Infrastructural Citizenship References Revision

Von Schnitzler, 2008

• Post-apartheid South Africa has been faced with widespread non-payment of service charges in towns holding from anti-apartheid rent boycotts in the 1980s, after a failure to encourage payments for services prepaid meters were installed that would self-disconnect households following non-payment

• The prepaid water meter initially a depoliticising device but became a cost recovery and neoliberal reform agent to form spaces of calculability in the home and subject residents to scrutinising their daily consumption as inclusion and connection becomes contingent on civic duty and entrepreneurialism achieved by becoming calculative citizens

• Neoliberalism is a new form of governmentality where agency is linked to practices of calculative rationality in spheres previously considered non-economic, the calculation and payment for the service became part of a moral language of being an ‘empowered’ and ‘active’ citizen

• This infrastructure was key to establishing a biopolitical relationship between the state and population where water infrastructure is key to public health and became contingent on a social contract demanding moral and entrepreneurial behaviour 

• The water meters encouraged entrepreneurialism and formed a new market-style citizenship maintained through infrastructures that transitioned with changing political landscapes

Grazioli, 2016

• After economic crisis urban citizenship becomes more nuanced with an array of grassroots organisations reappropriating their essential right to the city, in Rome this has occurred through a widespread practice of squatting where native and migrant dwellers tackle conditions of housing deprivation and form new forms of life in their transformative power over the urban environment 

• Homelessness entails being degraded from citizen to marginalised urban dweller, this led to the reoccupation of abandoned buildings by housing squats that have increased in numbers and become firmly settled as political, cultural and social touchstones where life continues to unfold and a new citizenship is formed to reenfranchise urban subjects 

• This is seen in occupations such as Metropoliz where occupation brings together different subjectivities and biographies and converges them towards a single purpose of rebuilding; this links to the right to the city as the re-assertion of political, material and symbolic potential allows people to become urban citizens once again

• In this way citizens earn their share in decision making and become citizens of the city and confronts urban citizenship to reassert their rights; these infrastructures allow urban swellers to overcome a lack of legal rights and state infrastructure to realise inclusion in Rome

Lemanski, 2019

• Urban geography promotes infrastructure as a core lens for understanding the city and a space through which political struggles are mediated and discourses of citizenship can be employed in multiple and diverse urban settings

• In South Africa despite 25 years of post-apartheid public investment in housing and services there remains frustration at poor service delivery; this was demonstrated in Westlake, Cape Town in 2018 when residents formed violent protests over nearby developments due to anger at the absence of infrastructure investment in their community and subsequent criticism for erecting shacks, dumping waste and illegally accessing electricity when they felt abandoned by the state

• The explosion of anger here represented a long term problem of citizenship disjunction manifested through infrastructure, the failing infrastructure mirrors a breakdown in the state-society relationship as universal access to resources had not been achieved and the post-apartheid poor continued to struggle

• Citizens were forced to make physical alterations to their houses mirroring their reassertion of their urban citizenship in improving their living environments, there is also collective citizenship occurring here as homeowners feel a responsibility to provide shelter for other citizens motivated by a shared experience of poverty and inadequate housing

• This adaptation and destroying of public infrastructure proves that infrastructures are not simply neutral, mundane bodies but highly political and contested systems in cities that mirror and contribute to the evolving nature of urban citizenship

Cupers & Meier, 2020

• The Trans-Africa Highway is seen as the greatest manifestation of capitalist-driven injustice and dispossession meant to connect Africans to one another, but instead alienates them seeing local people betrayed by the ruling elite and international capitalism; infrastructure of roads and public works become a force that urban poor classes must overcome in order to redress state-led injustices and become fully vested citizens

• The TAH was coordinated by the UN Economic Commission for Africa with an ambition to connect the newly independent nations, this was planned with little to no input from local communities; there were elite and luxury routes and services created to form spaces for white elites; however, much of the route was left unfinished, exploiting the working poor and severing their connections to each other and economically important land

• Here infrastructure served the elites, with little consideration for the lives of local people who were alienated and made vulnerable

Knox & Gambino, 2023

• Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world as they are built above and below land to connect, channel or halt the movement of humans, commodities and resources as well as immaterial flows of data, capital and organising systems; they are the underlying structures that allow a system to function

• Infrastructures can also act as catalysts for political struggle as they shed a light on statecraft, ideas of the environment, political possibilities and conceptions of time and space; this allows us to analyse the past and present as well as push for a collective re-imagining of the future

• Large scale public works and infrastructures are dependent on the state to finance them and are also tied to the state through standards, regulations etc. meaning they cannot exist without being tied to the state; yet the state is also not possible without infrastructure as they are key technologies through which states enact, perform and reproduce themselves; they can also be seen as machines of colonial violence 

• There should be attention to the dynamics of resistance, repurposing and reappropriation of infrastructure on a local and international scale as squatters, activists, labourers, migrants etc. counter dominant infrastructural forms through collaborate design based on sharing, participation and care as they become sites of political struggle, negotiation and socio-cultural creativity

