Paper short abstract:

Engineers saying places have 'no infrastructure' marginalises landscapes of autonomy, and assumes nothing can be learned from existing skilled practice. The paper confronts natural science hegemony in renewable energy innovation, and brings in alternative concepts of Pluriverse thought and practice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper pursues the panel’s interest in making the invisible visible. During years of work with interdisciplinary groupings such as the Durham Energy Institute and the UK Low Carbon Energy for Development Network, it has been an ethnographically notable fact that engineers and natural scientists are prone to declare parts of the off-grid Global South as places where “there is no infrastructure”. This is not simply a highly partial description of technologically marginalised landscapes, it carries with it a brute assumption that there is nothing to learn from existing practices of lifeways, and new interventions can be designed disregarding local knowledge and capacities of skilled practice. This is effectively a techno-colonially constructed terra nullius. The paper confronts the extent of natural science hegemony in renewable energy innovation, and brings in alternative conceptual pathways that belong more to Pluriverse thought and practice. Examples of hybrid innovation from the Himalayas, Africa and Latin America will provide evidence of grassroots capacities for bottom-up technical practice that is embedded in socio-ecological contexts of livelihood resilience. These provide different narratives of change from techno-interventionist approaches in their visible entanglement with diverse layers of social institutions and environmental governance that enable claims of social justice and solidarity to interweave with possibilities for material innovation. The paper emphasises residual issues of socio-political inequality that infrastructure cannot simply pave over.

Paper short abstract:

By exploring infrastructure through the lens of the creative work of telecommunication engineers, this paper aims to analyse a networked infrastructure as both a material-human assemblage and a product of a contemporary moment in capitalist accumulation.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on PhD research into the technical labour which builds broadband networks, this paper will explore how political economy approaches to infrastructure will give rise to material and relational issues prompting questions about how ostensibly different approaches can usefully be integrated through ethnographic analysis. The starting point for the research was the oligopolistic behaviour of infrastructural capitalism in telecommunications, what has been called “rentierism” by Christophers (2020), and how economic logics played out in the upgrading of the UK’s broadband networks to “full fibre” (comprehensive fibre optic technology). It aimed to show how the labour conditions of the engineers who install and maintain the infrastructure would be affected by the upgrade. However, when the ethnography took an “archeological” approach, tracking the infrastructure through its historically-constituted objects and spaces — its telephone exchanges, wires and access boxes — it showed how these material “layers” were created and repurposed by engineers engaged in problem-solving work over time. These insights showed how working conditions were not only shaped by the logics of oligopoly in the sector, or the defensive responses of the engineers’ union, but also the importance of maintenance, repair and installation work. The engineers’ role is to stabilise the infrastructure, ensuring a functioning broadband service can “get to market”. The paper will critically evaluate a possible integrated approach to infrastructure, using examples of the engineers’ interactions with infrastructural objects, in the segment of the network known as the “Last Mile”, where the final productive activities which deliver broadband services take place.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on a moral economy approach to examine themes of verticality, visibility and values. The development of infrastructures related to the growth of the Everest tourist industry contributes to a double bind: the incompatibility of economic growth and environmental sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

The Nepali state government and private telecommunications corporations have made a committed effort to increase digital connectivity in the largely remote and underdeveloped Solukhumbu (Everest) region in the wake of the earthquake and avalanches in in 2014 and 2015. Newly implemented digital infrastructure has coincided with an increase in the number of tourists arriving in the region, and improvements in tourist infrastructures (accommodation, amenities and services) have followed.

This paper draws on a moral economy approach to examine themes of verticality, visibility and values. The paper argues that the development of digital and other infrastructures related to the growth of the tourist industry in the Solukhumbu contributes to a double bind: a situation of “can’t win”, or the incompatibility of economic growth and environmental sustainability. Through my ongoing fieldwork, I investigate changes, continuities and contradictions in moral reasonings related to infrastructures over time. In the Solukhumbu, such commitments are needed to address challenges posed to livelihoods and the impacts of climate change.

The moral economy of infrastructuring (the ways that infrastructures are subject to stop and start processes, rather than emerging through linear processes) reveals how infrastructuring become a symbolic reflection of anxieties of the cultural order and consequently, the sense of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate that regional populations adhere to while trying to navigate economic aspirations alongside environmental conservation.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Montreal, this paper explores how new infrastructural developments – situated at the intersection between waterfront speculation and grassroots resistance – can become powerful reminders of an obsolete past, thereby showing their anachronistic qualities.

