Infrastructural Turn Research Articles

Housing: an infrastructure of care

In this article, we conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of care. Drawing on the recent infrastructural turn in social sciences we understand infrastructures as dynamic patterns that are the foundation of social organization. New infrastructural analyses attend to how infrastructures pattern social life and identify the values that are selectively coded into infrastructures, (re)producing social difference through use. We argue that housing patterns care across three domains: through housing materialities, markets and governance. First, we identify how housing patterns the organization of care at a household and social scale. Second, we attend to the relational politics of care through housing, asking how care is ordered through housing and to whose benefit. Third, we consider where and how care is located in housing. This third direction opens a substantively new approach in housing scholarship, identifying housing as a sociomaterial assemblage that is constitutive of care. We provoke housing researchers to ask: is this a housing system that cares?

‘The politics of things’: digital media, urban space, and the materiality of publics

Recent characterizations of publics – as expressed through concepts like ‘networked publics’, ‘hashtag publics’, ‘ad hoc publics’, ‘calculated publics’, and ‘engineered publics’ – or notions describing processes of circulation – such as ‘virality’, ‘shareability’, and ‘spreadability’ – fail to appreciate that publics are not just digitally constituted but also manifest themselves in, and are intimately connected to, physical spaces. ‘The politics of things’ refers to the way in which things, objects, infrastructures, and physical space remain crucial to political communication in a digital age as well as to the manner in which bodies, objects, and urban space become politicized and digitally remediated. Drawing on fieldwork carried out during the 2011 and 2016 Zambian elections, this article proposes a material, mobile, and spatial approach to political communication. It hereby extends the relevance of the recent material and infrastructural turn in media and communications in a political context. It examines the physical recirculation of digital content, the digital remediation of physical space, and the communicative role of bodies, objects, and the built environment. Problematizing common dualisms between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as well as ‘public sphere’ and ‘public space’, it argues for an exploration of publicness and processes of circulation across digital and physical spaces.

The Promise of Infrastructure ed. by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel

Reviewed by: The Promise of Infrastructure ed. by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel Tim Oakes (bio) The Promise of Infrastructure. Edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 264. Paperback $25.95. The Promise of Infrastructure emerged from a 2014 seminar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. Its first iteration was a series of brief posts that appeared on the Cultural Anthropology website in 2015: "The Infrastructure Toolbox." These posts were varied and evocative, and they offered a useful starting point for a student's journey into the surprisingly rich, nuanced, and complex world of the "infrastructure turn." If the original posts offered just enough to pique one's interest, the full-length versions now published in The Promise of Infrastructure pull together and engage in much greater depth the key themes of the Santa Fe conference. At the same time, however, the volume seeks to more explicitly come to terms with the infrastructure turn itself. Since 2014, the study of infrastructure has grown significantly, and the volume seeks to confront the questions "why infrastructure?" and "why now?" In response, The Promise of Infrastructure offers a provocative reflection on the current academic, social, and political moment that we find ourselves in. That moment is one, we might say, of crumbling infrastructure. There's a lot of decay, ruin, and rubble in this book. Most of the essays convey a palpable sense of the end of something: liberalism, modernity, faith in the progress of development, humanism and the primacy of the human subject, a stable climate, or carbon-based energy. The promise of these things—or more accurately, the failed promise—has been a promise materialized through infrastructure. While the writers of this volume thus suggest that the study of infrastructure can offer much critical insight into the promises of an Anthropocentric world gone awry, they also suggest that [End Page 1112] such insight—that is, into how our human worlds are caught up in and formed through nonhuman materialities—is absolutely necessary to charting possible futures in the Anthropocene. Following the editors' introduction, which happily does not waste our time with summaries of the chapters to come but instead offers a useful review of the broader themes underlying the infrastructure turn, the volume is divided into three parts: time, politics, and promise. Temporality is of course fundamental to promise, and the chapters in part one—by Appel, Gupta, Harvey, and Schwenkel—all explore how infrastructures materialize the promises of a particular future (of, say, oil-fueled modernity, efficient connectivity, democratized access to energy resources), and how their suspended construction, fitful maintenance, and eventual decay or destruction suggest not simply the always-incomplete reality of this promise, but also the need to move beyond an analysis that imposes a linear teleology on infrastructure development. That is, instead of viewing infrastructures in terms of plan-construction-completion, we might do well to think of them as always ongoing, always, as Gupta suggests, in the process of becoming something else. In part two, chapters by Von Schnitzler and Anand explore the technopolitical dimensions of infrastructure. Here it is less the decay of infrastructures that is at issue than their durability relative to a state's administrative and/or juridico-political arrangements. Material infrastructures of water provision, for example, may outlast successive colonial, nationalized, and privatized regimes of ownership. Their material durability thus conditions and distorts political and economic "transitions" (in places like postapartheid South Africa and neoliberalizing India) in unpredictable ways that help us better understand why certain social formations resist transformation even after the political institutions upholding those formations have been swept away. Chapters by Larkin, Bowker, and Boyer in part three offer more sustained reflections on how the study of infrastructure might in fact redeem the failed promises of the anthropocentric crises that we find ourselves in. These chapters more explicitly situate the infrastructure turn within what Boyer calls the "anti-anthropocentric turn." This turn away from "the toxic legacies of radically human-centered thinking and action" (p. 226) embraces what we might think of as a more honest (and indeed revolutionary) reembedding of the human and nonhuman, the...

