Presentation short abstract

Infrastructural violence is bound to the abandonment of racialized lives. We theorise infrastructure as transformed land to shed light on how urban communities organise against infrastructural violence, showing how reparative politics extends beyond monetary compensation and land claims.

Presentation long abstract

This paper presents the theoretical framework of our edited book project, in preparation, on reparative urban infrastructures. The book collates stories from several urban contexts across Africa, The United States, Latin America, Southeast Asia and Australia, shared via two workshops in 2025. In these events, community organisers and their academic collaborators discussed the range of practices and place-based strategies through which urban infrastructure is reclaimed, repaired, repurposed, and reimagined and what this means for the possibility of abolishing and remaking (infra)structures of harm in cities.

We begin our theorisation with the recognition that infrastructural violence in cities is bound to, and a manifestation of the abandonment of racialized lives. Hence, a politics of abolition and reparations, as both historically located and future oriented, must centre interventions into these urban sites and infrastructures. To clarify the relational and material stakes of this intervention, we propose to understand urban infrastructure as transformed land (echoing UPE’s formulation of cities as transformed nature). Thus, acts of reclaiming and remaking urban infrastructure open new ways for thinking about reparative possibilities: building on but also moving beyond monetary compensation and ‘land back’ claims.

The paper presents vignettes of reparative infrastructural work across contexts, from Sydney, Minneapolis, Santiago, Cape Town, and more, to illustrate how communities are making reparative urban futures for themselves. Taken together, these stories address creative strategies for resisting cycles of (infra)structural violence and methods for actively reclaiming, intervening into, and reimagining these as sites of healing, care, and worldmaking.