#12 – Sybil Derrible

March 31st, 2025

Music

Angus (00:06.456)
This is Everything is Somewhere, I’m Angus Stocking. Sybil Derrible is Professor of Urban Engineering and Director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation Career Award and a Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers and many other honors in the field of infrastructure and infrastructure scholarship. Author of several books and hundreds of articles on infrastructure, Sybil is speaking with us shortly before his latest publication, The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives, becomes available on March 4th, 2025. Sybil, welcome to Everything is Somewhere.

Thank you for having me. I’m glad you’d be here.

And a first question for you that occurs to me, we’ll talk about the book of course, I’m looking forward to that, but let’s back way up. How does a bright young kid become such an accomplished infrastructure nerd?

Sybil Derrible: That’s a great question. For that we have to talk about where I’m from because I think it’s a fundamental part of who I am and where I am today. I’m French but I’m not from mainland France. I was born and raised in France but France has a lot of violence everywhere in the world. many people will know some islands in the Caribbean, it’s very nice and warm. There’s some in the Indian Ocean, course there’s Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean.

Sybil Derrible (01:45.014)
I’m from a tiny island called St. Pierre in Miquelon that’s just off the coast of Newfoundland in Nova Scotia, close to Canada in Northern Atlantic. So it’s very small. It’s very, it’s pretty cold. It’s 6,000 people stranded in island, eating French food, eating baguette, the French school system. And growing up there and being isolated in an island, quite literally, you really get an appreciation for where you get, where’s your water coming from, how your trash is being handled, where your electricity, how it’s generated, how you get access to the internet and that’s all around you. And so just by seeing all how that works really made me appreciate more infrastructure for what it is and especially how it’s integrated.

One of the things that we might talk about is that really we’re pushing people to specialize in different silos. you have transportation engineers, they only look at transportation. Water resources engineers only look at water systems. I tried to look at everything because that’s the way I was raised in that small island.

Angus, well, it sounds very romantic as a place to grow up. It is. And then you went into academia. How did that start? Did you become an engineer or? Yeah. Explain that.

Sybil Derrible: Yeah, yeah. So I finished high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Engineering. I was pretty good in math and physics. Engineering sounded like a good career choice, at least to start, you get a bachelor’s degree, see where that would lead me. I went to France for a year and when I was there, I learned about England and I really was drawn to it because England was at the time part of Europe, which meant I was a home student.

Sybil Derrible (03:25.858)
And it was in English speaking. was always attracted to the English language. And so I applied and I went to Imperial College in London. And so I did my degree there. One summer, I didn’t want to go home right after the semester. So I decided to some research with a professor on polymer engineering. So plastics, nothing related to infrastructure. And I loved research. I mean, I grew up, my parents don’t have, you know, they barely have high school degrees, don’t even think they have high school degrees. No, the idea of doing a PhD or becoming a professor was just not you know, something I ever considered, even thought it was possible. But just doing the research as an undergraduate student, I loved it. I loved everything about it. And that really pushed me then to pursue a PhD. I switched from where I was in mechanical engineering to civil engineering to study transportation and infrastructure. And that led to where I am now. But it’s really just, you know, very just lucky, I want to say, know, stumbles stumbling upon, you know, just opportunities one after the other.

Angus: Good for you. So a couple of books are out already and we’re about to see the publication of the infrastructure book. Tell us how you came to write this book, who you’re hoping to reach, and how it’s structured. What led to this book?

Sybil: Yeah, so I when I started, so I’m in Chicago, University of Illinois Chicago. I started teaching class in 2013, I think on cities, on infrastructure in cities. So really geared towards students and civil engineering students. And I wrote a I wrote notes for my class and that turned into my textbook called Urban Engineering for Sustainability that was published in 2019. And when I finished the book, I really saw the potential, I really saw that a book that was more popular science for the public, I saw that that was missing. There were a lot of books on urban planning of cities. There were a lot of books on individual systems within cities, especially in transportation, some in water, some in electricity. But there was really missing a book with no equations, very simple, just first approach to infrastructure. But that came from someone who knew about the systems. And so I started to write it.

Sybil Derrible (05:33.942)
And I really also really enjoyed the writing process. tried to make it bit more fun. So the book, the way it’s structured is we go, we travel around 16 cities in the world to learn about five systems or seven systems. There’s water, wastewater, transport, energy, telecommunications, and then full infrastructure. And so every chapter, 16 chapters in water that’s divided in five chapters, we travel to a different city. And I’ve traveled to most of the cities. when I explain the general principles of how things work.