Digital media infrastructures: pipes, platforms, and politics

Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having ‘disrupted’ many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures.

The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance ed. by F. Musiani, et al.

Reviewed by: The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance ed. by F. Musiani, et al. Jean-Christophe Plantin (bio) The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance. Edited by F. Musiani, D. L. Cogburn, L. Denardis, and N. S. Levinson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xvi+268. $110. The goal of The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance, edited by F. Musiani, D. L. Cogburn, L. Denardis, and N. S. Levinson, is to show how information infrastructures constitute politics by other means. Despite not being designed at first to conduct activities of surveillance, the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 have described how these infrastructures are increasingly used to enforce control over populations, and to promote a political agenda of states or supra-national institutions. They especially shed light on how the decentralized architecture of the internet could provide the backbone for state surveillance over citizens, either by directly plugging into the cables (such as the now infamous Room 641A of AT&T, used for fiber optic taps), or through collaborations with tech companies to access users’ personal data. The book provides a theoretical framework and a series of case studies to analyze this increasing use of the internet as a proxy to enforce state power—what they describe as governance by internet infrastructure—instead of analysis of the actors, process, and challenges shaping the governance of the internet. Through a theoretical introduction and conclusion and ten chapters, this edited volume both documents and promotes an [End Page 900] “infrastructure turn” in the study of internet governance (IG). The authors situate their work toward the existing study of IG, and this turn is supposed to compensate for the traditional focus on institutions and the tendency to study these institutions as separate entities. On another front, their perspective imports concepts from STS, and more precisely the field of infrastructure studies, to focus on other points: IG is studied by the design and the materiality of information networks, by highlighting the invisible work involved in activities of maintenance, and by embracing the mundane, invisible, and ubiquitous nature of the internet. After this theoretical framework is laid out in the introduction, it is illustrated by a series of case studies organized in three parts: geopolitical conflicts, intellectual property rights, and civil liberties. As my expertise is on the latter, I concentrate below on chapters 8 to 11. The four chapters that constitute “infrastructure as a lever of/in surveillance, privacy, and censorship” offer examples that illustrate how information intermediaries act as important actors to enforce economic, political, or geopolitical agendas of states. The originality here is to cover both the systematic and the exceptional nature of this evolution, and to analyze the multiple facets of this delegation of surveillance to tech companies. N. Arpaignan shows how the data collection practices of companies such as Google or Facebook are very compatible with state surveillance: all the data collection procedures that they have implemented throughout the years for digital marketing are very much in line with the needs of states—a process that S. Luboff describes as “surveillance capitalism.” P. Vargas-Leon focuses on shutdown practices from states (also known as “kill switch”), and shows through a series of examples and technical-legal analysis of these actions how it is hard for states to have complete control over the internet in their territories. It also documents the justifications of this action, usually through a topical drifting presenting internet as critical infrastructure that therefore needs to be defended against terrorism. T. Sargsyan follows by showing the role of information intermediaries in law enforcement, but also how they potentially resist data requests from state agencies, or could potentially help enforcing privacy protection measures. This chapter also demonstrates that enforcing data localization on national servers as a reaction to U.S. surveillance is both economically harmful and enhances states’ capacities of citizen surveillance. J. Laprise presents the technical and legal apparatus of the PRISM program, its history and its potential failure (how to avoid misclassifications of citizens?), and highlights the key role metadata play in this process—due to their unregulated nature (at first), hence allowing their large collection by the National Security Agency, but also due...

