WAlthough you need this book sometime. When someone talks about water treatment and mentions the flocculation. Or when you have a conversation about 5G telecommunications technology and the other person assumes that we know it works at frequencies of more than 1 GHz (Gigherz), and we nod, but we had no idea. Sybile Dericable, the engineering professor and author of The infrastructure book: how cities and the power of our lives work (Prometheus Books; 253 pages), he knows more about the vast and physics of modern urban life that no one ever known, and shares it along with a river of technical details that would only suspect a specialist in one or the other disciplines of engineering. It covers everything.
As a candidate for the largest infrastructure in the world, he is a derier, he is able to let de factoides that would otherwise require a quick look at Chatgpt to, say, mention, a mention that municipal solid waste, which varies, generally have a weight of around 160 kilograms per cubic meter and moisture content of around 20 percent.
Professor of Urban Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago, Dericable organizes his book in chapters for seven types of infrastructure: water, wastewater, transport, electricity, gas, solid waste and telecommunications. The big cities of the world become the configuration and the starting points for their descriptions of each type of infrastructure. In the Chapter on Water, for example, Dericable discusses Rome, Tel Aviv and Bern, Switzerland, and carries the reader through the stages of water treatment. It is much better than a Wikipedia on foot; It is a capable and comfortable tourist guide for what is a cunning of infrastructure trips. Sixteen cities are on the itinerary and, as he writes, his book is “a journey that will probably transform the understanding of the infrastructure and give you a new esteem for it.”
To be honest, I am not an easy traveler, preferring to limit my holidays to no more than two places to prevent it from packing and unpacking my suitcase. I have another topic with the author, as it seems a bit too aware of himself, in a kind way, of the fact that he writes and is reading, referring from time to time the process of writing books or mentioning it with a phrase as “to whom we briefly met in the last chapter.”
As a rich reference work, these minor shortcomings lose their importance. What impressed me was the dominion of the draft of so many information on so many different types of infrastructure and the details of how these systems are successful or not in the cities of the world. It is worthwhile to discuss digital telecommunications, including a map of the world’s fiber optics underwater cable network, such as its assessment of Singapore’s infrastructure, one of the most sophisticated urban complexes in Asia.
For all the details contained in the basic text of each chapter, there is another dimension in the infrastructure book that goes beyond its casual scholarship on the Chicago electricity network or the management of rainwater in Copenhagen: footnotes. They are cautiously collected at the bottom of the chapter’s pages instead of making their own section on the back of the book. These notes, in addition to providing a rich context, form a delicious and parallel universe to the main text, a little more succinctly than, for example, the multiple hundreds of Edward Gibbon notes pages in their famous two -volume story, The decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1787). DIERIBLE MAKES Economic use of its distribution of space, using notes as a kind of infrastructural support of the main text, sometimes with a fun part, sometimes a little algebra and sometimes a sticker detail.
Some of my favorites appear on the bottom of pages 24 and 25, where we are reminded that the Galilean Sea is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth. And this to facilitate the process of flocculation, in which small particles rise to form -s large, called flakes, Sometimes “polymer aid” is also added. There are other footnotes that reveal the personality and preferences of the author to express weights and measures: “I do not even like to use the metric ton unit to weigh anyone; we should only say -megagram.” Or one that reminds us that the term “Silicon Valley” was created by journalist Don Hoofler, who first used it in an article published in Electronic News on January 11, 1971 “.
I didn’t know, I didn’t know I wanted to know it, but now that I do, as in this book, I’m glad to do it. I will keep my copy by hand in my desk, to look for everything about the infrastructure I did not know, but that was too embarrassed or lazy, to find out so far.
