Book excerpt: Is infrastructure but the plumbing and wiring of the human environment, or is it the true lifeblood of the spaces we inhabit? Infrastructural systems facilitate the flow of anything from people and goods to resources and information. While engineered to perform specific tasks, such networks also determine the structure of buildings, cities, and metropolitan regions, if not of entire nations and the planet itself.0Taking this critical leverage in consideration, this book calls for expanding and renegotiating the roles of infrastructure not only as a technical, but also as a political, economic, social, and even aesthetic matter of concern for all, claimed not only as the means for achieving more resilient forms of development, but moreover as a right to a sustainable way of life.0Twenty-five essays?by architects, engineers, urban theorists and policy-makers?address infrastructure as ?thing?, ?networked system? and ?agency? respectively in three chapters, which are periodically interspersed by a visual atlas of examples, that playfully celebrate infrastructure through the lens of its spatial qualities.