Every day, we are granted the power to travel at high speeds, fly, see in the dark, summon water from distant mountains and electricity from the sun. The systems that run our world are invisible to us until they fail.

Infrastructure enables lives of astounding ease and freedom that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. These technological systems – the most complex and vast ever created by humans – have allowed us to work collectively for the public good. But these systems are now beginning to fail us.

Engineering professor Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, and just how much they shape our lives – but also the price they extract, who pays it and in what ways, as well as the threats to our infrastructure in a changing world.

From Snowdonia’s Electric Mountain to a solar plant in southern India, Chachra shows how we can rebuild our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. We need to learn how to see these systems and to transform them, together, because the cost of not being able to rely on them is unthinkably high.