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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Malagasy president Andry Rajoelina has used urban infrastructure projects to territorialise his political power and create a newly imagined ‘state space’. It argues that this territorialisation process represents a crucial step towards achieving authority and legitimacy.

Paper long abstract:

Like many African capital cities, Antananarivo’s recent development has been based on large-scale infrastructure projects. New housing, hospitals, schools, stadiums, transport infrastructure and a satellite city have materialised at a rapid pace in Antananarivo and its surroundings over the last decade. Those projects, framed as ‘presidential projects’, are designed and implemented by the highest echelons of the national government and its ruling party.

Drawing on recent works in urban political economy as well as anthropological and geographical approaches to the state, this paper explores how Malagasy president Andry Rajoelina has used urban infrastructure projects to territorialise his political power and create a newly imagined ‘state space’ in his image. I argue that this infrastructural territorialisation of presidential power represents a crucial step towards achieving authority and legitimacy. The paper shows how global discourses and imaginations of development as well as national narratives pertaining to royalty and sovereignty are intertwined and territorialised through urban infrastructure to claim political authority, creating a new mode of sovereignty. In doing so, I aim to provide an alternative perspective on the current infrastructure-led development trend in Africa and beyond, which tends to be analysed through the lens of policy mobilities and variegated processes of neoliberalisation, by focusing on the key role mega-infrastructure projects play in national and municipal politics.

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This paper analyzes the co-constitution of infrastructures in the Dominican-Haitian borderland. Building on the concept of people as infrastructure, this paper highlights the agency of subaltern people in infrastructural works and discusses their intended (in)visibilities.

Paper long abstract:

Since its independence, the Dominican state has been using infrastructural projects as a means to differentiate itself from its neighboring state Haiti. Currently, under the government of president Luis Abinader, a new wave of state building through infrastructure can be observed. People living in the Dominican-Haitian borderland suffer heavily from the every-day structural violence by the Dominican state and its demarcation efforts as they have been depending on mutual economic exchange since colonial times.

In this paper I build upon AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of "people as infrastructure" in order “to render people’s actions as technical”. Drawing on the data of my 6-months ethnographic field work in the Haitian-Dominican Borderland I argue that the socio-economic marginalized borderland population strategically creates social networks across state borders based on a place-specific form of creating “kin” and thus “family”. Such Lakou networks safeguard the circulation of people and goods in a particular manner even in times of crisis and closed state borders. I claim that people as infrastructure, therefore, not only fill gaps when state infrastructures fail, but also create alternative infrastructures in order to contest and circumvent state projects and borders.

A focus on the entanglement of infrastructures can contribute to a better understanding on the co-constitution of infrastructures. It further sheds light on the intended (in)visibilities of infrastructural projects. Such an approach can bring to the fore the agency of subaltern people and their potential to create barely perceivable alternative infrastructural works.

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Infrastructures make territories in ways that exceed their purpose as infrastructures, properly speaking. In their design and construction, they transform landscapes, changing affordances of place and radically redefining how land is used. This paper examines the case of Valsusa, Northwestern Italy.

Paper long abstract:

Valsusa has long been one of the major corridors of travel across the Alps. In the last fifty years it has become a site of intense infrastructural development, most recently with the contentious plan to drill the world's longest railway tunnel beneath the mountains of the valley. The tunnel is part of the new Lyon Turin railway line (NLTL), a flagship project in the EU's trans-European network transport (TEN-T) initiative.

This paper is drawn from my doctoral research in Valsusa, a major Alpine valley in Northwestern Italy between the city of Turin and the French border, in which I conducted ethnographic research between 2020 and 2022, examining the contested territorialisation of infrastructure in Valsusa, the profound transformations that are occurring in the Valsusan territory today as a result of infrastructural development, and how these transformations are experienced by those who dwell in the margins of major infrastructural worksites.

In this paper, I argue that the territorialisation of infrastructure exceeds the narrow purpose of an infrastructure itself. Infrastructures make territories in ways that go far beyond their stated purposes as infrastructures, changing a territory's ecology, its affordances, and its governance. Indeed, the NLTL is still at least a decade away from being completed, and yet its planning, design and construction already amounts to an enormous impact upon the territory.

Drawing on Kallionos et al's (2022) concept of infrastructural harm, I pay attention to the temporalities, spatialities and visibilities of infrastructure in Valsusa, centering questions of power and sovereignty in my analysis.

