The people as infrastructure concept: appraisal and new directions (original) (raw)

Urban Geography, 2021

Abstract

Casual notions in research reportage can unexpectedly reverberate powerfully through a field of study. AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004, 2013) idea of people as infrastructure is one such notion. Its origins, a formulation at a workshop in Johannesburg in 2002, has grown into a central referent to understand the enriching, shadowy collaborations and alliances that subalterns creatively forge in currently afflicting capitalist cities (particularly in the global south). Simone’s goal was nothing less than to simultaneously broaden the infrastructure notion and offer a fundamental ontological challenge to its scope and breadth. To Simone, the term infrastructure, mobilized to understand these populations, had been cast primarily in one way: as a physical–morphological provisioning. A focus on engineered systems – power stations, mass transit lines, road networks, coal burning facilities, sewer systems – was incomplete in identifying what back-bones the complexities of ever-evolving, ephemeral socio-spatial life in cities. His dilemma: people’s mediative prowess and constitutive capabilities that respond to and re-align their immediate everyday circumstances had been cast into the shadows. The infrastructural notion, to Simone, needed to recognize the subtleties of ruminative, ever-negotiating beings striving to improve lives through creating life-shaping alliances and solidarities. At the core of the revised people as infrastructure notion: infrastructural provision is a far-flung, human galvanizing and arranging set of deliveries. To be sure, it encompasses a physical component, as Swyngedouw’s (2011) “spine of morphological coordination,” but also, crucially, involves humanly created foundational alliances configured in resistance-political activities. The reason for this resistance politics: subalterns find themselves ensnared in networks of debilitating production, consumption, and social reproduction as governances relentlessly drive an, age-old imperative, to simultaneously equalize and differentiate urbanized space, i.e. create uniform landscapes for capital accumulation and splinter them for housing and commercial submarkets. Capitalist urbanization through these forms and processes relentlessly entraps the poor. But city life and lived ways never cease being negotiated by restlessly constitutive people that enact complicities and collaborations. There is no failure of subaltern imaginaries here. The world is a battle, many of these people feel, and through enacting complicities and collaborations the battle goes on. Human infrastructural creation in these lives ultimately

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