Paper long abstract:

In times of uneven urban development and environmental degradation, urban waterfront areas have become battlegrounds where different future visions are enacted and contested. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Montreal (Canada), this paper explores struggles over a wasteland – a terrain vague – situated next to the industrial port of Montreal. Although the terrain vague epitomizes the aftermaths of de-industrialization - with its trail of social problems and decline - it is now populated by trees, wooded areas and local residents, who rapidly grew attached to one of the very few green spaces in the area. Yet, spontaneous urban nature is supposed to leave space to a major infrastructural development, which will mainly serve the expanding needs of the adjacent port of Montreal and, more broadly, of the global logistics industry. In the context of pressing environmental concerns, new infrastructural projects, instead of signaling economic growth and “modernization”, can become powerful reminders of an obsolete past, thereby showing their anachronistic qualities or, in other words, their lack of synchronization with the multiple urgencies of our times. Thinking about infrastructure and urban space together, I trace the mismatch between institutional promises of “sustainable” and “resilient” urban futures, and grassroots struggles for the right to inhabit healthy and just urban environments. At the same time, by exploring the reinsertion of a marginal space into the speculative dynamics of capitalism at multiple scales, I show how new infrastructural developments speak about evolving (dis)connections between the city and the river – between people and water.

Paper short abstract:

Desert dwellers’ understanding of the “nature” of the Pakistani state in the region of Cholistan, South Punjab, bordering India, is informed by their perception of infrastructural changes that link up to border-making practices as well as the “outsourcing” of sovereignty to the United Arab Emirates.

Paper long abstract:

Infrastructures have social and political lives that provide avenues to understanding the relationship between state, territory, materiality and affect. Addressing infrastructural changes in the Cholistan desert, South Punjab, Pakistan, adjacent to Rajasthan in India, my paper focusses on societal transformations engendered by border-making processes. How do trading, pastoral and peripatetic communities who previously moved freely across the desert, relate to a variety of infrastructural changes that have redone their lifeworlds?

Infrastructure development altered the regional ecology and economy of the Indo-Pak borderlands and contributed to shifting mobility patterns. State constructed canal infrastructures, transporting water into the desert, caused nomadic communities to be settled as sedentary peasants. Along with declining transit routes across the desert, residues of forts and oases, crucial for survival and movement, turned into nostalgic reminders of nomadic pasts and desert livelihoods. However, instead of touristifying existing heritage sites, the Pakistani “rentier state” “outsourced” territorial sovereignty to the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. erected its own infrastructure in the desert: every winter, thousands of Emiratis land with private planes on two exclusively constructed airports, roam with their own vehicles on highways built by themselves through the desert in order to hunt several endangered species, which they actively conserve and breed, too. Emiratis also built two palaces and a fruit orchard, pool local water, and apparently traffic Cholistani girls for sex work. Concentrating on a visible but silenced discourse about dominance, I aim to demonstrate that borderlanders’ subaltern understanding of the state intersects with their perceptions of infrastructural change.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reconsiders the mineral, logistic and aggressive character of Soviet modernity by paying attention to the reproduction and destruction of energy infrastructure. Ethnographically, it shows how extractive activities and the related infrastructure changed the sociality of Eastern Estonia.

Paper long abstract:

During the 20th century, Eastern Estonia experienced industrialization, the birth of an independent state, the patronage of a nationalistic regime, war devastation and occupation, Stalinist repression and deportations, economic and technological stagnation, the articulation of a transition economy with limited financial capacity and know-how, and the integration within global markets and transnational institutions with a particular intensity.

Based on five years of fieldwork in the mining region of Ida-Virumaa, this paper discusses the ways in which secrecy takes place and how a particular kind of sociality has been constituted through the reproduction and destruction of energy infrastructures. The ethnographic research shows how the exploitation of natural resources and the displacement of people and things rarely follow a simple linear trajectory. Instead, they produce complex reverberations and fundamental changes in sociality; because mining, as an ecological incident, does not end with the closure of a mine or an industrial plant, nor with the abandonment of railways, housing, roads and power lines. Years later, once natural resources become just substances again and once the geopolitical wheel spins around, regions such as Eastern Estonia appear as a dead-end, characterized by loss, pollution and stigmatization.

By paying attention to practices of secrecy in relation to energy infrastructure, the paper expands the space for locating culture, politics and infrastructure, showing, in turn, alternative forms of sociality. Secrecy emerges not merely from within the relations among individuals, or between individuals and institutions, but also contingently out of topological, material structures and wider socio-cultural processes and representations.

Paper short abstract:

In the wake of World War II, the Pioneers/Children's Railway traveled across space from Soviet Russia to the Socialist countries to contribute to the making of the “new Soviet person”. It then traveled across time and traversed regimes to become a community space for children in Budapest, Hungary.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that the Children’s Railway can be viewed as a traveling model across space, departing from the Soviet Union after World War II and arriving in Central and Eastern European socialist and Yugoslav countries, to deploy the capacity of infrastructure to “enchant”, promising speed, political integration, and economic prosperity (Harvey and Knox 2012), and contribute to the making of the “new Soviet person” by employing different translations. The Children’s Railway can also be viewed as a traveling model across time, traversing different state regimes and ideologies from the mid-twentieth century to the present day.

