Infrastructures of liberal life: From modernity and progress to resilience and ruins

Abstract

Whereas until recently, the topic of infrastructure was practically invisible, studies of the spaces, landscapes, and geographies of infrastructure now abound, and for many critical thinkers, infrastructure has become perhaps the political question of the Anthropocene. This review traces two distinct but related paradigms of liberal governmentality and infrastructure, the first, modern infrastructure and its project of mastery and order, and the second, contemporary paradigm of infrastructures of resilience, ruins, and survival. Through this review, I also trace a story of the crisis or dislocations of liberal thought and practice underway as what we now refer to as the Anthropocene. Exploring this crisis and its responses through the lens of infrastructure, I suggest, offers new ideas for other ways to move forward amidst the splinters of the present, and I conclude with some remarks on the political possibilities inherent in both critical infrastructure studies and resilient infrastructures themselves.

Social infrastructure and the public life of cities: Studying urban sociality and public spaces

“…Simone (2004) has taken this argument further, arguing that people themselves can be understood as infrastructure: They help the economy, communications, power, and water of cities to function (McFarlane & Silver, 2017). Much of this work comes in the context of radically uneven and unequal provision of infrastructure that excludes the poor and disadvantaged (Wakefield, 2018)-a kind of infrastructural violence (Harris, 2013;Rogers, 2012;Rogers & O'Neill, 2012;Salamanca, 2015).…”

Evictions as infrastructural events

“…More generally, we suggest that increased attention to the social-technical assemblages in which the evicted participate, rather than primarily to "social" ties, unmediated technologically, is a useful window into transformations of urban politics, resistance, and citizenship (Desmond, 2012;Latour, 1993). Approached that way, evictions represent the infrastructural unbundling of the home, the shattering of the liberal project of (urban) citizen making through infrastructural provision, and violent attempts to push the evicted beyond the boundaries of state biopolitics of care (Anand, 2012;Fernández Arrigoitia, 2014;Wakefield, 2018). At same time, the networking of the camp was more than resilience.…”

Epistemic injustice, risk mapping and climatic events: analysing epistemic resistance in the context of favela removal in Rio de Janeiro

“…As examined within both political ecology and environmental justice literatures, disaster events have generated powerful, multidimensional claims of injustice, making clear the uneven processes and differential vulnerabilities that are implicated across stretched temporal scales (Walker, 2012). In making connections between disasters and climate change dynamics, much recent attention has been given, for example, to the uneven risks and outcomes of flooding, both on its own (Walker and Burningham, 2011) and as part of major hurricanes and storms (Bullard and Wright, 2009;García-López, 2018), and to heat wave events (Mitchell and Chakraborty, 2015;Schlosberg and Collins, 2014). Landslides, the threat to life of concern in this paper, are often also linked to climatic extremes but have been given less attention within environmental justice and related scholarship.…”

“…As Klepp and Chavez-Rodriguez (2018) emphasise, climate change has become a particularly significant domain in which knowledge disputes are being played out, including in terms of how assessments of risks, impacts and adaptive potential are being used to justify certain paths of action. There is clear potential for a science-driven, depoliticised discourse of "becoming resilient to climate change" to be used in ways that override local knowledge structures, deepening power differentials and further aggravating historically constituted patterns of inequality and marginality, including in urban settings (Fainstein, 2015;Wakefield, 2018;Kaika, 2017;Grove, 2018).…”