Revolutionary Infrastructure (original) (raw)
Related papers
Analyzing Infrastructures in the Anthropocene
Historical Social Research, 2022
»Die Analyse von Infrastrukturen im Anthropozän«. This contribution takes the multiple ecological crises as the background to connect discourses on sustainability and infrastructures. It discusses the preservation, development, or disorder of infrastructures by different actors and practices in the context of diverse imaginaries of sustainability. When infrastructures are addressed and scrutinized against different visions of the future, their orderforming elements, dysfunctionalities, and transformation potentials come to the fore. The question of which decisions, translations, and norms are inscribed in infrastructures is of particular importance in the discourses on ecology. Moreover, focusing on the planetary dimensions of the ecological crisis adds particular complexity to the infrastructural analysis. An ecological perspective fundamentally challenges the view of infrastructure, as traditional concepts are no longer able to contribute to necessary planetary solutions. Since struggles for the futures of sustainability are struggles for the modernization and transformation of, as well as control over and through (material, immaterial, planetary), infrastructures, we argue that infrastructures will and should receive special attention in the social sciences and humanities in the future.
Infrastructure, Environment and Life in the Anthropocene
Duke University Press, 2019
Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate change through a series of infrastructural puzzles—sites at which it has become impossible to disentangle the natural from the built environment. With topics ranging from breakwaters built of oysters, underground rivers made by leaky pipes, and architecture gone weedy to neighborhoods partially submerged by rising tides, the contributors explore situations that destabilize the concepts we once relied on to address environmental challenges. They take up the challenge that the Anthropocene poses both to life on the planet and to our social-scientific understanding of it by showing how past conceptions of environment and progress have become unmoored and what this means for how we imagine the future. Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Bruce Braun, Ashley Carse, Gastón R. Gordillo, Kregg Hetherington, Casper Bruun Jensen, Joseph Masco, Shaylih Muehlmann, Natasha Myers, Stephanie Wakefield, Austin Zeiderman
The Promise of Infrastructure, 2018
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
Infrastructures, intersections and societal transformations
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2018
There is renewed and increasing interest in understanding the part that infrastructures play in societal transformations, especially in response to the various challenges of climate change. Studies that focus on these issues tend to examine infrastructures in isolation from each other, and tend to work with evolutionary accounts of incremental change punctuated by short periods of radical innovation. This paper questions both these abstractions. Using four empirical cases, it directs attention to intersections between infrastructures at specific times and places, highlighting the dynamic qualities of infrastructures-in-use, and conceptualising societal transformations as outcomes of these intersections. Four forms of intersection are elaboratedco-constitution, adaptation and threading through, historical layering, and coexisting configurations. Instances of each are used to illustrate some of complex and often ambiguous processes through which infrastructures interact. The paper ends by outlining implications for future research and for interventions by policy-makers and others seeking to influence the ways in which infrastructures intersect.
Infrastructure governance for the Anthropocene
Elementa, 2020
Transitioning infrastructure governance for accelerating, increasingly uncertain, and increasingly complex environments is paramount for ensuring that critical and basic services are met during times of stability and instability. Yet the bureaucratic structures that dominate infrastructure organizations and their capacity to respond to increasing complexity remain poorly understood.To change infrastructure governance, it is critical to understand current conditions, the barriers to change, and the strategies needed to shift priorities and leadership strategy. The emergence of modern infrastructure bureaucratic and organizational structure is first explored. The need to rethink infrastructure as knowledge enterprises capable of making sense of changing conditions, and not simply as basic service providers, is discussed. Next, transformation of infrastructure governance is presented as both a challenge of organizational change as identity and power and leadership capacity to shift between stable and unstable conditions. Infrastructure bureaucracies should create capabilities to shift between periods of stability and instability, emphasizing flexibility where ad hoc teams are given power to make sense of changing conditions and steer the organization appropriately. Additionally, several critical factors must be addressed within organizational power structures, identities, and processes to facilitate change. Allowing infrastructure governance to persist in its current form is likely increasingly problematic for the future and may result in an increasing inability to maintain relevance.
Of Ruins and Ruination: Infrastructures Against the Anthropocene
Adaptive Reuse in Latin America: Cultural Identity, Values and Memory, 2024
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