Jonathan Rutherford - Redeploying Urban Infrastructure: The Politics of Urban Socio-Technical Futures

Cover illustration: Grafissimo/gettyimages

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Over the past twenty years, urban infrastructure has come to be seen and studied as one of the key sites and vantage points of global urban transformations. Cities are facing the ongoing challenge of reconciling social inclusion, economic prosperity and environmental sustainability in their socio-technical systems (energy, water, communications, transport). Scholars have responded by unpacking and critically investigating the shifting capacities of diverse actors to shape these systems, the various means they use to envision, enact and contest change, and the wide-ranging implications of systemic urban transitions. There is a meaningful politics of infrastructure which is and will continue to be a crucial and productive arena of debate and conflict over the directions, forms, modalities and outcomes of future urban change. This book seeks to substantively develop and demonstrate, both conceptually and empirically, this fertile politics of urban infrastructure.

While infrastructure is increasingly present in urban studies and there is something of an infrastructure turn in the wider social sciences (see for example Harvey et al. 2017), much of this work remains quite piecemeal and diffuse across disciplines, sectors or contexts. There is still work to be done to bridge between technology scholars seeking efficiency and optimal solutions and social scientists concerned by contingent softer relations between actors, and a sense that generalizing or theorizing across these various boundariesmoving towards a comparative theory of urban infrastructure (Graham and McFarlane 2015, p. 13)remains a difficult task as we seek broader understanding of why and how infrastructure matters or comes to matter in and between situated urban contexts. Paying more attention to the materiality of infrastructure can help in this undertaking.

It is perhaps here that infrastructure demands what Jackson et al. (2007) call a sensibility: a way of thinking and acting in the world capable of moving between the separate registers of technical and social action. Redeploying infrastructure in theory and in practice involves a recognition that social and technical worlds are not carved off neatly one from the other, but are always untidily intertwined. This calls forth particular views and enactments of humantechnology relations which are highly contingent and consequential for shaping futures. Infrastructure creates and maintains the conditions of possibility for a particular higher-order objective (Carse 2012, p. 540), while its redistributive nature means that particular configurations always work to the advantage of some groups and entities and to the disadvantage of others (Jackson et al. 2007). Not only do the material and physical qualities of infrastructure make a difference to its functioning, to how it works and is developed and taken up, but they also (increasingly?) have political consequences and indeed constitute political (im)possibilities (Barry 2013; Mitchell 2011).

I use urban infrastructure as a window to explore shifting relationships between cities, humans, technologies and ecologies, as imperatives to sustainable urban futures continue to be promulgated, but for varying, often contradictory, visions, rationales and interests. Continuing exploration of the relationship between infrastructure change and urban transitions is required to analyse how and why socio-technical systems are put to work for wider sociopolitical projects and the implications and contests this implies and draws out. To do this I develop a relational socio-technical perspective which sees urban infrastructure as an emerging material political process or achievement in which technological components and social relations are fully entwined and mutually constitutive. Here, the urban is at once the context, constituent and consequence of infrastructural processes: simultaneously shaping of and shaped by, but also, crucially, fully constitutive or actively formative of actual and possible pathways. In other words, while cities are a milieu of socio-technical change (with historical and territorial specificities) and an outcome of change processes, they are also constantly emerging material political configurations through which change actually comes about. Understanding the urban as a socio-technical process through which materiality becomes political, rather than as a pregiven state or a set measure of density/centrality, helps to underscore that studying how infrastructure becomes debated or disputed is to explore how urban socio-technical change comes about.

There are three main objectives of the book. The first is to use original empirical studies of urban infrastructure change processes in European cities, and to show these to be at the heart of crucial, ongoing debates over urban futures. The second is to straddle and interface engagement between the latest theoretical advances and empirical investigation of urban planning practice and socio-technical engineering of systems and flows, forging new reflections and perspectives across distinctive worlds of infrastructure. The third is to open out our understanding of urban infrastructure by tracking different rationales, materials and flows through the urban arena as they are employed to connect to, disconnect from, and contest wider urban political projects. In so doing, it contributes to reflections around the role of urban infrastructure and its multitude of actors in enacting more desirable, progressive and collective urban futures.