Infrastructural Turn Research Articles

Anthropology at the Ends of the Lines

Anthropology at the Ends of the Lines

Review: The Problem with Feeding Cities: The Social Transformation of Infrastructure, Abundance, and Inequality in America, by Andrew Deener

Review: <i>The Problem with Feeding Cities: The Social Transformation of Infrastructure, Abundance, and Inequality in America</i>, by Andrew Deener

The Times of Splintering Urbanism

ABSTRACT The twentieth anniversary of Splintering Urbanism’s publication is an apropos moment to consider the significance of time in, and for, critical infrastructure studies. This commentary brings Splintering Urbanism into dialogue with Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis to explore how time and temporality can (re)frame, extend, and challenge how we engage and analyze the networked metropolis. As an empirical concern, conceptual framework, and methodological approach, “infrastructure time” discloses commonalities and contradictions emerging across the infrastructure turn, enriching our understanding of the production of infrastructure space and helping us pose questions about urbanization, urban politics, and the urban condition in new and generative ways.

Slow forms of infrastructural violence: The case of Vietnam’s mountainous northern borderlands

In Vietnam’s northern mountainous borderlands, ethnic minority Hmong and Yao farmers must constantly negotiate the Vietnamese state’s aspirations to bring these rural communities under greater control. The state is working hard to integrate this territorial periphery, along with its people, land, and resources, while altering local livelihoods to better fit centralised aims and imperatives. These efforts are closely linked to a number of infrastructure programmes. While scholars have contributed important work regarding the wide-ranging impacts of highly visible rural infrastructural projects such as dams and highways, I focus here on three less-well documented state-driven or encouraged projects. These include the implementation of hybrid seed systems, ‘upgrading’ or creating new marketplaces that are both spatially and temporally fixed, and the significant expansion of tourism-sector infrastructure. Drawing on conceptual literature from the infrastructural turn, especially regarding infrastructural violence and infrastructural lives, I examine the impacts these projects have on upland ethnic minority livelihoods. While the Vietnamese state appears to be winning in its quest to territorialise and ‘modernise’ this borderland region, I highlight how minority individuals and households (re)shape specific infrastructural lives with tactics that include subtly disrupting or resisting such state-supported initiatives. I make the case that more attention needs to be paid to infrastructure projects that might be only barely perceptible, but that are nonetheless perpetuating slow forms of infrastructural violence across the Southeast Asian Massif.

Infrastructures of Minoritization

Abstract Figurations of body, community, and politics traversed India and the Ottoman world along the artificial coaling archipelago that connected both via legal islands of extraterritoriality and other technologies in the Red Sea. Examining this system and the ethnic groups that operated and subverted it reveals how minority formation and other forms of making community and autonomy were linked to processes of anatomization and a rearticulation of ideas about race, blood, and soil. This “infrastructural turn” meant that sociability, religion, identity, and political legitimacy in the inter- and intra-imperial domains were biologized and thus fastened to the material and technological systems these groups were part of. Parsis and their Muslim competitors naturalized this system and made it and themselves into parts of the landscape. Such ecologies of ethnicity and extrastatecraft flourished on the margins of large-scale infrastructures, underpinning the emergence of minorities and diasporas in the twentieth century.

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Measuring Equity through Spatial Variability of Infrastructure Systems across the Urban-Rural Gradient

Recent regional research has taken an ‘infrastructure turn’ where scholars have called for examining the transformative ability of different infrastructures in causing systemic inequities beyond the spatial conception of ‘urban and the other’. This research examines the interconnected impact of infrastructure systems on existing spatial inequities through a study in metropolitan Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This study investigates whether the urban-rural (U-R) gradient concept can enhance understanding of the spatial relationship between socioeconomic indicators and infrastructure systems. Indicators of spatial inequalities were regressed against infrastructure variables and imperviousness, as a proxy for the U-R gradient, using multivariate and spatial regression methods. The models show that imperviousness has a positive correlation with the concentration of racialized minorities and a negative correlation with access to health insurance. The study also shows that the predictive power of multiple infrastructures varies across space and does not adhere to urban boundaries or the U-R gradient. The complex interactions among different infrastructures shape inequities and require further inquiry in urban regions around the world.