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My paper delves the conflicts between the aspirations of Quechua populations for a development imbued with capitalist characteristics and the intellectuals’ vision for the future, advocating the suspension of an airport infrastructure to safeguard the landscape and the traditional Andean lifestyle.

Paper long abstract:

My paper delves into the conflicts that arise when infrastructure remains a project whit uncertain construction prospects. In 2020, the Peruvian government announced the construction of an international airport in the Chinchero district (Urubamba province, Cusco region). The statement provoked a fierce response from both Peruvian and international intellectuals, who argued that the airport would jeopardize the intangible heritage of humanity, local archaeological sites, and the rural landscape.

Conversely, local peasants expressed optimism, anticipating that the infrastructure would transform the town into a “modern city”, complete with roads, concrete houses, malls, etc. fostering the expectation that such development would generate new employment opportunities. A local leader encapsulated the stance of Chincherinos affirming: “The airport is our future”. This sentiment stems from the conviction that the airport will provide an avenue to transition away from farming. Local organizations are so committed with the infrastructure project that they have rallied to demand the government to proceed with the construction of an airport, eagerly awaited for fifty years.

Leveraging data gathered since my fieldwork commencement in 2013 in Chinchero, I will analyze the tension between the aspirations of the peasant populations for a development imbued with capitalist characteristics and the intellectuals’ vision for the future, advocating the suspension of the project to safeguard the preservation of the traditional lifestyle. This case shows that even before their construction, infrastructure is at the core of social transformation in Quechua societies, whose population are already creating networks to engage with invisible yet expected state-planned technological objects.

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In Brazilian working-class neighborhoods, residents welcome street paving as progress, diverging from ongoing Western trends. This perception reflects the inhabitants' relationship to space, but also a political strategy favoring their settlement in former rural areas.

Paper long abstract:

“The progress (progresso) is coming!” This is how the residents of Jardim Maravilha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest “irregular settlement” (loteamento irregular), welcome the authorities’ street paving. In 2011, the dirt road where I conducted my doctoral research, bordered by shrubs and thickets, was paved. While I understood the benefits for residents, I couldn’t fathom why they sought to erase all greenery, pressuring the municipality to concrete the entire sidewalk. At a time when Western countries are removing asphalt from streets to cool the air, in Rio’s poor neighborhoods, the residents applaud the new pavement.

Do these people remain captive to an “ideology of progress,” while we Westerners recognize its limitations? I argue that this adherence to “progress” is not an outdated belief, but a historically situated “perception,” in Tim Ingold’s sense. On the hone hand, residents, often from rural areas, replicate the same relationship to space as in agricultural settings: space becomes inhabitable once “cleared” (limpa) of undesirable elements, especially wild vegetation (mato). On the other hand, the lack of infrastructure is a political strategy: to ensure housing access for the working class without direct financing, Brazilian elites chose to facilitate their settlement in former rural areas, sacrificing urban comfort.

Examining this category of “progress” allows us to overcome the opposition between ontological and materialist approaches to infrastructure: it makes sense only related to the historical experience of the Brazilian proletariat, constantly tasked with clearing space, while elites refuse to allocate part of the social product to improve living conditions.

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Paper short abstract:

Living with unbuilt or devastated island infrastructure affects everyday life of islanders and often limits their economic development. Infrastructural projects that have remained unrealized for long create permanent conditions of waiting, suspended present and future.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we present ethnographic research on unbuilt and neglected water infrastructure on two Croatian islands: Žirje and Hvar in 2024 to illuminate the changing experience of development in isolated communities. The analysis reveals that the state, as a historical and political authority, has the central role in infrastructural development meeting the needs and cost-effectiveness.

If the state is theorized through roads, the islands are inhabited because of and due to accessible water (Carse and Kneas, 2019). This implies a persistent effort of building and reconstructing infrastructure for otherwise decreasing number local population. Paradoxically, the business aspects of island tourism in the wider context significantly increase the national and local income. In this situation, small islands, as well as the more isolated parts of larger islands, find themselves in a non-sustainable position, relying on small and uncertain initiatives for building infrastructure.

The infrastructure analysis is based on two main approaches illustrating the relationship between the islanders and the state. The first level of analysis encompasses the state's role in constructing infrastructure, while the second level focuses on the islanders' initiatives to bridge the gap between their needs and neglected infrastructure. For islanders, the development of infrastructure is linked to historical significance, pride, cultural development and identity, while for the state, it challenges economic profitability in times of permanent and overlapping crises.

