The Subtle and Enduring Power of the Spatial Arrangement of Infrastructure
Not everyone has unrestricted access to clean tap water, nor do all people around the world live with the benefits of environmentally friendly power grids. Some communities suffer damage from annual flooding yet are unable to relocate, while others cannot walk along pedestrian paths with peace of mind because of the threat of violence and crime. Moreover, the numerous satellites launched by countries across the world may also function as instruments of a new imperial governance.
This book focuses on the ways in which infrastructure consolidates injustices that appear to belong to technical systems rather than to politics, while also helping to naturalise such relations. Infrastructure, in other words, does not merely reflect existing inequalities; it may also produce and entrench new forms of inequality.
The spatial dimension of infrastructure is important because it offers an ideal site for examining “how broad and abstract social orders such as the state, citizenship, crime, and class unfold concretely at the level of everyday practice”, and how such relations of power and hierarchy are translated into perceptible forms of physical and affective harm.
Building on this expanded understanding of infrastructure, infrastructure humanities examines how infrastructure participates in the operation of social structures such as gender, race, colonialism, postcoloniality, and class. Furthermore, by foregrounding the vulnerability of living beings and their consequent dependence on infrastructure, it extends the scope of infrastructure studies beyond the human, incorporating the survival of all life forms on Earth into the field of infrastructure humanities.
On the Ways Infrastructure Shapes Space
This book draws on a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including history, science and technology studies, media studies, museum studies, sociology, urban studies, and law. Through these perspectives, it empirically demonstrates that infrastructure studies can serve as an important site for discussing the safe and just reorganisation of social relations and the world.
Part I, “The Conceptual Multispecies of Infrastructure”, examines the conceptualisation of infrastructure from the perspective of ecological history; offers a diachronic analysis of the infrastructure of slow disaster, focusing on the relationship between ragpicking and the Nanjido landfill; ethically problematises digital media platforms as infrastructure; and studies Japanese history museums as modern cultural infrastructure.
Part II, “Infrastructure and Spatial Politics”, explores the ways in which infrastructure shapes space, with particular attention to the city. Specifically, it discusses the transnational mobility of neoliberalism mediated through the materiality of infrastructure; the planning of environmentally friendly compact cities through urban architectural infrastructure; discourses on shrinking cities in an age of population decline; and the infrastructural significance of Japanese zoos within the urban environment.