Himalayan BRI: an infrastructural conjuncture and shifting development in Nepal

ABSTRACT In Nepal, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) contributed to the articulation of a post-2015 conjuncture involving a new constitution, earthquake reconstruction, an Indian blockade and disenchantment with Western non-governmental organization developmentalism. This conjuncture permitted the emergence of new domestic possibilities, regional configurations of power, Himalayan geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics, and developmental trajectories involving an infrastructural turn. Considered a frontier zone since the Sugauli Treaty, Nepal has mobilized its own historical, geographical and political conditions, and articulated the BRI as a historical opportunity to liberate itself from India’s market monopoly and domestic political and economic influence by generating a new national discourse in favour of a sovereign, autonomous and self-reliant development path that is already shaping national policymaking, state restructuring, political mobilizations, regional negotiations and Nepal Himalaya landscapes. As such it challenges the conventional opposition between globalized capitalist and imperialist exploitation and national sovereignty.

Imagining Infrastructure in Urban Jamaica

This article presents a preliminary outline of what an infrastructural humanities might involve. We ask how the established body of work in the geohumanities, including literary geography and related fields, might incorporate the infrastructural turn that has been emerging in geography and anthropology. Studying literary and cultural imaginings of infrastructure, we suggest, extends considerations of spatiality by emphasizing how spatial connections and disconnections are constructed through material and technological means. In seeking to demonstrate the potential of attending to the imagination of infrastructure, we focus our analysis on one specific case: the infrastructure of gullies in Kingston, Jamaica. Kingston’s gullies—an extensive system of open drains meant to quickly channel rainwater to the city’s harbor—occupy an important if largely unexamined space in the Jamaican capital’s urban imaginary. In this article, we read the gully not just as a specific spatial imaginary, but as a form of infrastructure. How are Kingston’s gullies imagined in Jamaican popular music, literature, and visual culture? How do these forms of cultural production convey and evoke infrastructure’s aesthetic and affective dimensions? How do writers, musicians, and filmmakers engage with infrastructure both to assess urban dis/connections, and to reimagine these relations otherwise? We address these questions across a range of cultural texts to illustrate how a direct engagement with infrastructure might extend work on spatiality by highlighting the cultural politics of materiality and technology.

Petro-populism and infrastructural energy landscapes: The case of Mexico’s Dos Bocas Refinery

In 2018, recently elected presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) promised the construction of a new refinery in Mexico. Arguing a lack of energy independence and the urgent need to ‘rescue’ petro-state giant PEMEX and the stateowned electricity company CFE from the mismanagement and neoliberal policies of previous administrations, the Dos Bocas Refinery (DBR) became one of the main flagship projects of AMLO’s administration symbolizing a discourse of energy security and national pride. This paper reviews the process of approval and construction of the refinery by assessing, the material and relational character of energy infrastructure, the “politics and poetics” that are built into the promises of infrastructure projects, and the shifting temporalities of infrastructure and their interaction with emerging ‘petropopulist landscapes’ which serve as material evidence of oil-led development. Drawing on Anthropology's and Geography’s ‘infrastructural turn’, this paper reviews a series of government documents, speeches and declarations supported by interviews with energy experts to understand the symbolic meaning of energy infrastructure and how the DBR has become deeply entangled with a nationalist political project which has instituted an inertial path-dependence towards the continued use of fossil fuels, off-staging other concerns associated to climate change and the energy transition at the national level.

Editorial: The geography and governance of infrastructure provision

Infrastructure matters for regional development as well as for the individual wellbeing of people. This not only became painstakingly obvious since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. Thus, the phases of ‘lock-down’ during the pandemic became an eye opener for the condition of infrastructural fundaments of our cities and regions. Debates about systemic infrastructure for maintaining the functioning of our societies and economies – in scientific terms ‘Services of General Interest’ or the ‘Foundational Economy’ – received wide societal and political attention since the outbreak of the pandemic. Yet, already before the outbreak of this most severe global health crisis, discourses in applied social sciences have experienced an ‘infrastructural turn’, putting technical, social and green infrastructures into the centre of attention of social research, theory building and dissemination. This has led to different understandings of ‘infrastructure’ coexisting in academic and professional debates today. This introductory paper to the issue on ‘The Geography and Governance of Infrastructure Provision’ aims at giving an overview of current debates about infrastructure provision in Regional Science and Planning while introducing the six papers included in this theme issue of Europa XXI.

РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИОННАЯ ИНФРАСТРУКТУРА ПОЗДНЕСОВЕТСКОГО БУСТЕРИЗМА: УРАЛ И ЗАПАДНАЯ СИБИРЬ

The article, based on the corpus of Soviet geographical poetry dedicated to the Urals and Western Siberia, examines the infrastructure set up to represent industrial projects. The adopted approach to studying geographical images of the Soviet industrial expansion of the 1950–1970s relies on the ideas of the “infrastructural turn” in the social sciences and uses as a research tool the methodology of “distant reading”. The author argues that the goals of the late Soviet representational project cannot be reduced to direct propaganda or mobilization. It was formed as a local version of modern boosterism — an expansionist ideology characteristic of the situation of forced creation of new territorialities and aimed at the formation of patriotic identities in new settlement centers. The Late Soviet geographical poetry was the product of this Soviet representational infrastructure, and the quintessence of its ideology, functioning within the framework of consolidating rhetoric, and giving rise to the figure of the poet, who was identified with poems dedicated to a certain infrastructure project. The Soviet boosterism implied placing the representations of industrial projects in a situational administrative-social context, while simultaneously producing indirect infrastructural effects that were crucial for the formation of urban “normality”, subjectivity and identity. The article outlines the main stages of the formation of the Soviet representational infrastructure, standard forms of its functioning in the late Soviet period; it describes historical geography of this network in the Urals and Western Siberia, which assumed different forms of dealing with the projects for representation of which it was created.

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

More-Than-Human Infrastructural Violence and Infrastructural Justice: A Case Study of the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline Project

As a new wave of infrastructure expansion takes place globally, there has been a parallel turn to infrastructure in geographical research. This article responds to recent calls within this research for less human-centered engagement with the infrastructure turn. More specifically, this article aims to destablize anthropocentric discussions about infrastructural violence and infrastructural justice. Using the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline Project as a case study, we advance two main points. First, we show that infrastructural violence is not solely directed at humans. Rather, all agents, objects, and conditions—from humans to fish to carbon sequestration—entangled in webs of relations within zones of infrastructural expansion risk being subjected to violence when new and existing infrastructures meet. To illustrate this point, we detail two examples of competitions between new and existing infrastructures along the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline route, which together reveal the various forms of violence experienced by the more-than-human world when new infrastructural arrangements are layered on top of already existing ones. Second, we advance debates on infrastructural justice by adopting a more-than-human perspective in our conceptualization of this term. Recent writing on infrastructural justice has reflected on efforts to repair and rebuild infrastructures to produce more just futures (Sheller 2018). Drawing on the observations and reflections of our fieldwork along the Chad–Cameroon Pipeline route, we argue that just infrastructure projects must not only be inclusive of marginalized human and nonhuman populations but they must also avoid interfering with the infrastructural work done by nature to sustain the more-than-human world.

Blurring the shoreline: De- and re-infrastructuring and the changing colors of European flood policy

This paper provides a genealogy of the emergence of a common EU flood policy, including the scope and direction of this policy. Noticing how EU policy proposes green infrastructure (associated with using nature as a buffer zone in managing floods) as an alternative to grey infrastructure (implying fixed installations of concrete and cement), this paper adopts the theoretical lens of the so-called infrastructural turn, which advocates a relational investigation of infrastructure. By engaging this approach, the paper shows how flood infrastructure can contain very different compositions of (unruly) water and (settled) land. A narrative of a historically strong focus on guarding society from the powerful forces of nature through a fixed line of defense is increasingly giving way to more muddy states—quite literally—where society is expected to learn to live with flooding and show ecological consideration. To capture the EU’s, and especially the European Commission’s efforts to establish a pan-European flood infrastructure that accommodates this turn, the concepts of de- and re-infrastructuring are developed. These concepts act as heuristic devices to capture how policy performs some combinations between water and land as constituting an attractive and functional flood infrastructure, but constitutes other infrastructural relations of the aquatic and the terrestrial as undesirable and, hence, as malfunctioning. This performative act of distinguishing between what constitutes “good and proper” versus “bad and undesirable” infrastructure is referred to as a politics of infrastructure.

