All tagged Infrastructure
Essayist and author Antonia Malchik joins me in this wandering, expansive discussion, touching on subjects at the heart of her writings and 2019 book, A Walking Life, and her upcoming book, No Trespassing. We discuss how the infrastructure of an automobile dependent society shapes our perception of nature and built environments, and in turn how we relate and move through it. I asked her about her more expansive view of walking and walkability, and how getting lost is good for our brains and souls. And near the later half of our time together, Antonia talks about her decision to ditch smartphones and social media, and how the creeping demands of our digital lives relate to her broader focus on enclosure, property, and reclaiming the commons.
Michael Truscello joins me to discuss his book Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure, in which he “looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this “infrastructural brutalism”—a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.”
Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute discusses the increasingly precarious situation we find ourselves in as fossil fuel energy production meets numerous intersecting crises, including, but not limited to: an aging and outdated energy grid, abrupt climate disruption-related weather events, rapidly depleting cheap fossil fuel reserves, and the fracturing of consensus reality.
