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From the vantage point of the present, many of the infrastructures that support and govern modern lives, societies, and work practices will appear dull, flat, and still. The more settled the infrastructure, the truer this feels: we think about roads until we can drive easily on them, and then promptly forget (until prompted by accidents, construction, and traffic jams to think again). We drink from the municipal water supply until we can’t, then think once again about water. Once here, effective infrastructures appear as timeless, un–thought, even natural features of contemporary life. This sort of naturalization and forgetting is central to the effectiveness and deep value of infrastructure, and is indeed one of its highest aspirations. But it also makes it challenging to recall what is at stake with infrastructure (which turns out to be quite a lot), or to chart the processes by which infrastructures grow and change. This is an academic problem for professional historians and social scientists; for would–be builders of infrastructure, it is arguably something more.

In this section, we review a growing body of evidence pointing to patterns or dynamics common to the development of many infrastructures over many times and places. From this we distill three general arguments. First, effective infrastructures are above all accomplishments of scale, growing as locally constructed, centrally controlled systems are linked or assembled into networks and internetworks governed by distributed control and coordination processes. Second, the extension of infrastructure typically follows a complex path of transfer or translation from one location or domain to another. To achieve this, multiple …