Deploying the Spectrum of Translation (Rottenburg, Park, and Behrends 2014), the translation process of the Pioneers Railway from Soviet Russia to the other socialist republics was done under the dominion of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This facilitated the travel of the rationality, as well as the token of the Railway to its different final destinations, with minimal translation. However, when the Railway traveled across time, it adopted a new rationality along the way and underwent radical translation. This translation was driven by the process of decommunization, as well as the structural decoupling of the Railway from other youth-driven Communist institutions. The result was that instead of the Railway being a cog in the bigger machine dedicated to building the ideal Communist citizens, it became a standalone entity that hosts a community and a space for children, for the sake of hosting a community and a space for children.

Paper short abstract:

Flood defensive infrastructures, such as dikes and drains, are not simply hydraulic interventions engineered to disrupt the natural (over)flow of water. This infrastructure exercises agency and elicits affect by manoeuvring space-time to produce new formations of 'infrastructural time'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper brings recent discussions, on the socio-political life of infrastructures (Alderman & Goodwin 2022., Hope & Arsel 2022), and the manoeuvring of time during disasters (Bonilla 2020., Merilainen, E & Koro, M 2021), into conversation with each other. It does so to discuss the ways in which flood defensive infrastructure (dykes, drains) are made real by postcolonial subjects who have lived through a flooding disaster. Drawing on empirical research from a flood affected region in the north coast of Peru, we argue that residents living in urban and semi-urban localities around hydraulic systems believe that non-human hard infrastructure to prevent flooding must be protected. This is not because they value the highly engineered river systems of Rivers Chira and Piura, as modernist progress, in the same way that many state planners do, in fact they are more likely to be sceptical of such large-scale infrastructures. Rather, our research participants from the big and small towns around Piura are strong believers in the emancipatory possibilities of hydraulic infrastructures because of the way in which they are able to manoeuvre, even control, time. Dykes being broken, or sandbag walls being erected at the height of the flooding, gives such (infra)structures immense agency to impact the most precious feeling at that moment (that there is not enough) time till the floodwaters arrive. Through a series of participant stories, locally produced art, outputs from mapping exercises and ethnographic research this paper interrogates the relationship between time and space through ‘infrastructural time’ (Hetherington 2014).

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores transport infrastructures, their temporalities and entanglements in Northern Manitoba, Canada, by discussing concrete moments of change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores transport infrastructures, their temporalities and entanglements in the Subarctic town of Churchill, Canada. The community of 870 people in Northern Manitoba, which is not accessible via roads, is unique in terms of transport infrastructures. It is home to the only deep-water port on the Arctic Ocean that is directly linked to the North American railway system. Due to the former military presence the community has a big airport which is crucial for the growing tourism industry in the “Polar Bear Capital of the World”. The military also constructed a rocket range which was later used by research organizations and a commercial operator before it was finally closed in the 1990s. While the ruins of the Churchill Rocket Range have become a tourist attraction, the Hudson Bay Railway, the Port of Churchill and the town’s airport are still in use and need to be maintained under harsh Subarctic conditions. Since 2021, the railway and port are – for the first time in history – owned by a consortium of local communities. For renovating and reviving these transport infrastructures, the new owners started right away to look for much needed investments. Eventually, recent global crises prompted the governments of Manitoba and Canada to once again invest heavily in these infrastructures. By discussing results from ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and a future scenario workshop, conducted within the ERC project InfraNorth, this paper focuses on infrastructural temporalities (Velkova & Plantin, 2023) through concrete moments of change.

Paper short abstract:

In the context of infrastructural transformation, the role of maintenance and repair is often overlooked. Drawing on Hamburg's gas and water infrastructure, this paper emphasizes the ambiguity of these practices as transformative as well as sustaining, challenging narratives of innovation.

Paper long abstract:

We live in times of crisis. Ecological, economic, political, and social disruptions are shaping global society. The resulting uncertainty gives rise to an urgent need for action. Infrastructures lie at the core of many of these socio-ecological crises, and (technological) innovation is often discussed as an answer to these challenges. This focus neglects the importance of already existing structures, their durability, and thus resistance to rapid, radical change, particularly the role of maintenance and repair practices. On one hand, these practices counteract the constant decay of the material fabric and thereby enable the basic functioning of our society. On the other hand, as various authors in the social sciences and humanities have pointed out, these practices themselves have an inherent potential for transformation.

Drawing on insights from my PhD thesis on Hamburg's gas and water infrastructure in Germany, this paper aims to highlight the inherent ambiguity of maintenance and repair practices and processes. Rooted in geography but employing a methodology that combines participant observation, interviews, and archival research, the study demonstrates the role maintenance and repair play—both presently and historically—in the context of wider (infrastructural) transformation processes. Additionally, by employing theoretical frameworks developed in contexts of the “Global South” to analyze urban processes in the "Global North", this input contributes to ongoing discourses within postcolonial research on the globalization of concepts and theories.