Transport Infrastructures T&M26

Star 1999

Key writer of infrastructural turn. infrastructure is fundamentally relational. Something is infrastructure in relation to organised practice, not in itself. Also argues that infrastructure is typically invisible until it breaks down- when stuff breaks, the scaffild becomes visible

Graham + Marvin 2001

Critical infrastructure studies. The Modern Infrastructural Ideal (MII): the post-war vision of standardised provision (Keynes style). Seems egalitarian on surface but reality is ‘splintering urbanism’ - noeliberal privatisation, deregulation etc. has fractured MII, producing infrastructure that serves mobile elires while bypassing or degrading provisions for others. External Critique: MII is Eurocentric- imposed on Global South - not a neutal standard.

Graham 2018

Expands the idea of ‘fracturing’ through ‘elite avenues’. Tolled flyovers literally elevate elite above deprived communities that get demolished and fragmented

Larkin 2013

Poetic and aesthetic dimension of infrastructure. As well as utility, states also build infrastructure to represent themselves. Singal: Modernity, mobility of some, and produce Noise: the immobility, disruption, displacement of others.

Siemiatycki et al 2020

Gendered production of infrastructure- critique cost-benefit-analysis as a mode that serves the already mobile, 9-5, gendered commuter. Ignores the non-linear, care based, multi-modal trip patterns associated with women

Guma et al 2023

‘Plug in urbanism’ foreign financed infrastructure. Pre-packaged design from global north or China has little regard for existing mobility patterns. Uses example of Nairobi expressway: elevated toll road that ignores the 62% of journeys made on foot.

Denis + Pontille 2015

Extend Star’s relational ontology into a study of how material ordering (and the work to keep things in order) requires ongoing, skilled and often invisible labour

Schwanen + Nixon 2019

Four tensions of infrastructure and their effects. (1) Openess + Closure (2) Fixity + Fluidity (3) Unity + Fragmentation (4) Visibility + Invisibilty- critique’s Star 1999 here- visibility depends on positionality of actor in relation to infrastructure- not just if its broken. All tensions are generative of social outcomes- they are all contested and navigated along spectrums. Bridges gap of “what is infrastructure” and “what does it do to social life”

Uribe 2019

‘illegible infrastructures’ - names the roads, paths, and improvised networks that do not register in official planning documents & maps. They are rendered invisible by the standards of legibility imposed by the modern infrastructual ideal (MII)

Goodfellow 2020

Critiques discourse of ‘infrastructure gap’ and ‘gap filling’ and how they are defined to the standards of global finance, not the actuall mobility needs (or existing infrastructures) of African urban residents

Mattern 2018

Maintanence is a theoretical framework, ethos, and political cause, not just a technical necessity. Adds feminist angle- domestic and reproductive labour invisible backbone of maintanence work. However not just a ‘celebration’ of repair work. Romanticising repair risks obscuring the labour inequalitites involved

Plyushteva + Schwanen 2023

Infrastructural rhythms- flooding in Manila low income neighbourhood becomes a routine. Maintanence failures, partial breakdowns are incoperated into the everday + planning of local people.

Stehlin + Millington 2024

De-infrastructuring- challenges assumption that transport policy is always additive. Situated in Sao Paulo and Madrid where urban highways have been removed or repurposed to make way for pedestrians or cyclists. However, argues that the politics of this processs are deeply unequal. Often driven by gentrification + middle class urban imaginaries. Those that put up with disruption of road are displaced when it is removed.

Twidle 2017

South African Higway as a text to be read. concept of the everyday in global south context

Goodfellow + Huang 2021

Push back on concept of purely ‘Chinese’ infrastructure projects in Africa. Always entangles and contested between communities, local goverments, elites. Prospect of resistance and political pressure: Addis Ababa- LRT repurposed from profit-making to subsidised infrastructure with politcal pressure

Agbiboa 2020

Modern Infrastructural Ideal’s (MII) dissmisal of paratransit and alternate mobilities is a form of epistemic violence (Spivak 1988).