Magnificent megastructures

Utilitarian as they may be, some civic projects are so monumental they approach the sublime. And one of the most elegant is a power station hidden away inside a mountain in the glorious landscape of north Wales 

- Deb Chachra

I'VE BEEN FASCINATED BY SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING MY ENTIRE LIFE. The first thing I remember wanting to be when I was a kid was an astronaut - it was the 1970s, the cultural peak of space exploration. By the time I was 10, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist, and this took me all the way through to a degree in engineering physics.

I was born in Canada, but when I was nine, my family lived in Bhopal, India, in my father's family home, for six months. If culture is everything that you do without thinking about why you're doing it, then our infrastructural systems, and the ways of life they make possible, are unquestionably an important part of culture. Even as a child, the differences between Canada and India - language, social norms, the deep poverty and the unignorable inequality-required serious adjustment.

In Bhopal, we only had running water for an hour or so each morning and evening. We collected it in buckets to use for bathing and flushing toilets the rest of the time.

My mother boiled and filtered the water to make it potable to digestive and immune systems accustomed to clean, cold, carefully treated water from Lake Ontario. We quickly learned to expect dimming lights and power cuts as the city's electrical grid struggled to cope with the fans and evaporative coolers brought to bear against summer's heat.

I doubt I would have given much thought to infrastructure had I not lived in these two different places. By moving to Canada, my parents had given me a new citizenship in a country with a different set of educational and economic opportunities, alongside the infrastructure that made it possible for me to access them.

Collective infrastructures - water and sewage, transportation, electricity, telecommunications - are good candidates for the most complex systems created by humans.