I also give some adding notes of what I did when I was there. So for example, the first chapter is called water collection. All aqueducts lead to Rome. The goal of that chapter is to explain how we get water from the environment, from rivers, from lakes, from mountains, from the ground, how we collect it and bring it to a water treatment plant. And for that we go to Rome and I explain what I did when I was in Rome and how the Romans really, really in large defined how we collect water. And it’s just no fun to write. And I try to explain again, the simple concepts, the simple engineering principles of how this works.

That’s what a collection then there’s another chapter on water treatment. There’s another one on water distribution. And so I go linearly around pretty much all infrastructure systems that we have in cities. So from water to transport to the internet, to natural gas or electricity. Yeah, that’s the look.

So it’s pitched at the general public, we might say, but also in my reading so far, you say no equations, but there are some, and you do dive deep. It’s a science book in part. So the audience of everything is somewhere would be land surveyors, civil engineers, GIS experts, people who work with infrastructure, build infrastructure.

Angus: For my reading, I’m of this audience too. And I was interested in detail about how things work. And there’s of course fields that I don’t know anything about. I know quite a bit about sewage, for example, and I learned a few things there. And I know very little about desalinization and was fascinated to read that. How did you go about deciding how deep to go in which areas?

Angus Stocking (08:01.478)
Did you ever worry about losing part of the audience by going too far?

Sybil: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why, I mean, there are no equations. There are equations in the footnotes. So I tried to, I did try to layer the writing, the chapters so that everyone could get, you know, could gain something. So if you know nothing about infrastructure, you can still read the book, get something, really appreciate infrastructure. If you know something about some, would, know, some would resonate with you. And if you really want to get into the equations, then you go to the footnotes. So that layered approach for me was important so that the people I had in mind were, want to make sure that a teenager can read the book and enjoy it.

I actually use the book at the moment in one of my classes. It’s a general education class for anyone at UIC. So it could be neuroscience, geology, engineering, business, know, whichever degree. They can take a class on, it’s called evolution of infrastructure and society. And they can, you know, they read the book and they actually enjoy it. So a teenager is a typical audience.

I also have people who are retired who just want to learn about cities and infrastructure. had them in mind to make sure that they would enjoy it. And also had people like the audience of this, of this podcast, know, engineers, land surveyors who probably know about one system really well, like you did for sewers. And so you might not enjoy the sewer chapters as much just because you know already a lot about it, but you don’t know about the other systems. And so learning how again, transport works, how natural gas systems works, and that would be very interesting. And so I had all those audiences in mind when I wrote the book.

Angus Stocking (09:38.21)
The chapter titles are pretty interesting and amusing, we might say. For example, Chapter 12, Natural Gas, a Dead Cow, an Oracle, and Rotten Egg Smell in Buenos Aires. And as you mentioned, you draw most of your stories from particular cities that you’ve been to. Could you maybe tell us a story. What was a very interesting city that you were in or a very interesting example that you’ve used that kind of stays with you? Say we’ve met at a bar and you’re telling me what you do for a living. What’s the story you pull out?

Sybil: That’s a great question. It’s funny because my favorite story, my favorite infrastructure, I don’t even have a chapter on it. I talk about it at the bottom because every single chapter happens in one city and at the end of the chapters there’s an end story that happens in a different city. So my favorite one is when we talk about traffic and roads stuck under 405 in Los Angeles. We actually then go and talk at the end about Boston and Seoul in Korea.

And Korea that has my favorite infrastructure in the whole world, it’s the Cheonggyecheon river. so what they had there was a double story. So 1950s Korean War ends, a huge economic boom in South Korea. They started to build a lot of infrastructure and in particular, they built a lot of roads and expressways because that’s what was happening in 1950s, 60s and 70s. There’s a small stream that’s there with a lot of low income people who live in really bad conditions.

So they decided to try to move the people and on that little stream, they built a double store expressway. It’s there like almost every expressway from the beginning. It’s congested, it’s polluted, it’s not really pleasant for the people nearby. And so they wanted to tear it down for the longest time. And the mayor ran on that idea in the 1990s in Seoul, won and then they destroyed the double store expressway. And what they did after was to restore the stream.

