Derrible releases infrastructure book
Professor Sybil Derrible has published hundreds of scientific articles and taught hundreds of students in civil, materials, and environmental engineering at UIC. He also wrote the textbook “Urban Engineering for Sustainability” for students and professional engineers. Now, the prolific professor is back with a popular science book called “The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives.” The book examines the infrastructure that makes up our world and explains in simple terms how it works.
“Our lifestyles would be impossible without infrastructure. Yet, most of us do not know how infrastructure works,” said Derrible, director of UIC’s Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) laboratory. “By talking with people over the past decade, I saw that the public was hungry for a book about infrastructure, a book that explains in simple terms the engineering principles that govern what infrastructure can and cannot do.”
He explained that infrastructure will have to change in this century, and to ensure it changes in a way that contributes to society, society should have a say in it. This starts by learning about infrastructure.
While most popular science books focus only on one infrastructure system, Derrible covers seven infrastructure systems: water, wastewater, transportation, electricity, gas, solid waste, and telecommunications.
“The books that cover multiple systems tend to focus on urban planning rather than engineering. I couldn’t find a single, short, easy-to-read book covering all major public infrastructure systems because very few people in the world know about all these systems. That’s why I wrote the book. I felt that if I did not do it, nobody would, and there really ought to be a popular science book on infrastructure,” he said.
While many books are geared only toward professionals, Derrible’s target audience is nearly everyone in the world, from curious teenagers and college students to engineers and retirees.
“Anyone with some curiosity about the built environment around them will learn something from the book. The book is short on purpose, only 260 pages, but it is full of content. It is one of those books that you read once and get back to every once in a while to read individual chapters and remind yourself of something, like how water is treated, why cities flood, what causes traffic congestion, how electricity is generated, what happens to waste after the garbage truck picks it up, or how the internet works,” he said
The book has sixteen chapters, each focusing on a different city in the world. It explains water collection in Rome, integrated transport in Shanghai, electricity transmission in Chicago, and solid waste management in Tokyo. The last chapter recalls everything covered in the book in the context of Singapore.
“The engineering principles that govern infrastructure are universal, but I put them in the context of individual cities to make the content more fun,” Derrible said. “Plus, cities must also adapt in their own unique way based on their surrounding environment. For example, Hong Kong has a secondary water distribution system, one that distributes seawater for toilet flushing since freshwater is scarce in the region. The same engineering principles apply, but the city had to be clever so it does not receive much rain.”
The book can be found everywhere books are sold, and it is available in print, digital, and audio formats.