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Scholarship on infrastructure in geography has reached a high tide in recent years. Scholars have examined infrastructure-led development at multiple scales (Enright 2015; Addie, Glass, and Nelles 2020; Apostolopoulou 2021; Schindler and Kanai 2021), infrastructural temporalities (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018; Addie and Marino 2021), infrastructure as state-making (Easterling 2014; Turner 2020), infrastructure finance (Bigger and Millington 2019; O’Neill 2019; Webber et al. 2022), infrastructural splintering and fragmentation (Steven Graham and Marvin 2001; McFarlane and Rutherford 2008; Rutherford and Coutard 2014), and incremental and peopled infrastructures (Furlong 2011; Silver 2014; Simone 2014).

However, this proliferation of work has arguably centered on the financing, development, and maintenance of infrastructure - or “infrastructuring” in the positive sense. Meanwhile, vast quantities of already-existing infrastructures are aging, obsolete, and inflexible obstacles to development (Carse and Kneas 2019). Simultaneously, many infrastructural arrangements, even when not physically deteriorated, underpin extractive economies, militarism and imperialism, white supremacy, and other systems incompatible with human flourishing (Gilmore 2007; Holgersen and Warlenius 2016; Nisa 2019; LaDuke and Cowen 2020). A small but growing movement has emerged to retrofit or remove highways, railroad lines, dams, jails, and other such infrastructures, often in the name of healing the social and environmental scars of the 20th century but also increasingly for economic development (Bocarejo, LeCompte, and Zhou 2012; Millington 2015; Lang and Rothenberg 2017; Schept 2017; Bratspies 2020; Congress for the New Urbanism 2021; DeFazio 2021; Sneddon, Magilligan, and Fox 2022). These trends raise numerous questions regarding how infrastructural obsolescence is determined (Rogers 2014; Knuth 2019), how infrastructural obduracy is overcome (Hommels 2005), how infrastructural removal intersects with other patterns of sociospatial change, and at what scales infrastructural reconfigurations occur.

References

Addie, Jean-Paul D, Michael R Glass, and Jen Nelles. 2020. “Regionalizing the Infrastructure Turn: A Research Agenda.” Regional Studies, Regional Science 7 (1): 10–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681376.2019.1701543.
Addie, Jean-Paul D, and Lauren Marino. 2021. “Unpacking the Temporalities of Urban and Regional Infrastructure.” In .
Apostolopoulou, Elia. 2021. “Tracing the Links between Infrastructure-Led Development, Urban Transformation, and Inequality in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.” Antipode 53 (3): 831–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12699.
Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. 2018. “Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure.” In The Promise of Infrastructure, 1–38. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Bigger, Patrick, and Nate Millington. 2019. “Getting Soaked? Climate Crisis, Adaptation Finance, and Racialized Austerity.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, September, 2514848619876539. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619876539.
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LaDuke, Winona, and Deborah Cowen. 2020. “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure.” South Atlantic Quarterly 119 (2): 243–68. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8177747.
Lang, Steven, and Julia Rothenberg. 2017. “Neoliberal Urbanism, Public Space, and the Greening of the Growth Machine: New York City’s High Line Park.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49 (8): 1743–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16677969.
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Schept, Judah. 2017. “Sunk Capital, Sinking Prisons, Stinking Landfills: Landscape, Ideology and the Carceral State in Central Appalachia.” In Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology. Routledge.
Schindler, Seth, and J. Miguel Kanai. 2021. “Getting the Territory Right: Infrastructure-Led Development and the Re-Emergence of Spatial Planning Strategies.” Regional Studies 55 (1): 40–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2019.1661984.
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Non-Presenting Participants