to address those needs in other ways. The reality is that any seemingly individual decision about ways of connecting to these networks is constrained by collective systems that facilitate certain ways of acting in the world, often to the degree that to act otherwise seems impossibly hard.
And this isn’t only an issue of academic interest, a free-market argument for more individual choice. It’s a problem for everyone, because the majority of our individual energy use is mediated through these collective systems, not just utility gas but, especially, electricity generation and transportation. The energy that powers these systems still, overwhelmingly, comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, with its attendant greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why decarbonizing these collective systems is a key step in addressing climate change, and another facet of how these collective systems impact us all.
There’s a myth of individual action, that it’s the responsibility of right-thinking humans to decarbonize the built environment themselves: by replacing a furnace with a heat pump or a gas stove with induction, installing solar panels on the roof or a battery in the basement, swapping out a conventional car for an electric equivalent, and the like. And there’s a concurrent myth of individual inaction: The largest systems, if they’re considered at all, seem intractable, and so they’re somebody else’s problem to solve.
Eliel Saarinen famously wrote, “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” Focusing on individual-level action for infrastructural systems is a lot like considering a chair in isolation, or maybe like considering it in the context of a city plan: You might just end up with a bunch of chairs in an empty lot, purchased and placed there by the people who can afford to buy chairs.
What does the “next larger context” look like for infrastructural nodes? One answer is local- and neighborhood-scale infrastructural networks. This might include microgrids, which are designed to generate, store, and distribute electricity locally, and that remain functional even if the larger electrical grid is disrupted by, for example, severe weather. A microgrid might include neighborhood geothermal systems, like the pilot projects being built outside Boston in a collaboration between the local gas utility and community nonprofit HEET.
It might include neighborhood-scale septic systems, which are managed professionally rather than at the household level, providing an alternative to and transition between household septic and conventional waste treatment plants for communities as they grow. Or it might entail municipal commitments to renewable energy generation: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city mediates between individual utility customers and the monopoly electricity provider, offering individual households the option to use renewable-only power regardless of whether they can install solar panels on the roof, with the electrical utility meeting the aggregated demand.
Abolition activist Mariame Kaba describes how we create social change by acting at the individual, community, institutional, and societal levels. Our infrastructural systems aren’t merely technological; like the built environments in which they are embedded, they are just as much about the people who use them. Considering the “next larger context” for the infrastructural nodes in our built environments means going beyond Saarinen’s dictum for designers by learning how to incorporate Kaba’s social contexts.