by Grete Gansauer
You never notice everyday objects like faucets, drains, spigots, and fire hydrants until you read academic articles about them until your eyes water. And then, like a physical sarcastic joke, you start seeing these things almost as often as you’ve read the words on the page. Infrastructure surrounds us, all the time, and goes humbly unnoticed until it is broken, leaking, or out-of service. It is, after all, infrastructure - unseen elements meant to facilitate modern economic life without friction. Although the presence of built infrastructure seems unremarkable, the processes by which it enters our world are markedly the opposite.
Built infrastructure is surprisingly interesting. Once you see the invisible prowess of streets, telephone lines, and underground water pipes you’ll never be able to ‘unsee’ the unsung impact they have on our day-to-day reality. Suddenly, a flush toilet becomes an opportunity to consider ‘modern life’. Water flowing from a tap urges you to consider how much effort it really takes for H 2O to appear to flow effortlessly into billions of homes around the globe. And a road raises questions about political boundaries: who owns this road, anyway? Infrastructures are great feats of human ingenuity, but these technologies often create political and social outcomes beyond their intended use, which fascinates academics.
Lest you think infrastructure researchers are all engineers, we span a variety of social science disciplines including science and technology studies, geography, anthropology, urban (and rural!) planning, and political science. We are united because we have discovered a great secret, a clandestinely juicy topic cloaked in the guise of normalcy. In particular, infrastructure geographers are concerned with the ways that these large-scale technologies take shape over space and time. Where do they start and where do they end? Who built the thing? Why? And a recurring theme, how the heck are they going to pay for the maintenance?
Answers to these questions are often quite nuanced. For example, this summer I am researching transbasin rural water systems in the Western US. Geographies of these regional water transport pipelines are larger than one might expect, sometimes covering hundreds of miles of mountainous terrain (an attribute which becomes quite expensive when heavy water must be piped uphill). Those of us living in the arid West might not feel that regional water pipelines are particularly out-of-place, however, my research thus far indicates that the scale and number of these projects in the Western US is nearly unmatched elsewhere on the globe. (Aside from, predictably, China, where a 2,700-mile long water pipeline is under construction.)
Regional water systems are envisioned by their proponents as a solution to both water quantity and water quality challenges, and as an opportunity for small rural communities to pool their investments into one big water system. Some tout such pipelines as critical to local economic development. However, large water systems are extremely costly, and they pose governance difficulties as they traverse and connect several jurisdictions. My research explores these emerging geographies of rural water resources, and critically examines regional infrastructure solutions to water management. Thankfully, I find it deeply interesting. I never would have guessed I would be so intrigued by big, ugly, underground pipelines, but now I see there is more to infrastructure than meets the eye.
