Infrastructures of Epistemic Moments: Buildings, Black Boxes, Improvement and Neighbourhood Chang

Abstract

When urban sociologists pay attention to built environments, they often assume that buildings and infrastructure can be understood as reflections of social changes in neighbourhoods. In this chapter, I disrupt this assumption and present a more complicated picture of the relationship between a neighbourhood’s social change and physical form. In doing so, I propose introducing two concepts to urban sociology that stem from science and technology studies (STS). I suggest that Latour’s (1987) notion of a black box may be useful to think about how built form might work to stabilize knowledges at certain times and open them to controversy at other times. In addition, I propose the concept of epistemic moments — based on Knorr Cetina’s (1999) epistemic cultures as a tool for researching neighbourhoods and their inhabitants and how such inhabitants come to know what they know about the place where they live. Like Knorr Cetina’s (1999) epistemic cultures, epistemic moments bring attention to the material and social conditions through which people come to know what they know, thereby allowing urban scholars to conceive of what people in Edgewater knew as something to do with the character of the neighbourhood, shaped by the built environment as well as legal and organizational discourses. Incorporating these concepts into urban studies that attend to built environments may give better purchase on processes of neighbourhood change, and, using the concept of epistemic moments, I ask what architectures and infrastructures might characterize epistemic moments of change.