Many imagined social futures and actively promoted ‘transition strategies’ rely on infrastructure development. But to what extent can, or even should, our social futures depend on such infrastructural foundations? This chapter examines infrastructures through three interrelated temporal registers: their lifetimes and life cycles; their day-to-day operation, maintenance, and functioning; and the mediatory role they perform between social pasts, presents, and futures. Drawing from observations of, and insights from, Western (European) urban contexts in which infrastructures are ubiquitous if unequal, it demonstrates how infrastructural environments shape dominant social temporalities by materializing them. The chapter argues that long-industrialized societies have inherited from the modern era a propensity to control social futures through infrastructures but that predominant forms of ‘infrastructure-based futuring’ engender ambivalent and even contradictory implications within the Anthropocene. To address this challenge, the chapter discusses key methodological, epistemological, and political considerations for researching infrastructural, urban-regional, and social futures in the making.
Infrastructure engenders temporalities that ripple with different implications across a range of landscapes and lives. This chapter unpacks the lived experiences of waiting, delay, and suspension for people living in the shadow of the construction of the Laos–China Railway. It identifies variations of waiting, suspension, and stasis as modalities of infrastructure time and contrasts them with notions of speed, progress, and promise. This disrupts linear notions of ‘China speed’ and planning or project time. Through an examination of this uneven temporal terrain across the villages and homes affected by construction between 2018 and 2020, the chapter finds that people living in the shadow of infrastructure have a particular temporal orientation that is organized around waiting, the unevenness of which exposes and further entrenches ethnic and class differences. For Lao residents directly affected by the railroad, waiting and uncertainty are coupled with hope, which bleeds into a sort of ‘cruel optimism’ as they anticipate benefits from the object responsible for their dispossession and await a promised future from which they are likely to be excluded.
This chapter situates Infrastructural Times in relation to current debates in urban and infrastructure studies. It introduces the book’s central themes and discusses key temporal dimensions of urban infrastructure, including socio-technical systems’ impact on the urban experience, temporal fixes, infrastructural imaginaries, and temporalities of maintenance and repair. The chapter argues that centring time with the contemporary global ‘infrastructure turn’ enriches, extends, and challenges current work by posing critical questions in novel registers: disrupting neat teleological narratives; probing the relationship between radical and incremental transformation; interrogating moments of temporal disruption; exploring the unexpected pathways of technological and urban development; contextualizing infrastructures’ pasts; and asking what they signify about the future. It then introduces the chapters in the book and presents the key theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions made throughout the volume.
This edited volume addresses overlooked questions of time and temporality to advocate for a ‘temporal turn’ in critical infrastructure studies. The chapters in the book examine multifaceted temporalities – ranging from long-range planning horizons to the rhythms of everyday life in the city – to build an interdisciplinary dialogue that bridges technical, political-economic, and experiential knowledge of urban infrastructure. With global coverage of cities and regions from Berlin and Toronto to Cairo and Jayapura, the book argues for the conceptual and political significance of emphasizing the social construction and experience of time through infrastructure, as well as the importance of analysing the diversity of temporal codes that infrastructure urbanization processes. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed chapters uncover the complex relationship between radical and incremental change to reveal unexpected pathways of urban and technological transformation. Moments of spectacular infrastructural development and everyday social practices invite readers to rethink self-evident and linear notions of time in and beyond the networked metropolis. By contextualizing infrastructures’ pasts and what they signify about the future, the book generates a multidimensional perspective on ‘infrastructure time’ as a research problematic, an empirical concern, and a methodological approach. In doing so, it forwards an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice to better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis precipitated the emergence of a consensus among policymakers surrounding the state’s role in spatial planning and infrastructure-led development. This chapter argues that the belief that infrastructure was the missing ingredient in earlier rounds of neoliberal restructuring constitutes an emerging ‘infrastructure fundamentalism’. This animates national development plans whose time horizons now routinely extend two or three decades into the future. This new infrastructure time has inhibited the efforts of international financial institutions (IFIs) to foster ‘blended finance’ because planning with such extended time horizons is inherently risky. The chapter demonstrate how IFIs have sought to standardize the distribution of economic, political, and environmental risk in an attempt to future-proof profits. Its analysis confirms that while significant risks remain unaccounted for, slow operations have been launched worldwide to extend commodity frontiers and integrate markets.
