Making Urban Environments: Infrastructures of Power, Resistance and Negotiation

Abstract

Abstract As scholars from the fields of history, anthropology and animal studies, as well as landscape planning and management, we discuss various forms of urban and urbanising infrastructures and their political entanglements. Questioning and illuminating how various actors and their practices build and shape urban environments, we address topics ranging from the black soldier fly - used as biotechnological infrastructure to manage waste - to other nonhumans, like macaques -developing and negotiating their own urbanisms; from plants and community gardens - used as green infrastructures to provide shade and food, and social infrastructures to endure and resist - to the transportation infrastructures that humans have built to both segregate and divide, as well as to live and unite. In case studies situated across the world, we present different conceptualisations of infrastructures as complex human-nonhuman co-productions that shape the modern city.