Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure (original) (raw)
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Journal of Architectural Education, 2009
To design infrastructure is to design a built form that can be generative and directive: it has the potential to create place and suggest future growth. Yet transportation infrastructure in North America is routinely designed as isolated, mono-functioning works of engineering. In urban areas, this singular approach often leaves areas of adjacent land as vacant and unviable public space discouraging to other patterns and modes of movement. Conversely, new infrastructure in dense urban areas could be developed that promotes public space and includes cultural and social agendas as primary generators of built urban form. This new approach would weave novel, responsive elements into an existing fabric, generating a multiplicity of connections, program, and places.
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42: 327-43. 2013.
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of tech-nopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
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.
The Political Lives of Infrastructure
Radical History Review
This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histories of infrastructural power reveal if infrastructures are delinked from master narratives tying them to state and state-backed centralization? While development, nation building, and extraction are often state-sponsored or state-backed projects, the articles here demonstrate that modern states are not the only wielders of infrastructural power. Second, how does this decentering of the state in infrastructural analyses transform the stakes of radical political activity and the work of radical historical actors? In highlighting a different, ...