Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures by Dirk van Laak (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures by Dirk van Laak
• Maria Paula Diogo (bio)

Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures By Dirk van Laak and translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 314.

The richness of Dirk van Laak's book (originally published as Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft—Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur, 2018) can be easily grasped from the preface written by the author for the English version. The time that has passed between the German and English versions is five years. Under normal conditions, that would not be long; but the turbulence of this period and the events that took place during it deeply changed our relationship with society, nature, science, and technology.

In this context, the concept of infrastructure acquired new layers and emphasized its structuring role in the design of contemporary society. Infrastructures shape territories both as geographical and political categories, defining both their internal dynamics and hierarchies in terms of management and use of resources and the relationships among national powers. Cables, railways, roads, airports, energy, water, sanitation, and the internet—in a nutshell, infrastructures—are at the core of our networked world and the sheer possibility of them failing makes us deeply worried and exposed to an uncomfortable fragility.

If these are the guiding lines of van Laak's analysis of the role of infrastructures and their entanglement with the various dimensions of society at large, the author's approach concerning actors takes us to the anonymous history of practitioners, far from a history of the so-called great figures. This book focuses mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a foray into the twenty-first century; with regards to the geographic scope, the author uses multiple scales—urban, national, and global—to access the transnational dimension of the main infrastructures and the way they act as tools of centralization and decentralization.

Lifelines of Our Society begins with an introduction in which the author explains and discusses the assumptions of his research—largely summarized in the paragraphs above—including a very interesting disciplinary overview of the meaning of the concept of infrastructure. Once the conceptual and methodological structure underlying the work has been established, the author dedicates the two following chapters to the analysis of the leading [End Page 699] infrastructures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: public works related to collective transport of people and goods (canals and railways) and electricity and individual mobility, respectively. This analysis is built as an interactive puzzle—which includes a set of "alternative routes" that look at infrastructures as cultural and political actors—rather than the traditional description of infrastructures per se.

Chapter 3, which closes part 1, "The Classical Era of Infrastructure," deals with the tensions of modernity concerning the balance between the individual and the collective, between tradition and novelty on both the local (urban) and the national scale, as well as on a global scale that brings to the discussion non-European actors, particularly in the context of colonial and postcolonial settings.

Part 2, "Nodes of Infrastructural Debate," has five chapters and shifts the readers' gaze from the (critical) role of infrastructures as systems of multiple flows in contemporary societies to what I would call the anatomy of infrastructures: How are they organized (ch. 4)? What symbolic value do they embody (ch. 5)? What is their life cycle (ch. 6)? How vulnerable are they (ch. 7)? How do they relate with consumers, with people (ch. 8)? Often linked by the concept of technocracy, van Laak presents a variety of detailed accounts that lead the readers to reflect on their own vision and perception of what is an infrastructure and what is expected from it, and how "naturalized" they are.

In the last chapter, the author introduces in a subtle and challenging way the debate about our capacity to act, as a collective, on our own technological constructions and devices. Information, big data, and ecological and climatic issues are addressed as part of a new paradigm that attempts to find a balance between defiance and order, between engaged activism and alternative mindfulness. In any case, infrastructures will continue to be...