Deb Chachra delivered what may have been the most insightful view of infrastructure ever at Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure 2024. Her talk, more or less a summary of her “How Infrastructure Works” book, is a big-picture revelation of how infrastructure is more than steel and concrete; it is an organism [my words] that gets bigger exponentially, feeds on energy, and by its stillness and ubiquity, hides in plain sight.

Chachra is not without hope, however. Just as we have made infrastructure, we can also change it. But after her talk, I mostly see a dark picture of a world in which infrastructure is built at the cost of the environment and paid for with energy.

Chachra, a Canadian-educated engineer (she shows her iron ring as proof) who now teaches at Olin College, is thanked for her presentation by Bentley Systems, the leading infrastructure software company, one that certainly stands to benefit from its customer’s success in building infrastructure.

“You’ve given us a lot to think about,” says the Bentley host, who either did not see the same dark picture or was using code for “We’re never inviting you back.”

At a Q&A with Bentley executives, I couldn’t help but ask if they, too, saw the same dark picture. After all, it was their software being used to design and build the infrastructure that Chachra had vilified.

It was a foolish question – and one easily deflected. One day, I hope to understand how journalism works.

“We’re not creating the infrastructure; our customers are,” was the reply.

He had a point.

An Enabling Technology

Bentley Systems is not creating the infrastructure, but they are certainly enabling it. The mega projects being feted at Year in Infrastructure, the dams, bridges, roads, railroads, water treatment, and electric power stations… are built with steel and concrete on land that once had plants and animals. Their extraction, sheer volume, manufacture, and transportation use vast amounts of energy. They lay bare the Earth’s surface (strip mining), replace nature with the built environment, etc. Who should bear responsibility?

Not us, say the media in attendance.  We just report on it.

Not us, say the software companies. It’s our customers.

To their credit, software companies are doing all they can to mitigate the ravaging effects their customers have had on the environment. Design, engineering and construction software vendors all promote LCA, circularity, and sustainability. They make an example of themselves, working in LEEDS Platinum buildings as sustainably as possible, all in the hopes that their customers will take notice and take it easy on the Earth. To which, building and constructions might say, “Thanks for the software. We’ ‘ll take it from here,” and go about their business with little respect for those who work in offices making code with keyboards while they have to make megaprojects from steel and concrete.