Short abstract:

The conceptual contribution discusses the concept of temporary infrastructure in crisis and transformation. Focussing on the effects of temporal boundary work it highlights how temporary infrastructure enables prefiguration, experimentation, exploration, mediation, construction and colonisation.

Long abstract:

The boom in infrastructure studies is accompanied by a critical questioning of the taken-for-grantedness of infrastructural entities. Maintenance, decay, and ruin have replaced the idea of eternal progress and permanent provision. But while critical scholars emphasised these forms of what might be called ontological and practical temporariness, there is still a lack of attention to explicitly planned temporary infrastructure – a type of infrastructure that has come to the fore during recent crises: the protest camps of the so-called Arab Spring, the front lines of the Russian war against Ukraine, or the pop-up bike lanes of the Covid19 pandemic are examples of this broader type of infrastructure that has accompanied human life forms for millennia.

In this paper I will argue that temporary infrastructure is deeply connected to processes of transformation and crisis. In both modes of socio-material change, the conditions of practice are constantly shifting, making long-term planning and anticipation difficult (Jürgen Link). Nevertheless, the normative openness and over-complexity of crisis (Gramsci) can also bring new forms of life to the fore. Recently, we have also witnessed how once permanent infrastructures such as fossil and nuclear power plants become temporary in planned processes of decommissioning.

The crucial feature that makes temporary infrastructure an important aspect of transformation is temporal boundary work that creates limited life spans that regulate the "form investments" of infrastructuring (Théveneut). The paper also presents a theoretical typology with empirical examples of practices of futuring with temporary infrastructure, including prefiguration, experimentation, exploration, mediation, construction and colonisation.