The politics and practices of making progress with infrastructure

Keywords: infrastructure, politics, urban political ecology, heterogenous infrastructure configurations, southern cities
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Infrastructure has long been understood as central to enabling ‘progress’, a visible sign of modernity and development, particularly in global south cities. Recent scholarship has, however, troubled simplistic understandings of infrastructure, highlighting its socio technical construction as well as its role in producing inequality and causing ecological harm. Further, southern urban scholarship has pushed back against modernist notions of the networked city as the teleological end of infrastructure, the universal goal to which cities ought to aspire. In this paper, building on recent scholarship that has argued for reading of infrastructures as inherently unfinished/incomplete, we draw on three examples of infrastructure in Nairobi to show different ways infrastructural progress, disruption and completion are imagined, described, adjusted to and politicised. Considering infrastructure as always in formation-- a work in progress-- helps us to understand the processes and politics of incremental changes and proclamation of an envisioned final state (creating a bus rapid transit system). It also, however, helps us to understand negotiations, adaptations and acceptance of disruptions even where an imagined final state of infrastructure is absent (digging under sidewalks to lay pipes and wires). Finally, it calls attention to the uncertainties associated with non-modern infrastructures where individual artefacts may be built, but anticipated wider infrastructural configurations remain ambiguous (devising sanitation infrastructure beyond networked toilets). Throughout our paper, we consider the politics of making progress through infrastructure, including the salience of visions of completeness and the political challenges of more open-ended infrastructural configurations