Search Results
Infrastructuring urban futures is a dynamic process involving complex relationships that are simultaneously reorganized and reconfigured through infrastructure. Understanding cities through their infrastructure offers a way of conceptualizing the common systems, networks, and flows that reproduce the diversity of historical legacies and contemporary realities facing cities across the Global South and Global North. This Introduction first presents a critical review of scholarly literature on urban infrastructure, then discusses the overarching themes that cut across the book, making three key points. First, that a grounded, material, and geographic analysis is necessary for infrastructure research. Second, that infrastructure always operates within the uneven and contradictory logics of contemporary capitalist accumulation. Third, infrastructure’s capacity to provide for some people, certain goods, and particular flows of information, while at the same time disenfranchising and/or disconnecting other residents and other elements of the urban condition, are a matter of everyday urban politics. Articulating a more-just urban future inherently necessitates understanding the role of and place of infrastructure within and between cities.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanization.
Considering the climate emergency, economic transformation, public health crises and racialized inequality, the book argues that paying attention to infrastructures’ past, present and future allows us to understand and respond to the current urban condition.