Sybil Derrible (11:40.652)
And so right now, if you go there, it’s a nice linear part with little stream. And the nice thing is that not only is it a nice park, but the stream is below the ground level. And so it’s used for flooding. whenever it rains, instead of flooding urban areas, they flood that stream. So it works really well. And I love that because it’s a transport problem, became a water solution. And inevitably, whenever I talk to about that story, people ask me, well, what about the traffic?

Surely it must have been traffic nightmare after. And the answer is no, it’s not because people adapted, they change maybe when they left home, they took different routes, maybe they changed modes. So just people adapted. And so it’s actually not a traffic nightmare at all. It’s just the way it was before. It’s absolutely fine. And it’s a wonderful story. So that’s my favorite one, but it’s not even the main chapter. In the main chapters, I don’t know, I love the story of water distribution in Hong Kong. One of the reasons why is water distribution.

Angus: I like that one too, so please go ahead.

Sybil: Yeah. So water distribution. So once after we treated the water, we have to distribute it to buildings. The way we do that is usually by adding pumps and the pumps put a lot of pressure in pipe systems to be able to bring water to single buildings. Hong Kong is extremely hilly, which means that if you have pumps, you really have to go all the way up the hills. that’s not not I mean, it’s one way of doing it in other ways to really try to leverage those hills that they have in Hong Kong.

So what they do is they treat the water, then all the water, they pump it up to a water reservoir that’s on a high hill, and then they purely use gravity to distribute water. That’s how they distribute fresh water. But the interesting, the very interesting part about Hong Kong is that they have two water distribution systems. One is the potable water that you can drink. Another one is seawater. So it’s clean seawater, but it’s still salty. And they use that purely for toilets.

Sybil Derrible (13:33.614)
So they have two systems.

Angus Stocking
You know, there’s a very small-scale example of that in my small town. I live in a little rural town of 1500 and there’s ditch water that comes through town. And then there’s the potable treated water from a spring and the ditch water is diverted or made available for gardening and watering lawns. And it’s a lovely little system. And if you’re a house that has access, you’ve got a great lawn all summer. It’s a nice system.

Sybil: I love that story. I love that story. know, at the end, engineering is always about leveraging what you have, you know, locally and what they’ve done in your town sounds amazing. That’s perfect.

Angus: Since I’ve got a infrastructure scholar on the line, maybe I could go a little away from the book for a moment just to ask you, one of the most amazing new aspects of infrastructure to me over the last 20 years, say, is the concept of location as instantly available on our phones. We can know where we are to the coordinates to the meter.

Angus Stocking (14:51.138)
This has become so common to know where we are and how to get to where we’re going with our apps and of course with navigation and it’s pervasive in life. What are your thoughts, Sybil, about this new utility that has become available?

Sybil: I mean, there’s, I mean, I love it. I mean, I use my phone all the time whenever I want to get somewhere. I always say before when I travel somewhere, I would have to prepare, buy plans, exactly how it go from the airport to the hotel. I really just get somewhere, open my phone, open Google map, and it tells me how I can get to my hotel. So no, I absolutely love it. I love that location. but I want to bring that, maybe we can bring that point a little bit at a higher level, which is my…

I want to say complicated relationship with technology, absolutely love technology, but I do find that in our world right now where we’re ready to adopt any technology at any point because we think technology is always a good thing. And I would like to remind people and myself that technology surely exists as a support for our lifestyles. right. And so that’s, I love technology and I adopted it in my life all the time, but I think sometimes we try to overuse it.

And that’s been specifically the case with current cities that have older systems and that maybe try to, or saying they can rejuvenate their system with technology. But in the end, if you have old pipes, you have old pipes. So you can probably make it a bit more efficient by putting a bunch of sensors. But in the end, you’re probably going have to change the way you do things. And so it’s not so much of a technology problem anymore. It’s more of a design problem. And so I like to think about those two things. And again, I like to use technology or I like to recommend technology when it really adds something as opposed to adding it just for the sake of it because we think something good is to come out of it no matter what.

Angus Stocking (16:45.41)
I think all of us are worried about technology now or have a complicated view. You know, in my field, I’m sure in yours, the whole concept of artificial intelligence and the way it’s being applied to infrastructure tasks like water management, it’s a really big change. And I don’t feel it’s super, everything seems good so far, but are there dangers associated with new technology adoption?