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Drawing on ethnographic material gathered in the Greek town of Florina, the paper traces the infrastructural, social, and economic worlds that lignite assembled over the years and argues that ongoing energy transition processes suspend various grids of relationality.

Paper long abstract:

The European Green Deal sets out to turn Europe into the first carbon neutral continent in the world by 2050. In the case of Greece, the path to decarbonisation marks the end of the county’s long history of lignite dependence. In a speech delivered at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, Prime Minister Mitsotakis announced the closing of most lignite-fired power plants by 2023 and a complete end to lignite use by 2028, thus inaugurating the country’s post-lignite transition era and turning Greece into a ‘frontrunner’ in European decarbonisation. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered in the Greek town of Florina between 2022 and 2023, the paper traces the infrastructural, social, and economic worlds that lignite assembled over the years. It then zooms into processes of decay and ruination, and addresses the various renewable energy infrastructures that are taking over the spaces that were once animated by lignite. The paper argues that ongoing energy transition processes suspend various grids of relationality, previously enabled through lignite and its infrastructures. The land that was previously valuable by means of its extractive potential and established relations of recompense between landholders and the state, is growing worthless. The vast economies of clientelism that were previously fuelled by lignite are gradually giving way to renewable energy mega-projects, the financial benefits of which are questionable and available to select few. Finally, the rapid erection of massive wind turbines and vast photovoltaic fields severs ties between people and their material and social environments — often in irreversible ways.

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The paper analyzes the debate around waste treatment infrastructure in Sofia(2007-2022). Set within the framework of incineration pros and cons, the debate shifts the focus from implementing waste treatment solutions towards polarization arising from the waste imaginary causing questionable choices.

Paper long abstract:

Waste is a problematic materiality (Edensor, 2005) and as such impacts deeply on policies and treatment strategies. Environmental concerns are often outweighed by political agendas and economic interests (Alexander, 2012; Gille, 2007; MacBride, 2012). Because of waste's imaginary and materiality its treatment is often disproportionally outsourced to vulnerable communities (Alexander, 2012; Nixon, 2013; Pellow, 2007, 2004; Венков, 2023). This not only makes visible social hierarchies but also reinforces the feeling of belonging to the periphery for populations implicated in the process. A number of studies have demonstrated that waste treatment facilities serve as a basis for social cohesion(Cirelli and Maccaglia, 2019), however, a lack of a social contract regarding waste infrastructures not only polarizes societies, but also threatens to endanger the attainment of sustainable environmental solutions. My presentation will analyze the debate surrounding the waste treatment facilities in Sofia in 2007-2023 from an anthropological perspective. Set within the framework of incineration pros and cons, the debate shifts the focus from finding and implementing waste treatment solutions towards polarization arising from the waste imaginary. Very little is being said and done in terms of waste reduction, not only at the individual level, but also at the macro and production level. Public decisions are torn between NIMBY and the need to make a decision (administrative, substantive). This determines the location of part of the facilities but also its whole infrastructure while the environmental, social and cultural impacts are not comprehensively considered.

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Exploring the UK's canals, the presentation examines their social life and a historical transformation from vital transport routes to spaces of wellbeing and sites where the production of nature and the built environment intersect, shaping urban life between tensions of development and preservation.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation delves into an anthropology of infrastructure, focusing on the urban canals in the UK as sites where the production of nature and the built environment intersect. I will examine the British canal network as a complex infrastructural socio-natural entity, navigating the spaces between public and private, and weaving together historical legacies and various narratives about it with contemporary urban life. The paper is based on data collected through ethnographic fieldwork on the canals in and around Manchester (participant observation and in-depth interviews) and looks at the processes through which canals are both shaped by and actively shape the social fabric and material infrastructure of the city. I will trace how the canals have transformed from being vital transport routes into obsolete infrastructure and what role do they play in the contemporary UK as increasingly important arenas for understanding the ongoing tensions between preserving their distinctive characteristics and the pressures of neoliberal urban development. Looking at infrastructure not as a research object but instead a perspective for analysis (Buier, 2023) I will discuss the importance of strategically managing the delicate equilibrium within urban canal settings and discuss the broader implications of such an approach for future waterfront development projects.

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Paper short abstract:

My presentation acknowledges political, theoretical, and methodological differences between the anthropology of infrastructure and uneven development scholarship but argues that the two fields form a complementary research agenda that is theoretically heterogenous and empirically comprehensive.

