In the Excess of Splintering Urbanism: The Racialized Political Economy of Infrastructure

Abstract

ABSTRACT This intervention discusses the relevance of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the study of splintering urbanism, as an uneven socio-spatial process that simultaneously produces dispossession and racial differentiation. Reflecting on our work in Palestine and South Africa we grapple with what leaks in processes of splintering urbanism and we propose “excess” as a provisional analytical space to focus on the racialized political economies of infrastructure. We argue that excess is a generative concept: to render legible the often-silenced histories, geographies, and experiences produced and managed through infrastructure; to reflect on the way stratified social relations materialize in and through urban networks; and to speculate on liberating horizons. In doing so, we consider infrastructure as an archive, a lively ethnographic repository where modern histories of excess live, and where the contested material relations of racialized political economies unravel.