Sybil: yeah, absolutely. That’s not in the book, right? But yes, mean, one of the main ones is that now we become dependent on another system. So we’re just, you know, we’re becoming more vulnerable. So it seems amazing at the beginning, but when the technology doesn’t work and then everything goes dark, it becomes even worse. So the way that we implement those technologies, we should be very careful the way we do it and know that not only can it fail, but it will fail at some point and we don’t…
hurt people because of that.

Angus: Okay, back to the book. So you travel to cities. You’ve written quite a bit about civic infrastructure. Did you in your head go through a rating process? Were some cities better than others? What’s the best infrastructure in the world right now? I think a lot of people would say Singapore, but what’s your feeling?

Sybil: I don’t really rate cities. I really enjoy going in all of them. Please.

Angus Stocking (18:17.218)
Just indulge me, pick a favorite. Let’s hammer on a city or lot of cities.

Sybil: I’ll tell you one of my favorite by far and in the book, so water, transport, energy, telecommunication and then it’s all full circle and it’s all Singapore because I actually lived in Singapore and they do have very new infrastructure and it works really really well. I’ll tell you, Singapore is my favorite city in the whole world when it comes to infrastructure and I live there and I love that and it works really really well.

Angus: I visited several times for a Bentley Systems Conference, and so it was all about infrastructure. And we got tours and went through it. And it really works extremely well, no question at all. But I also, just to share a little personal reservation, I was listening in the audience as a traffic engineer that worked in the city, talked about being able to remotely take a car offline if they detected difficult driving processes, you know, if someone was swerving or whatever, they could take over the car, which sounded really great, but it also sounded potentially dystopian as if there was too much control available. And of course, you know, such control could be used for good or ill. In Singapore in particular,

Sybil: So I haven’t heard that. I haven’t heard that and it doesn’t sound good. I agree with you. I’ve never heard that.

Angus Stocking (19:52.194)
Yeah. But then also, it was very amazing that I never went into a subway station where I couldn’t have eaten off the floor if I wanted to or where the subways themselves weren’t a spick and span. But then there was warnings about eating durian. You know, that was an arrestable offense. Yeah. Just, and I, do you think that that level of control is necessary? Obviously that’s different than New York, for example, and the subway system there. What are the social factors or environmental factors? What has to be implemented to get a clean subway?

Sybil: Yeah, yeah. So no, that’s a great question. So it’s not something I talk in the book, right? And so in the book, when I go with infrastructure with Singapore, I’d go over their water system, water collection, wastewater, et cetera, et cetera. Your question specifically about control. What I like to tell people is that we have to put it back in the context of the 1960s when Singapore became independent with Malaysia, Indonesia, know, different levels of, you know, how developed the places there were.

And so they just had to exercise more control. But I think it’s more of a contextual problem, right? The context at the time, what had to be done rather than an absolute rule. should have the, should something like Chicago or Paris, should they enforce the same rules? Absolutely not, because the context is different. That’s what I like to remind. The one thing about Singapore that I love in particular is the fact that Singapore is really, really hot and really humid. The idea of walking 20 minutes outside every day to be able to go buy groceries is not the best or even biking for that matter because it’s really, really hot. What they try to do is to have towns where they have a lot of residences, but then also a lot of commercial space for grocery stores and then just shops in general.

Sybil Derrible (21:57.334)
And that’s something that we in transportation called accessibility, which is a name now that when we say accessibility, we think it’s accessibility for people with disabilities. It’s not that at all. Accessibility is just how many shops can you, for example, how many shops can you access within a five-minute walk or within a 10 minute walk or within a 15 minute walk or within a 10 minute car ride or bus ride. the accessibility in Singapore is just very high because everything is pretty much nearby.

So it’s very easy to have a life where everything that you need doesn’t require you to go through extensive drives. And that’s very, very nice. I mean, when I was there, it was, I loved it. And I still think to this day that especially for families, it’s probably one of the best cities, if not the best city in the world to live in. Everything is so easy.

Angus: I agree, I loved it. Beautiful city and great food, great variety and the fusion cuisine was amazing there. And the beauty, the orchid garden that are all over there. Just everything is very wonderful. It’s almost to Disneyland level. It could be a little bit unnerving at times, but you live there for years and you move back, do you think, or are you done with Singapore?