This chapter provides a synthetic assessment of the varied infrastructures, temporalities, and geographies encountered throughout the book. It identifies and expands upon the key thematic contributions developed across the chapters and details their collective theoretical implications for the study of time in urban and infrastructure studies. The chapter argues for the potential of infrastructures’ temporalities to inform comparative urban research while reflecting on the political and scalar challenges raised by the problematique of infrastructure time. It suggests that the task for future infrastructure studies lies in creating geographically contextual accounts of pluralistic temporal modalities capable of considering empirical details about both the microseconds involved in self-healing systems and the epochal transformations of the Anthropocene. The chapter concludes by outlining the parameters for a research agenda on infrastructure time that includes accounting for infrastructure futures, examining urban infrastructure at night, and engaging with non-Western temporal ontologies.
While scholars and policymakers alike brood over the opportunities and uncertainties surrounding infrastructure futures, the past provides a rich source of inspiration that is waiting to be tapped. The ‘temporal turn’ in critical infrastructure studies advocated by this book needs to include new and different histories of urban technology. This chapter applies the concept of ‘usable pasts’ to uncover what kinds of history can be used productively and how infrastructure pasts can be rendered valuable in addressing today’s global challenges. The chapter defines and conceptualizes what usable pasts are, based on a wide-ranging literature review. It identifies and categorizes diverse types of usable infrastructure pasts, illustrated with examples from Berlin’s rich history of urban technology. Finally, it explores ways of mobilizing usable pasts of urban infrastructure to generative effect today. Overall, the chapter demonstrates critical and constructive ways of thinking with history, rather than just about history, when considering infrastructure futures.
This chapter examines the influence of US–China geopolitical tensions in the political economy configurations of the energy and telecommunication sectors in Argentina. To do so it examines at a series of leading infrastructure projects that have reconfigured these sectors in recent years or that promise to do so in the future, and poses two questions. First, in what way do these infrastructure projects manifest geopolitical tensions between the US and China as well as the responses of the Argentinian state to such dynamics? Second, can these infrastructure projects be seen as contested socio-technical processes leading to the production of new forms of territoriality (rescaling of spatial-politics relations, transnational connectivity, and so on)? It concludes that Argentina’s infrastructure state overwhelmingly focuses on the promise of economic growth through the exploitation of nature, neglecting the serious environmental and social consequences of extractivist development.
This chapter argues that Ethiopia has received so much finance from China (both before and after the announcement of the BRI) partly because of Ethiopia’s potentiality as an ‘infrastructure state’, due to its relatively centralized state structures and hierarchical governance processes. It therefore begins by examining why and how Ethiopia became such an important partner for China in Africa, and how Sino-Ethiopian infrastructure relations thrived partly due to the relative affinity between Chinese and Ethiopian governance processes and their shared spatial objectives. It then examines how Chinese infrastructure finance has facilitated the restructuring of state institutions to deliver major transport infrastructure projects and Ethiopia’s industrial parks strategy. Here we show that Ethiopia has drawn on China’s own experience of infrastructure governance and territorial integration, but also argue that it is far from being a powerless partner in its dealings with Beijing and with Chinese State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Finally, we turn to the recent period of political crisis, particularly since 2018, and show that US engagement in the Ethiopian infrastructure sector offers potential opportunities and risks. The future of the ‘infrastructure state’, developed partly through Chinese assistance, remains uncertain as the Ethiopian government struggles to consolidate territorial integration and control, and political fragmentation threatens to unravel a centuries-long project of centralization. Moreover, it is not clear whether the finance provided by a new range of actors with an interest in Ethiopian infrastructure will contribute to centralization or undermine it.
Chinese-funded multi-facility economic zones (MFEZs) in Zambia are paradigmatic cases of the complex processes of negotiations between state interests, industrialization, and urban development. As instruments of Chinese foreign policy, state-led investments, and globally accepted best practice for economic development, economic zones require land, infrastructure, and a development strategy that is loosely aligned with priorities of their host countries. Rather than conceiving of these MFEZs as isolated Chinese enclaves, this chapter situates them within a longer spatial and temporal trajectory of geopolitics to unpack how urban design and planning practices are also subject to such negotiations. The chapter, first, contextualizes the history of Zambian economic planning that led to the establishment of MFEZs in relationship to Chinese and Japanese foreign policies. Second, it compares the planning and design of the Zambia–China Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone and the Lusaka South MFEZ – funded by the Zambian government with assistance from Japan and Malaysia – to analyse the underlying spatial and urban logics of two state-led economic development projects.
