From bridges to broadband, Professor Chris Henke looks at infrastructure and how it affects social structures.

It’s not every day that the president of the United States gets the country talking about your favorite topic. So Chris Henke, associate professor of sociology and environmental studies, was excited when the Biden administration introduced its sweeping plan to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure.

The American Jobs Plan outlines an investment of about $2 trillion. “I’m happy that they’re going big, and that they’re taking it really seriously,” Henke says. He and his coauthor, Benjamin Sims, a sociologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, also take the subject seriously. They recently published a book called Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power (MIT Press, 2020).

To the authors, repairing infrastructure doesn’t just mean filling in potholes. Henke and Sims discuss processes big and small, involving both physical structures — the roads, pipes, and buildings that most people associate with infrastructure — and the social structures intertwined with them. The book explores examples of tangible and intangible infrastructure including Louis XIV’s Versailles, New Orleans’ levees, public transit, the Panama Canal, Colgate’s Trudy Fitness Center, and even the internet. 

The Biden plan also takes a broad view of infrastructure. In addition to structures like highways, bridges, and airports, it includes money for the electrical grid, high-speed broadband, replacing lead pipes, and building day care centers. That has drawn some criticism, but Henke thinks it makes sense. Investing in electric vehicles and their charging ports, for example, will be critical for building a country that’s better prepared for climate change. “In a way, that’s infrastructure. But it’s not the roads, it’s not the bridges,” he says.

No matter what you’re trying to fix, Henke and Sims’ case studies show that repairing something can raise questions of power, perception, and privilege.

One of those stories is about the San Diego–Coronado Bridge. It stretches more than 2 miles across the bay to connect San Diego with the wealthy city of Coronado. When the bridge was constructed in the 1960s, it ran right through a Mexican-American neighborhood on the San Diego side called Barrio Logan. Over the years, artists from San Diego and beyond painted dozens of striking murals on the bridge’s support columns. The site, called Chicano Park, would eventually become a National Historic Landmark.

That’s not the end of the story, though. In 1995, state engineers decided the San Diego–Coronado Bridge’s columns needed retrofitting with steel jackets to protect against earthquakes. But that would mean covering up the murals. Engineers “thought they were trying to solve a technical problem,” Henke says, “but were enmeshed in this set of politics and controversies about how to best fix this bridge at the same time that you would preserve an important landmark and source of cultural pride.” Eventually, the engineers found a solution that would make the bridge safer while mostly sparing the murals.

“How do we really know when something is broken? Who gets to decide if something needs to be fixed?” Henke and Sims write. Systems of infrastructure can determine who has power and who doesn’t — and the way infrastructure is repaired can reflect, or even change, where that power lies.

“If there’s one takeaway at the end of our book, it’s that we want people to be reflective about repair,” Henke says. “So that when you’re investing this money, it’s not just going to reproduce some of the problems of the past.” 

He’s glad to see that the Biden plan explicitly lays out the same goal. “Too often, past transportation investments divided communities,” states a fact sheet about the infrastructure plan, which aims to remedy historic inequities (citing I-81 in Syracuse as one example).

“It’s not just that they want to rebuild bridges and roads,” Henke says, “but they want to do it in a way that helps support communities that have been disproportionately and negatively impacted by how those structures were built and maintained in the past.”