Sybil: Oh, I’ll go back for travel. I just can’t take the heat. know, if it were like only six months per year and then it would be winter, you know, it would be a bit colder. I know I would maybe consider it, but it’s just, I just can’t take it. The other thing by the way about Singapore is that they’re so small that everything is strategic. So even what you think is beautiful, it’s probably also has a use. So one of the best examples is if you, I’m sure if you type Singapore in Google, one of the first thing you’re going to see is the Marina Bay Sands. So it’s a big hotel that has three pillars.

Sybil Derrible (23:46.638)
And at the very top there’s a long structure and it has a pool and it’s very, very famous.

Angus: I’ve stayed there and I’ve been in that pool. Yeah.

Sybil: So it’s beautiful, it’s perfect, but you should know that that building stands on ground that did not exist 50 years ago. So they bought and brought a lot of rocks from Indonesia to infill inside into the ocean. And then they create some kind of a horseshoe pattern. And in the middle is a reservoir and the dammed, imagine the top of the horseshoe and all that water there now is fresh water and because it’s freshwater, they can use that because it’s so small, they don’t have access to a lot of freshwater. So they have to import a lot of it from Malaysia, but they want to be more and more independent. So they actually have several of those gigantic reservoirs of freshwater that’s almost into the sea. So again, beautiful and very functional at the same time.

Angus: You know, another thing you can, staying at that hotel, if you’re in the right room, you could spend a lot of time looking out your window at the amazing cargo boats and ships that are hundreds lined up or docked or anchored, waiting for their time to come in. It’s a very visceral sensation of a city being fed. And if that was to go away, the city would go away.

Sybil Derrible (25:10.082)
Yeah, I mean, shipping is definitely one of the biggest industries in Singapore. So I’m sure they wouldn’t like it to go away.

I feel like we’ve covered Singapore pretty well, but you went to a lot of interesting cities. How did you decide which cities to visit or what cities became part of the book and why?

Yeah. Well, so the city, well, so if you look at the book, you’ll see that it’s dedicated to my wife. Her name is Margot. We traveled everywhere together. She’s in art history and I’m in engineering. we have to, you know, usually we try to go to cities that have nice museums and also nice infrastructure. And she takes pictures of paintings and I take pictures of, I don’t know, air conditioners sticking out or telecom towers because I’m a big infrastructure nerd. love it. And so that’s how we pick, you know, a lot of those cities where we traveled.

And when we lived in Singapore, we traveled to Thailand, went to Vietnam, we went to Hong Kong. And it’s really when I started to write the book, I was trying to think of good examples where some of these things were happening. for example, Hong Kong is water distribution. There’s Shanghai for integrated transport because Shanghai is a great transport system and not super chaotic in terms of traffic because they’re really balancing between roads, with cars, buses, transit and walking. so, and so, yeah, so that’s what we did. And also when I wrote the book, I tried to cover everywhere in the world. So I tried to have cities in North America and Europe, you know, even Africa and a lot of in Asia and in South America, which was something important for me because all of the cities. So the driver of infrastructure in the cities are people, the fact that people live there.

Sybil Derrible (26:55.318)
And people at the end pretty much have the same needs as in, we want fresh water, you know, we have to be able to drink water. We have to be able to, you know, use the toilet, use water for washing, et cetera, and get rid of that water. We have to be able to move around the city. So those same needs right now in the past hundred years, you know, we’ve been addicted to electricity. Electricity is absolutely wonderful. So we all want electricity and some cities have natural gas and now increasingly, you know, we want phone. So telecommunication, phone access.

And so it’s pretty much everywhere in the world. It’s universal. so that’s why I like to use international cities to capture that effect that again, everyone in the world pretty much wants the same things. And that’s why infrastructure is there to provide these things.

Angus: In my early reading, one of the things that most struck me was desalinization. it was, according to you, it’s being used more routinely than I thought. it’s apparently there are cities now that wouldn’t be nearly as big or nearly as well watered without desalinization. Take a dive into that for us. What’s the current state of the art using seawater for drinking water?