Paper long abstract:

If we depart from new materialism, the anthropology of infrastructure (AOI) can hardly uncover the political-economic drivers behind the global “infrastructural moment”. Yet, what if we start from Foucault’s influence, especially his work on ideology? Would the AOI remain analytically diluted and incommensurable with uneven development (UD) scholarship?

My contribution advances two arguments. First, both fields avoid the fetishization of the built environment through revealing different but complementary relations that guide spatial expansion. AOI is primarily concerned with ideological effects, with the enlargement of the logistical power of the state/corporations. On the other hand, UD highlights the ways places, classes and capital are mutually co-produced symbolically and materially. Notably, UD became methodologically closer to AOI with its recent move from structuralist towards historical-ethnographic studies. The second argument claims that both converge at the politics of the built environment. AOI focuses on distributive justice, and the governance of differentiated populations through developmental projects. UD looks at processes of valorization, as well as the strategies of the state and capital to compete through the production of scales. Therefore, points of convergence can be found in: “poetics of infrastructure” enabling us to look at the common sense of unevenness; changing ideological and socio-economic effects that follow modes of investments; and in a comparison of the ways politico-economic regimes deal with geographical unevenness through history. My presentation acknowledges their political, theoretical, and methodological differences between them, but argues that the two fields form a complementary research agenda that is theoretically heterogenous and empirically comprehensive.

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Paper short abstract:

While Prato’s Chinatown is still seen by many as a place of tension and decay after four decades of constant Chinese migration, groups of K-pop and anime fans, as well as language and food enthusiasts use their skills, knowledge, and networks to change the status quo.

Paper long abstract:

Starting from Abdelmaliq al Simone’s idea that people in cities form a human infrastructure that connects individuals, institutions, spaces, and processes that make the city work at any given time (2021, 2004), I look at how cosmopolitan consumers of East Asian pop culture deploy to transform tensions generated by migration in Prato, an Italian city next to Florence.

Macrolloto Zero, a former industrial neighborhood, was the recipient of massive Chinese immigration in the 1990s and the 2000s. The neighborhood wears a spatial and social stigma (Waqcuant, 2007), seen as a decaying urban space.

Pieces of urban human infrastructure have been deployed over the years to work towards social inclusion and incorporation of migrants in urban life – social centers, schools, cultural associations, religious institutions, and political actors. Enthusiasts of East Asian pop culture may not seem significant.

After a year of ethnographic work in Prato’s Chinatown, I argue that due to the increasing popularity of East Asian cinema and the music industry in the past decade, the number of fans in search of a place that connects them to the culture they admire created a new consumption demand for Chinatown.

In this paper I look at how some of these enthusiasts use their skills, knowledge, and networks to form associations, organize events, and lobby institutions, thus creating pieces of human infrastructure deployed to renegotiate the spatial and social stigma. They turn the “dirty stinky China” picture painted by anti-immigration voices into the “cool Asia next door”.

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Paper short abstract:

Based on an international study on public libraries, we argue that the concept of infrastructure serves as a boundary object (Leigh Star) to create trans-disciplinary research. Scholars, librarians, patrons and other stakeholders work together to strengthen practices of care in and for libraries.

Paper long abstract:

Based on research in the international, EU-funded project “Infrastructuring Libraries in Transformation” (ILIT) on public libraries in Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands, we argue that the concept of infrastructure may serve as a “boundary object” (Leigh Star) in trans-disciplinary research. This allows us to conceptualise the shared ground where academics of different disciplinary backgrounds, librarians, patrons and other stakeholders work together to strengthen practices of care in and for libraries.

Why and how does the notion of infrastructure allow for non-consensual cooperation as a boundary object (Leigh Star)? We will describe how we replace it by “infrastructuring” when discussing within the interdisciplinary project team and turn it into the political verb “librarising” (Rivano-Eckerdal) to suit our specific research field. With regard to our transdisciplinary partners we are stretching it to include the social (Klinenberg), a notion that is widely shared in the field of libraries. We elaborate how this helps to (1) delineate a shared ground where interdisciplinary practice (anthropology, geography, political science, library studies) meets the world of librarians, patrons and other stakeholders, (2) adapt “infrastructure” to the specific situation in libraries by using it as a political verb, (3) capitalize on its interpretative flexibility (as libraries vary in size, style, and between different countries) without stretching it so far that it loses analytical capacity.

