Lifelines of Our Society A Global History of Infrastructure

A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives.

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today’s strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalize infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.

Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism’s individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfillment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today’s infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure’s potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

Dirk van Laak is Professor of History from the 19th to the 21st Century at Leipzig University.

Foreword vii
Paul N. Edwards
Preface to the English-Language Edition xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: As Long As It Keeps Working...1

I The Classical Era of Infrastructure
1 Public Works: The Nineteenth Century 21
2 Lifelines of Community: The Early Twentieth Century 47
3 The Measure of Modernity: The Late Twentieth Century 79

II Nodes of Infrastructural Debate
4 Public, Private, or Partnership? How Infrastructure is Organized 113
5 Prestige Projects: Symbolic Value and Failure 129
6 Crumbling Bridges: The Life Cycles of Infrastructures 143
7 Achilles' Heels: The Vulnerability of Large-Scale Networks 157
8 The Cold Persona: Users and Operators of Infrastructures 173
Conclusion: Down the Drain? 189

Notes 207
Bibliography 259
Index 311