Oystertecture

Wakefield, Stephanie; Braun, Bruce

doi:10.1215/9781478002567-012

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 280 publications

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“…The latter is a condition where a suite of entities, potentials and forces animate, and have bearings upon, the circulation, assembly and contestations of infrastructure. Yet, barring a small and nascent body of work attentive to circulation (Amin and Thrift, 2017; Banoub and Martin, 2020; Mitchell, 2002), sensing and mediation (Gabrys, 2014; Parks, 2017), and multispecies assemblages (Carse, 2012; Doherty, 2019; Wakefield and Braun, 2019), scholarship on infrastructures remain largely anthropocentric in their outlook.…”

Section: Infrastructure and Non-human Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It can entail an economization of non-human life, where bio- and anatomo-politics function as elements in the development of contemporary capitalism (Barua, 2018b; Lemke, 2011; Wadiwel, 2018), converting life into the capacity to work (Federici, 2004) and bringing the very acts of ecological being and doing into the locus of accumulation (Negri, 2017). Equally, as others highlight (Wakefield and Braun, 2019), the installation of non-human infrastructures is a quest for managing and governing human life, especially in the face of futures projected as uncertain or turbulent. Yet, relations between capital and life are not given.…”

Section: Non-human Life As Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result, what constitutes infrastructure shifts from built things and substrates to living beings and their mediatic capacities, which may be harnessed for purposes of securing human life. Using canaries as ‘biosensors’ in underground mines is an oft-cited example (Wakefield and Braun, 2019), but contemporary, and often promissory, iterations tap into living beings’ vital powers even further. We are beginning to witness the emergence of ‘cyborg’ animal bodies (Haraway, 1991) that push anatomo-politics or the pole of biopower concerned with disciplining the body and integrating it into economic processes (Foucault, 1998), into new terrain.…”

Section: Non-human Life As Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

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Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

Barua

2021

Progress in Human Geography

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This article develops a wider ontology of infrastructure. It argues that infrastructures not only hasten the flow of materials but produce non-human mobilities and immobilities that radically alter the dynamics of life. Infrastructures become a medium of life as natural and infrastructural ecologies meld, reorienting notions of design, architecture, planning and governance. Non-human life itself can be cast as infrastructure, with biopolitical implications for anticipating and managing the future. An infrastructural ontology moving beyond anthropocentric familiars generates new analytics and critical openings for the politics of governing human and non-human life.

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Section: Infrastructure and Non-human Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Non-human Life As Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Non-human Life As Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

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Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

Barua

2021

Progress in Human Geography

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“…55 Indeed, the concept of "dwelling in the ruins" 56 moves beyond the prediction of a darker side to resilience and instead seeks to explore the contemporary 'ruins,' where by "biopolitical doubling, we now manage other life to secure human life." 57 This argument suggests that managing the effects of the exigencies of neoliberal rule-rather than the causes-resilient governance creates a cascade of deferment "papering over the cracks" but not delivering solutions. 58 Rather than critically engaging with resilience as a means for progressive politics in the space between nature and human action, this is pre-emptively presented as the death knell of "coercive resilience" as a system of governance due to exposure of its failure to deal with anthropocentric accountability in the light of a collapsing modernist project.…”

Section: The Critique Of Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolution of Resilience

Rogers¹

2020

Connections QJ

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The concept of resilience has roots in many disciplines, making the pursuit of a unified theory very attractive but also very difficult. Yet this has not stopped scholars and politicians from attempting to claim resilience as their flagship concept and build a canon for the 21st century around it. This tendency to reduce or totalize resilience has spawned a host of taxonomies, each seeking to offer the final word on the definitional debate. I argue that this desire to create a unified theory of resilience misapplies the concept, ignores the dynamics of its emergence and the polysemic nature of its use in theory, policy, and practice. This malleability makes resilience at once both a very attractive logic for dealing with uncertainty and a dangerous pathway towards embedding untempered algorithmic systems of coercive prediction into the governance of everyday life. In understanding the emergence of the resilience concept, one must appreciate both the positive and negative potential of this flexible and adaptive notion. I close by suggesting that resilience has gained such traction in recent years in no small part because it represents a shift in the onto-politics of our time, but that we must be careful about which type of resilience gets enacted.

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“…More recently oysters had been reimagined by Kate Orff’s landscape firm SCAPE as a vital part of a future “green” New York. In SCAPE’s proposal for “Oyster-tecture” at the Museum of Modern Art’s 2010 Rising Currents exhibition (Bergdoll, 2011; Braun, 2014), oysters were hailed as a means of ecological remediation, human–nature coexistence, and a way to create a more sustainable urban future (Orff, 2010; Wakefield and Braun, 2019). Were it not for Sandy, oyster-tecture might have remained one idea among millions on a shelf.…”

Section: Narrating Nature As Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Making nature into infrastructure: The construction of oysters as a risk management solution in New York City

Wakefield

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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This paper investigates how nature is transformed into infrastructure through an examination of New York State’s Living Breakwaters project, a $60 million risk management experiment to grow oyster reefs in order to better govern storm surge, rising seas, and coastal flooding. While oysters’ infrastructural nature is portrayed by designers and planners as an inherent natural property which now simply needs harnessing, in reality making oysters into infrastructure requires extensive concrete work—by humans and oysters. Drawing on historical research, site observation, interviews, and media and design analysis, this article traces this work required to make oysters appear, and then function, as a risk management solution. In part one, I trace the narrative work involved in establishing the idea of oysters as infrastructure. In part two, I look at what it takes to build this idea in reality, to make oysters actually function within desired governmental parameters. Making oysters into infrastructure, I conclude, is a kind of biopolitics, both in the traditional sense of making certain forms of human life live, but also in which the goal is to make nature live in a particular way, albeit one imagined as natural to the oyster. While biopolitics forwards a dystopian view of human and nonhumans as vulnerable to threatening environmental processes and heavily secured, it may be undermined by the inability to make nature’s imagined “vitality” appear.

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Oystertecture

Cited by 17 publications

References 280 publications

Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

The Evolution of Resilience

Making nature into infrastructure: The construction of oysters as a risk management solution in New York City

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