Toward an infrastructural critique of urban change: Obsolescence and changing perceptions of New York City's waterfront

Abstract

This paper examines the interlinkages between changing infrastructural regimes on a macro-level and changing cultural imaginaries, stagings and experiences of cities. New York City's waterfront serves as a case study to examine how the transition from the Fordist era to a so-called post-industrial era has fundamentally been a large-scale infrastructural realignment to facilitate global production networks which has brought with it new understandings and experiences of the city. This analysis puts a particular emphasis on the unevenness of these transformations and argues that the functional specialization of spaces has reinforced and rendered invisible social inequalities in multiple ways: through the displacement of work, the attribution of value through discourses of sustainability, and the relocation of environmental and social costs. In lieu of a conclusion, this paper makes the case for an infrastructural critique of urbanization processes.