Sybil: Yeah, absolutely. So I go through that example is it’s a water treatment drinking from the seas in Tel Aviv. That’s chapter two. I talk about water treatment in general and the way that we treat water, the best ways that we treat water in general is by collecting whatever water we find from somewhere and then we remove the stuff that we don’t want. So we remove the large stuff and then the smaller stuff and then smaller and smaller and smaller. So for water treatment, we can do that and we get very small with filters, but we don’t have to go to the nothing is diluted in the water so we don’t have to do too much. With seawater we have to do the same thing. So first grains, we get rid of the fish and any branches or something that might be in the water. Then we do some more treatment to remove some of the particulates inside. I explain that in the book in a very simple way. It’s process called coagulation-fluoculation. But the one thing about seawater is that it’s got lot of diluted salt.

Sybil Derrible (29:01.23)
And to get rid of the salt, one of the best ways that we have the best technology we have right now is to use some kind of a membrane. Imagine a blanket where nothing, almost nothing gets through (the blanket) except for the pure water molecule. And so what we do is we compress water against that blanket really, really at a very high pressures so that only water seeps through. Pure water. And then that’s the water that we’re to use for drinking.

The only thing is that that water is great, but it’s pure water and pure water is not healthy. If you drink pure water, you’re just going know, pee it. You actually need the minerals to keep it and for your body to process it. And so then it’s remineralized by adding some limestone in the water and then it’s distributed everywhere. So it’s sort of similar to the conventional way, except for that last process and that pressure inevitably that pressure requires a lot of force, so it requires a lot of energy. so the biggest problem with desalinating seawater is really the energy consumption. that one example of that given the lake, the sorg plant in Israel is that they need to have a natural gas fire plant there really just to be able to operate those modules to get rid of the salt, the leachate salt in the water.

Angus: Interesting, I hadn’t made that connection between energy and freshwater quite so strongly. And it almost suggests that it’d be a good idea to build a nuclear power plant just for the desalinization plant.

Sybil: Or yeah, mean nuclear, yes, or a solar farm or wherever you have energy available, right? Whatever is best, whatever you have at hand where you can capture or have as the energy.

Angus Stocking (30:51.566)
Sybil, you came to my attention, or the book was forwarded to me by an editor from Informed Infrastructure, and it was because I’d reviewed Deb Chautre’s book from about a year ago about how infrastructure works. Similar titles with very different books. How did you identify the niche that you’re getting at here? Just as an author, I’m just curious. Was there a need, did you think, or were people asking for it, or did it come up in class? And why this book right now? Yeah?

Sybil: I mean, when I was telling people what I was doing, everyone was very, it resonated with everyone. They wanted to know how infrastructure works. They wanted to understand how it works from a simple level, not a textbook level. Students were really open to it, really resonated with them. I keep getting invited to give talks in a lot of places because my work is so interdisciplinary. And myself, when I started to learn, so I got my PhD mostly in transportation and then I became a professor and then I learned more about water, electricity and all that.

And I kept reading books and again, they were all so siloed. Either they were very siloed or again, it was more of an urban planning, you social aspect. I couldn’t find really a books that would explain in simple way the technical terms, know, the technical aspect of infrastructure. And so that’s why I really saw that there was a need for this book.

And that’s why I think this book should know is probably going to do well because there’s a real appetite from the public to understand how infrastructure works. So that’s why I wrote it. Also, even I used the book in one of my classes. mean, surely it’s people are interested in the topic because that’s why they take the class. But we’re talking about 18 year olds from discipline, not in engineering, who actually enjoy reading the book. so I’m pretty that’s one of things I’m proud of.

Sybil Derrible (32:47.886)
And again, I really saw that there was a need for something like this. The other thing is, despite the fact that every chapter happens in one city, all the principles that I discussed are very general. So normally, whoever, know, whoever the reader is, when they read the book, it should apply to their city, unless their city has, you know, something they’re specific, but they should really gain some information about how their city actually works. So I’m hoping that the book will also be relevant in 10, 15, 20, 30 years or in the longer term because I’m trying to be, you know, still very, remain very general.

Angus: Well, and I think there’s a good chance of that. I know that I’ve been enjoying it very much and it’s a book I’m looking forward to reading closely when I get my physical copy. And I guess maybe to wrap this up and again in reference to Professor Chachra’s book, she spoke of herself as a charismatic mega infrastructure admirer or nerd. And I think that applies to you too. There’s I think many in this audience, myself, you, other academics of infrastructure, there’s a sort of admiration for a big dam or a big power plant or a sewage system. And it’s a little bit unusual to a, that’s not a usual feeling amongst most people. And yet it’s a pretty real sensation of actually admiring and wanting to look at and be in a really big sewer, a dam or an energy plant. Would you agree with that? What’s your feelings about some of the big amazing things that humans have built to make cities work?