Overall, we hold that this theoretical promiscuity and the crossing of boundaries are productive especially in applied research, when applied with care and attention to the specificities of empirical field and research question.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the lens of the anthropology of infrastructure to present some preliminary reflections from a study on the emerging interface between universities and cities. I focus on the physical and digital expansion of UK inner city universities through university-anchored innovation districts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers reflections on the preliminary findings of an ongoing project that studies the role of public universities in contemporary urban transformation processes through an in-depth analysis of university-anchored innovation districts (UAIDs) in three UK cities. UAIDs are development strategies boosting large-scale urban regeneration through the clustering of scientific and business activity, in which universities serve as anchor institutions, acting as fundraisers, science and business incubators, landowners and vendors, employers and producers of high-skilled workers. Questions of how universities accommodate these functions, and the new assemblages of built environment, labour provision and knowledge and financial infrastructure, are not addressed in contemporary education scholarship or within a single research programme. Mapping the actors and processes involved in UAIDs in London, Glasgow and Manchester through the competing lenses of commercialisation and assetisation, I discuss the emergent interfaces between universities and cities and the repurposing of old and development of new physical and digital infrastructure of public higher education and how it profoundly shapes urban landscapes.

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Avoiding a binary either-or decision between historical materialism and new materialism, our infrastructures of value approach highlights the relational materiality of seemingly immaterial value. Instead of polarised commitments, this offers new perspectives on capitalism and supposed alternatives.

Paper long abstract:

Our infrastructures of value approach offers economic anthropology insights in the relational materiality of seemingly immaterial value. Rather than forcing a binary either-or decision between the critique of political economy and the ontology of more-than-human assemblages, we think it is most fruitful – both academically and politically – to develop infrastructure as a lens that enables new perspectives on capitalism and its supposed alternatives. We discuss this productivity of infrastructure studies through two ethnographic cases: Analytical attention to the materiality of information infrastructure in a food network in China allows insights beyond the theoretical ventriloquism of activist critics of capitalist agriculture and the theoretical puppetry of organisers of alternative economies who are well-versed in social theory; and a focus on the modularity and interplay of technological and agronomic infrastructure in Serbia grasps the surprising compatibility of socialist and capitalist projects with their seemingly incommensurable values. In both cases, looking at infrastructures of value directs our attention beyond the usual suspects that populate critiques of capitalism – such as capitalists and workers – to the undergirding work of non-human beings (roads, labels, plants and social science concepts) and experts (not only engineers, but also agronomists and social scientists). Infrastructuring value thus means uncovering often overlooked practices that materially shape value by generating relevant, larger wholes without being in full control. Untangling this meshwork of infrastructured value may not offer clear visions for post-capitalist futures. But in a present that is already more-than-capitalist it charts new terrain for struggles and alliances.

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Paper short abstract:

Problematizing the dichotomy between ontology and political-economy in the anthropology of infrastructure, this paper argues that the conceptual and empirical unruliness of infrastructures can be stabilized by a (re)examination of the notions of sociotechnicality, scalability, and causality.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on Buier’s (2023) recent critique of the anthropology of infrastructure, this paper advocates for a re-thinking and re-consolidation of the diverse scholarship on infrastructures. Accordingly, I begin by reassessing the genealogy of transdisciplinary cross-fertilization—between anthropology, STS, geography—that stabilized infrastructure as an object of study at end of the 20th century, particularly through the notion of sociotechnical systems or assemblages (Akrich 1992; Pfaffenberger 1988, 1992). Second, as sociotechnical systems, infrastructures are both embedded in, and extend across, time and space. They are at once imaginary and immediate for planners, designers, users, and fixers (Anand, Gupta and Appel 2018). Thus, the apparent dichotomy between relationality/ontology and politics/economy has more to do with the scale-making properties of infrastructure, rather than having some presumed homology within capitalist modernity. Third, taking the case of infrastructural repair and maintenance of Mumbai’s suburban railway network, this paper argues that the anthropology of infrastructure is well-suited to explore the elusive notion of causality or causal mechanisms in the social sciences, particularly from the vantage of care and repair studies (Bhan 2019; Henke and Sims 2020; Mattern 2018; also, Chakraborty 2023). This paper attempts to address the following questions: Which actors—human and nonhuman alike—bear the uneven and unjust burdens of infrastructural breakdowns and failure? What are the assemblages—people, objects, discourses, and so on—that are tasked with building and sustaining infrastructures? What political formations are either sustained or challenged through such interventions, and how?