Infrastructural gap

An infrastructural gap (IG) emerged after the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 and it refers to the difficulty of the state and the private sector in sustaining the level of infrastructural networks in the Western world. Yet, infrastructures comprise the realm where the state or the market materialize a great proportion of the social contract. Citizens therefore often experience IG as a challenge of the entire political paradigm. Nevertheless, as research in the country that is at the center of the current euro-crisis—Greece—records, we have novel and innovative forms of civil activity focused on the IG. Such activity, applying principles of self-organization and peer-to-peer relationships, along with practices of social solidarity and ideals of commons, attempts to address IG in innovative ways. However, such practices call for theoretical and empirical innovations as well, in order to overcome the social sciences’ traditional understandings of infrastructures. This paper—based on the inaugural professorial lecture I gave in acceptance of the Chair in Social Anthropology at the Vrije University Amsterdam—seeks to initiate a framework for understanding this shift in the paradigm of infrastructures’ governance and function, along with the newly emerging infrastructural turn in socio-cultural anthropology.

Aesthetics and the Infrastructural Turn in the Digital Humanities

Aesthetics and the Infrastructural Turn in the Digital Humanities

The Rise of the Compound–Hostel–Location Assemblage as Infrastructure of South African Colonial Power: The Case of Walvis Bay 1915–1960

The ‘infrastructural turn’ in social science conceives of infrastructure as having a political life; it is deployed to confer and maintain political authority, but it is also generative of ‘the political’. This article articulates this basic premise with the contention that space and circulation are integral to apparatuses of power, specifically in terms of orchestrating and stabilising what Foucault termed ‘the right disposition of men and things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end’.1 Based on archival study in Namibia and South Africa, the article examines the changing spatial disposition of African ‘men and things’ at Walvis Bay between 1915 and 1960, and how these articulated with the changing ‘convenient ends’ of African urban administration in Namibia. It demonstrates how problematisations in the activity of governing urban Africans during this period provoked the contested rise of key colonial urban political infrastructure – the compound–hostel–location assemblage. Research has shown how South Africa's Department of Native Affairs (DNA), particularly in its focus on urban housing, was central to the state's project of ‘internal colonialism’.2 This article shows how, especially from 1954, the DNA's role extended to ‘external colonialism’, particularly so in Walvis Bay, a town castigated for its chaotic existence.

Reinventing Planning: Critical Reflections

There is a growing acceptance in international development circles of the contribution a revitalised planning can make to addressing key urban challenges. Current expectations that planning can play roles in managing the growth of cities in ways that promote their sustainability, inclusiveness and liveability, contrasts with past perceptions of planning as an irrelevant discipline obsessed with spatial ordering and control. This paper considers whether the new forms of planning can address the challenges facing cities, with particular reference to the South African context. It does so through providing an overview of the shift in thinking about planning, and reflecting on the new agendas for planning as well as on some of their silences. It argues that the new approaches need to be understood in terms of contemporary urban and planning theories which are rethinking the nature of planning and its relationship to power and institutions, and which view cities as complex, dynamic places, embodying multiple interests and spatialities. These perspectives can help to enrich our understanding of the new approaches to planning, and to avoid ineffectiveness or a return to the negative elements of modernist planning of the past. The paper demonstrates the argument through focusing on some of the recent themes that have received attention in the contemporary international agendas for planning: the cross-cutting themes of sustainability and gender; the infrastructural turn in planning; and the ambiguities of the compact city. While these are quite particular concerns, they highlight the complexities of institutionalising the new approaches to planning, and ways of thinking about spatial planning.

The ‘Infrastructure Turn’ in Australian Metropolitan Spatial Planning

This paper argues that a recent resurgence in Australian spatial planning has been superseded by a resort to infrastructure to address urban problems. The paper uses case studies of the Melbourne and South East Queensland (Brisbane) metropolitan regions to chart the renewal of new spatial planning, after a period of neglect. This paper then shows this spatial planning renewal has given way to a new emphasis on urban infrastructure planning as the primary mode of intervention in these cities. The infrastructure turn raises important questions about the spatial planning and infrastructure of cities within a new era of global strategic challenges.