Sybil Derrible (34:38.482)
So I, what I agree with that, of course, I love those mega structures. I do think sometimes we’re too reliant on them. And so I, I’m more of a, I’m more in favor of many smaller infrastructures than one big one. Also coming from a very small town, you know, small islands. I liked the everyday infrastructure. Like I, I got to tell you my, one of my favorite things in the U S are one of my favorite piece of infrastructure in the U S are back alleys. I think back alleys are vastly underutilized.

And I love walking in back alleys and I look at the dumpsters and I look at the electric cables and telecom cables. look at in some of them in Chicago, they put permeable pavers so that, again, water, instead of just trickling down, to the sewers, actually just stays there, underneath the pavers. so I, I love, I love as much the small infrastructure as the big infrastructure. And, and one of the things that I like with the book, I’m, I’m hoping in the book that will happen is that any reader of the book could stand in pretty much any intersection in the world, look around and be able to identify what’s there. Which includes of course, maybe the asphalt, the pavement, right, of the roads. And maybe there’s also a bus stop. Also below the roads, there’s probably water conduits, electrical cables. If you look up, you might see the buildings, you might see certain air conditioning units sticking out. You might see some kind of a telecom tower. I know it’s one of those things when you don’t know, you don’t look at it.

But it’s those telecom towers, they’re like the white rectangles, like they’re vertical rectangle boxes. Once you start to see them, you see them absolutely everywhere. And these are the, that’s the infrastructure that keeps us connected when we want it so bad. So sure, I like to visit the big infrastructure systems. I love it. I went to see a tidal power plant in Nova Scotia and I’m hoping to go see one in Korea at some point. I went to see the Hoover Dam, know, between Nevada and Arizona. So I love all the big infrastructure, but I’m as much, I love as much the small infrastructure that’s there and that we pretty much take for granted, but it really makes our lives better.

Angus Stocking (36:45.614)
That’s a good point. And I live in a town with back alleys, which was unusual for me where I grew up. didn’t know we didn’t have alleys. But you’re right. When they exist, you wonder how people ever get by without them. So thank you for your time. And maybe tell us again the name of the book, when it’s coming out, and how people can get their own copies.

Sybil: Absolutely. the book is, it’s very simple. The book is the infrastructure book. I’m hoping if you even just Google or something, infrastructure book, you know, it should come up, but the infrastructure book, the subtitle is how cities work and power our lives. I think it’s, it can be purchased absolutely anywhere. So there’s not one vendor. So if you have a, whether you buy your books online, it should be there. If you buy it in library, it should be there. You can order it from the library.

There is a version, a e-version for people interested and it’s also coming out as an audiobook. So if you just Google the infrastructure book, hopefully you’ll find it. And I would of course invite everyone reading it to just email me to let me know what they liked about the book, they didn’t like about the book. And even more importantly, whether there’s one particular piece of infrastructure, maybe where they live that works in a certain way and that they love and that they just want to share their passion for infrastructure with me.

Angus: Sounds good, and it’s coming out March 4th, it’s S-Y-B-I-L, durable, and it’s spelled like terrible.

Sybil: Terrible with the D. There you go.

Angus Stocking (38:17.176)
Sybil, thank you for your time today and I wish you all the best in the world with the book release and with your teaching and the book. Is there a book tour coming up?

Well, I’m traveling a little bit. I’m invited to give talks all the time, so I’ll be there. But if anyone wants a signed copy in particular, they can just, again, email me in my email, Derrible at uic.edu, or just Google my name, they’ll easily find it.

Angus Stocking (38:50.414)
Thanks for listening to this episode of Everything is Somewhere, and thanks to Sybil Derrible for taking the time to talk with us about his new book, which should be available when this episode is published. Everything is Somewhere is on a roll. This is our 13th episode, our audience is growing, and the podcast is getting noticed. And it’s all thanks to you, the listener, and the feedback we get from listeners.

So please, if you have ideas or suggestions or complaints or stories or whatever, get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. Email me directly at angusstocking at gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn where I’m easy to find. There is only one Angus Stocking.

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