ABSTRACT
For a very long time, societies have been building large physical structures or objects, which support the way they interact with their surroundings. Enabling travel (ports, roads) and managing water (reservoirs, aqueducts) go back several thousands of years, and are especially associated with powerful states and empires. With the industrial revolution, this process became much more dynamic, creating ever larger systems, moving faster, using enormous quantities of energy. The globalisation of industrialism since the mid-twentieth century means that ever fewer parts of the planet are free of these systems – roads, bridges, power stations, pipelines, airports. They are the objects analysed here. Just type in any of these words to a search engine and you will find dozens of pictures of these objects, worldwide. Many of them will be very recent, and will have gone through lengthy planning processes. Missing will be many elements of infrastructure, proposed but halted by planning processes (amongst other forces).
