Short Abstract

The roundtable explores what STS and Urban Studies can learn from each other by examining the “infrastructural now”: a recursive, anticipatory present where cities are in constant test mode. It combines short talks and open discussion to rethink and discuss analytical repertoires in perpetuation.

Description

What can STS and Urban Studies learn from each other today and how might we move beyond existing analytical repertoires? Asking this requires grasping the now itself as an infrastructural condition. It is a recursive, anticipatory and residually maintained present in which the urban is constantly in test mode. The city no longer only reflects sociotechnical change but becomes the apparatus through which new modes of prediction, care or decay are negotiated; for instance, through digital twins or predictive climate dashboards that simulate unknowns before they arrive.

This roundtable asks what Urban STS can still offer while reconfiguring its analytical registers. We propose that the now is not a passing moment but an infrastructural problem that organizes how cities and their others come to matter: supply chains, digital platforms, institutional routines, atmospheric sensing, material ecologies, and more. In this infrastructural now, cities exist in a state of perpetuation, continuously updated yet never complete, caught in between what is not yet there and what endures from the past.

Extending classic STS engagements with urban artefacts into contemporary modes of sensing, automation and ecological entanglement, this roundtable discussion addresses the infrastructural now as both an analytic and ontological challenge. The roundtable participants consider how methods, knowledge practices, and political imaginations might adapt to a world governed through unfinished infrastructures and ask how research can make this recursive present perceptible and open to new modes of analysis.

The roundtable will take an explorative format, combining short input talks with an open conversational setup to foster collective exchange.