Interventions on Democratizing Infrastructure

Bregje Van Veelen,Ludovico Rella,Gerald Taylor Aiken,Emily Judson,Evelina Gambino,Alke Jenss,Ankur Parashar,Annabel Pinker

doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102378

Abstract

Abstract This intervention seeks to revivify democratic thinking in political geography, through foregrounding and pluralising its material and temporal dimensions. At the same time, it speaks to a renewed centrality and relevance of infrastructure and infrastructural projects in political discourse. The contributions included here demonstrate how an infrastructural lens can offer new insights into democratic spaces, practices, and temporalities, offering more expansive versions of what it means to act politically. Specifically, these contributions intervene in existing geographical debates by bringing to the fore four underexplored dimensions of democratic governance: (im)materiality, connectivity, performativity, and temporality. In doing so, it develops a research agenda that broadens and regenerates thinking at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and democratic action and governance.

Highlights

The proliferation of civic demands for democratisation through material infrastructures, including those pertaining to energy, water, currency, and transport, indicates a desire to transform how societal needs are provided, and how technologies of provision might act as ‘loci of hope’ (Bernardo, 2010) for achieving a more desirable and equitable future (Dawson, 2020)
While activists use the language of democracy to advocate for a transformation of the social, economic, and political relations enacted through infrastructures, neither they nor the academic community necessarily agree on the form or purpose of these new, material, forms of democracy
Departs from, existing geographical schol arship that has challenged the notion of democratic politics as ‘fundamentally the same everywhere, [consisting of] a set of procedures and political forms that are to be reproduced in every successful instance of democratisation, in one variant or another, as though democracy occurs only as a carbon copy of itself’ (Mitchell, 2011, p. 2)

Summary

Introduction

The proliferation of civic demands for democratisation through material infrastructures, including those pertaining to energy, water, currency, and transport, indicates a desire to transform how societal needs are provided, and how technologies of provision might act as ‘loci of hope’ (Bernardo, 2010) for achieving a more desirable and equitable future (Dawson, 2020). Gambino and Jenss build on these ideas, critically analysing how the pursuit of seamless connectivity can open up new understandings of the democratic (im)possibilities that travel across infrastructural networks. Pinker answers this call to demonstrate how the unruly materialities of infrastructural projects disrupt and impede the temporal imaginary of linear progress, yet create the conditions for distinc tive and unexpected forms of political life.

Results

Conclusion