Anand, 2011

• In Mumbai city settlers are subject to a more precarious water supply than the city’s upper class residents meaning they must mobilise the pressures of politics, pumps and pipes to get water to form a hydraulic citizenship realised through political and technical connections to the city’s infrastructure

• The outcomes of a settler’s efforts to access water depend on complex matrixes of socionatural relations with city engineers and hydraulic infrastructure to produce a cultural politics of water in the city

• Even through the city water rules only allow certain settlers to access the system legally, nearly all access it through pumps or lobbying politicians allowing settlers to establish themselves in the city through their access to water

• The upper and middle classes access water through property developers but settlers mobilise diverse relations with elected representatives, dads and social waters in order to exist in the city outside of dominant political regimes

• This struggle over water and pressure mirrors the class struggle in Mumbai through hydraulic infrastructure that is transformed into a political resource allowing for claims to the city to be made and a sense of belonging to be achieved

Andreola et al., 2025

• The experience of women and queer people in public space is linked to the body and how it is perceived in a patriarchal society where the female body is associated with domestic space, when they are outside of this arena they are perceived as being out of place

• Women are much more afraid in the night than men, this prompts them to avoid locations and modify their behaviours; this fear must be addressed through conscious urban design and challenging cultural norms to shape safe and inclusive cities

• For decades cities have been designed based on patriarchal ideas and being designed for men, but in recent years city planning strategists have developed new techniques to tackle issues of fear in cities by seeking to improve urban design by improving landscaping, street design, building orientation, walking paths, sightlines, area clean ups etc. to reduce feelings of risk

• In order to improve life in urban areas it is important to avoid falling into the trap of determinism, Jane Jacobs saw walking through neighbourhoods as an approach to establish a physical presence and begin to change dynamics through community walks that become acts of courage and an expression of freedom

• Streets of cities all over the world are crossed by thousands of bodies seeking to reclaim the right to being in public spaces without fear, it acts as a form of local democracy to integrate women's voices into decision making and urban planning; the global spread of this phenomenon allows women to participate and transform their cities through urban planning 

• The night becomes a space of possibility, a process of shared care and helps better plan cities where people can coexist without fear

Viatori & Scheuring, 2020

• There have been recent protests against road expansion along the Costa Verge in Lima where surfers sought to defend the infrastructure to ensure ongoing conditions to form rideable waves, this is rooted in constructions of race and class in Lima’s elite social geographies as the waves reveal the subtle ways in which broader inequalities are remade through infrastructural struggles

• To maintain the conditions for good waves, surfers defended the coastal nature but this was rooted in race-class differences that sought to redefine the coast as an elite, economically exclusive area that formed social circuits of exclusion

• The city’s coastal districts became enclaves for the rich and middle class citizens who journeyed there to escape the poor; however, as the area became more urbanised discourses of beautification and protection of nature were used against the threat of informal urbanisation using the binary of nature and the urban as means to protect their wealthy, exclusive landscape and infrastructure

Larkin, 2013

• Infrastructures are the material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over spaces and can be theorised through biopolitics, science and technology studies and theories of technopolitics; this concept of technopolitics sees liberalism seek to organise populations through technological domains that appear far removed from political institutions yet have underlying political rationalities allowing them to be used as an apparatus of governmentality 

• Infrastructures are the matter that enable the movement of other matter, the things and the relations between things as infrastructural networks grow 

• They are no longer only technical systems, but also financial instruments, biological, political and social connections as humans and machines become bundled together; this is also changing as digital infrastructures rise in modern societies

Harvey, 2016

• The right to the city refers to a concept developed by Marxist geographers and a slogan adopted by the young, poor and individuals/groups who feel excluded from aspects of city life; it was originally invented by Henri Leferbvre in 1968 when alienated university students in France expressed their anger in protests in Paris and was popularised by David Harvey in 2008 in the early stages of the GFC

• Often the right to the city is harnessed as a political slogan protesting against political oppression, protests against cuts in urban services, frustration with employment, high tuition or destruction of open space land; urban movements demand greater democratic control over the urban landscape

• The question of what kind of city we want is not separate from what kind of people we want to be allowing the individual the right to change the city after their hearts desire by use of powerful social forces

• Cities are critical to capitalism as urbanisation plays an active role in absorbing the surplus product that capitalists perpetually produce in the search for surplus value, this becomes clustered in one place allowing for the urban process to begin with building booms in the midst of impoverished areas; as the urban is tied up with capitalism there is bound to be a political and class struggle in these environments 

• Ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging have become harder to sustain with the radical expansion of the urban as social movements seek to overcome isolation and reshape the city; there are now signs of revolt everywhere and these must converge over the singular aim of gaining greater control over the use of surplus and should focus on the right to the city as a political ideal

Bingham & Thrift, 2000

• Infrastructures viewed as key technologies through which the state can enact its goals draws on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory whereby Latour understands the world to be constructed though a dynamic network of relationships between human and non-human entities where each possess equal agency 

• To apply this to urban infrastructure, the influence that such networks possess in transmitting political messages and shaping the ‘ideal’ citizen becomes clear

Foucault, 2008

• Urban infrastructures are used to create an ‘apparatus of governmentality’