Éditorial – « Faire tenir » et entretenir les infrastructures

Abstract

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Researching infrastructures and cities: origins, debates, openings

“…Analytically, this coalesces with the idea of re-embedding monetary considerations within social and material dynamics, in a classic Polanyian way, and has major methodological and epistemological implications for the understanding of infrastructural and urban transformations. Methodologically, such a focus entails the necessity to pay close attention to often invisibilised yet essential facets of infrastructure management, such as maintenance practices Pontille, 2015, 2022;Henke and Sims, 2020) and all the interventions aimed at upkeeping infrastructures (Denis and Florentin, 2022) and as such calls for ethnographic approaches aimed at grasping infrastructures in or through their mundane routines. Epistemologically, this contributes to reposition the attention of infrastructure studies on existing systems (and not on projected ones), on their constant decay (Graham and Thrift, 2007;Jackson, 2014;Mattern, 2018) and on the ways in which this continual degradation is either ignored or integrated within infrastructure management, be that in Southern contexts (Etienne, 2022) or in Northern configurations (Strebel, 2011;Strebel et al, 2019).…”