The Material Politics of Infrastructure (2016) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Toward a Material History of Infrastructure
ICON: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology 26, 1, 2021
This article offers a new research agenda for the material history of infrastructure. Building on a revised cultural history of technology and new materialism, it suggests that materiality is a powerful analytical lens for researching infrastructure. In doing so, infrastructure is understood in a broad sense to include artefacts like bridges, water mains, and internet cables. The agency of material infrastructure is central to this piece. As the article argues, viewing infrastructure as a "material assemblage" highlights its various relational interactions with humans and non-humans. This adds to ongoing efforts to decentralize human agency. Two sections devoted to these complex and fluid relationships outline possible research approaches. In particular, spill overs from the histories of knowledge and power to the history of material infrastructure provide directions for future research. Taken as a whole, this article proposes that materiality is central to any understanding of infrastructure and concludes with a set of questions for further research.
Review essay - recent publications in infrastructure studies
Review Essay, 2019
The edited volume is dead, long live the edited volume! While we continue to hear rumours about the imminent death of this publishing format, the three recent edited volumes in infrastructure studies prove that this particular form of knowledge infrastructure still has great potential. Two of them also prove that infrastructure has become a vibrant topic of conversation in the field of social anthropology over the past few years, even if the debate on the agency of things, systems and materials in neighbouring disciplines is a few decades older...
Social Science History, 2021
This article delves into the processes of territorial transformation by foregrounding the material dimension of infrastructure. The entry of the research is infrastructure network design and planning. We will trace the concepts of territorial transformation inscribed into the material layout of large technical systems by analyzing the discourse of engineers and policy makers involved in the conception of infrastructure networks. In so doing, the material politics of infrastructure networks will be studied: How did engineers and policy makers design infrastructure to generate a specific territorial transformation? Moreover, how did technological plans hold the idea that one could influence modernization processes by means of a territorial transformation instigated by infrastructure? The neutral status of technology is thus fundamentally challenged by showing that engineers, in association with policy makers, were essential actors in the planned transformation of the territory as they...
Journal of Urban Technology, 2022
's Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (2001) brought the study of infrastructure to the core of urban studies and inspired the "infrastructural turn" in the social sciences more widely. The book catalyzed a rich trove of research on how technology and society are implicated in the production of contemporary cities. More than any other publication, it has animated the socio-technical systems of water, energy, transport, and telecommunications as fundamental to the functioning and livability of cities. It has inspired scholars to seek out the vital processes and politics of the cables, wires, pipes, and roads that undergird urban development. The twentieth anniversary of the book provides a good opportunity to reflect on the impacts of the book and to consider the emerging trajectories of scholarship on urban infrastructure. Splintering Urbanism has taken on that rare quality in the history of urban thought and research in that it is both a text and an event. Of course, it is not the first book to focus on the relationship between the city and its infrastructure systems. It builds upon the work on large technical systems (
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, ...
2014
To speak about infrastructure is to invoke both the promise of a future as well as imminent trauma. Underground or above ground, systems that makes urban flows possible are always a threat, even when black-boxed and separated from the smooth flow of conscious urban life (Graham 2010). The city might be turned into a weapon or the city is constantly broken and must be fixed. The city is overflowing and must be contained or the city is too contained and must grow and let off steam. The story of infrastructure always begins with one or another of these historical moments – it is never a story of which infrastructure is itself the subject but a narrative about growth, decay or the end of the city, in which infrastructure happens to play a leading role. This paper grows out of eavesdropping on many conversations about infrastructure not the least of which are the shrill cries of despair about the “infrastructure problems” of mega-cities of the South. My intuition is that part of the cont...