If you’re teaching infrastructure and you need some metaphors to communicate how certain kinds of infrastructure operate, consider this: Street as vein and skin.
“Streets are both New York City’s circulatory system and its skin.”
Part of New York 101 from the New York Times, “Why are the streets always under construction?” is a great short, readable resource for students about the “subterranean layer cake” underneath the streets of any major city.
Installing (Social) Order 
you’ve gotta let yer uni’s PR dept know that you are onto the hot news theme of our times: http://www.npr.org/2016/08/22/490932307/aging-and-unstable-the-nations-electrical-grid-is-the-weakest-link
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As usual, dmf the voice of reason. When wi even NYT converge turn into anything more than rhetoric!!??
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i must be very au courant these daze, have said it before but still surprised by the press around infrastructure too bad it doesn’t seem to carry over into public action, maybe yer classes can try and build a link between knowing and doing.
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Crazy that you mention that — just reading it on twitter and then on WSJ!
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/cracking-the-codes-of-new-york-city-1471649961
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hope folks pick this line of teaching/illustrating up, I can imagine a curriculum that has students following all of the links/signals/systems from inside their classrooms thru the walls (floors, airwaves and all) and out into the world.
keep trying to tell people that ya don’t have to read Derrida to get (to) post-structuralism just take a close look at any actual the functions (and malfunctions) of any infra-structure from waste disposal, to DNA or computer-codes…
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/sh*t-happens/7701310
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