Presentation short abstract

Infrastructural violence is pervasive, yet infrastructures are widely asserted as basic human rights. We advance the notion of convivial infrastructure to overcome the impasse presented by the simultaneous indispensability of infrastructure and the socio-environmental violences that attend it.

Presentation long abstract

Critical scholarship has profoundly reshaped infrastructure studies, exposing the multiple forms of injustice embedded in infrastructural development, operation, decay, and decommissioning. Political ecologists and aligned scholars have productively illuminated how infrastructures can produce environmental destruction, human and other-than-human displacement, pollution, livelihood loss, socio-cultural alienation, resource extraction, and land grabbing. Yet, policymakers and industry stakeholders continue to justify and demand even more infrastructure. This apparent contradiction reflects a basic condition of modern life: networked electricity, water, mobility, and communication are now indispensable, yet the costs of such services are borne unequally while access and availability remain highly inequitable. As infrastructures are asserted as basic human rights, we confront a dilemma: Must we accept the life-curtailing effects of infrastructural development and decay for some in order to secure the networked services we have collectively become unable to live without?

We advance the notion of convivial infrastructure as a way to overcome this impasse. Drawing on cases regarding water resources management and renewable energy in South and Southeast Asia, we consider what characterizes infrastructures that support life and engender more livable worlds. Rather than offer a universal blueprint, we mobilize the concept of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ to argue that convivial infrastructures must be responsive to and situated within their socio-political contexts and as attentive to non-human as human well-being. We introduce convivial infrastructure as both an analytical lens and a political project that reimagines infrastructural systems as sites of justice, care, repair, and collective flourishing.