The social order of transnational migration markets

AbstractThe ‘infrastructural turn’ in labour migration studies has shifted attention away from the experiences of migrants to the role of public authorities and private actors in facilitating migrant mobilities. As part of a broader turn towards studying transnational mobilities rather than immigration and settlement, this research shows that the formalization of transnational labour migration has made mobility both freer and more difficult. In this article, I reinterpret mobility infrastructures from a market sociological perspective. Transnational labour migration, I argue, is more clearly conceptualized as the organized ‘making’ of cross‐border labour markets. Moreover, from a market sociological perspective the construction of cross‐border labour exchanges is at the same time a question of how the uncertainties inherent in market exchanges are coordinated by market actors. In its focus on how exchanges across borders are possible at all, a market sociological perspective makes note of the conflicting interests, power imbalances and uncertainties that must be handled for a social order of transnational migration markets to emerge. An important question concerns whether alternatives to the less regulated neo‐liberal market order that is evident in most migration corridors are possible and under what conditions. With reference to the challenges facing the regulation of cross‐border labour markets, in my conclusion, I map an agenda for future research.

Regionalizing the infrastructure turn: a research agenda

ABSTRACT An interdisciplinary ‘infrastructure turn’ has emerged over the past 20 years that disputes the concept of urban infrastructure as a staid or neutral set of physical artefacts. Responding to the increased conceptual, geographical and political importance of infrastructure – and endemic issues of access, expertise and governance that the varied provision of infrastructures can cause – this intervention asserts the significance of applying a regional perspective to the infrastructure turn. This paper forwards a critical research agenda for the study of ‘infrastructural regionalisms’ to interrogate: (1) how we study and produce knowledge about infrastructure; (2) how infrastructure is governed across or constrained by jurisdictional boundaries; (3) who drives the construction of regional infrastructural imaginaries; and (4) how individuals and communities differentially experience regional space through infrastructure. Analysing regions through infrastructure provides a novel perspective on the regional question and consequently offers a framework to understand better the implications of the current infrastructure moment for regional spaces worldwide.

Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure

This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.

On the Coloniality of “New” Mega‐Infrastructure Projects in East Africa

AbstractThis article responds to a preference for short‐term history in research on the infrastructure turn by engaging with the longue durée of East Africa’s latest infrastructure scramble. It traces the history of LAPSSET in Kenya and the Central Corridor in Tanzania, revealing the coloniality of new and improved transport infrastructure along both corridors. This exercise demonstrates how the spatial visions and territorial plans of colonial administrators get built in to new infrastructure and materialise in ways that serve the interests of global capital rather than peasant and indigenous peoples being promised more modern, prosperous futures. The article concludes by suggesting that a focus on the longue durée also reveals uneven patterns of mobility and immobility set in motion during the colonial scramble for Africa and reinforced after independence. These “colonial moorings” are significant as they shape political reactions to new mega‐infrastructure projects today and constrain the emancipatory potential of infrastructure‐led development.

Continuity or Change in the Infrastructure Turn? Reform of the Technicians’ Realm in a World Bank Dam

Development in Africa is undergoing an infrastructure turn, no more so than in resurgent dam building. But how are new projects planned and constructed? Are we seeing the repetition of much maligned practices that underestimated economic, environmental and social costs, or have past critiques changed infrastructure building in the twenty-first century? Using the concept of the technician’s realm that describes short-sighted and expert-centric twentieth century practices of dam building, this article analyses the incorporation of reformist ideas about knowledge production, mitigation and compensation. It uses a detailed case study of the Rusumo Dam, and examines the decision-making processes of the World Bank and a new dam-building organisation, Nelsap. Significantly, this case involved a marked design revision to reduce impact, but also top–down and depoliticising impact assessment and policymaking. It therefore demonstrates nuanced change in the infrastructure turn, the incorporation of reform and continued relevance of past critiques.