Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Zbigniew Grabowski, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Urban Systems Lab at The New School, Portland State University, and Eastern Connecticut State University

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Description:

Infrastructure is experiencing a relatively rare centrality in public discourse. Between individual and collective grappling with changes to daily life brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate crisis as well as multi-trillion dollar infrastructure legislation proposed in the U.S., conversations around the creation, distribution, and maintenance of infrastructure are abundant. For instance, the strain of pandemic response has laid bare the inadequacies and insufficiencies in healthcare infrastructures while simultaneously surfacing modes and methods of care from widespread mutual aid efforts to stabilize housing and food security to the rapid retrofitting of empty shopping centers as massive vaccination clinics. Similarly, the mounting pressures of climate change along with social demands for high quality environments have increased demand for ‘clean’ and ‘green’ infrastructural solutions, requiring new forms of care and expertise.

A recent raft of literature has conceptualized how “social infrastructure” networks serve as the foundation for social life (Klinenberg 2018; Lathan and Layton 2019). Maintenance and care is paramount to continued infrastructural functioning (Mattern 2018; Ukeles 1969). Civic actors--including NGOs, community-based organizations, informal groups, social collectives, and neighborhood leaders--activate and provide crucial services and meanings to social infrastructures (Campbell et al. 2021). A growing literature has focused on infrastructures as complex emergent social-ecological-technological systems, fundamentally intertwining more-than-human agencies with social processes and technological systems (Grabowski et al. 2017; Markolf et al. 2018). Despite this increasing attention to civic maintenance of infrastructure systems, fewer scholars have focused on the ways that civic actions shift or otherwise construct social infrastructures, instead theorizing the capacity for change as emanating from top-down or state power. Yet, infrastructure users can redefine what an infrastructure is for (Larkin 2013). In this session, we focus on the civic infrastructural actions redefining and re-appropriating existing - and building new - infrastructures. How do civic responses reframe what constitutes social and ecological infrastructures? What uses, practices, and performances rearrange or reconstruct infrastructural operations? How, where, and for whom do these actions reshape the purpose and processes of infrastructural service delivery? How might provisional civic alterations to infrastructure present an alternative ethics of social futures? What tensions emerge between self-organized infrastructural practices and existing institutions as infrastructures evolve beyond the auspices of state control?

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda