Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the case of Berlin’s infrastructure history since 1920 to explore how infrastructures are rendered both invisible and visible, what forms infrastructural in/visibility can take and what ends it can serve.

Paper long abstract:

Infrastructures are commonly described as invisible until the services they provide go missing. Ironically, it is the absence of infrastructure provision that makes infrastructures visible in the public realm. This paper takes issue with the underlying assumption behind this narrative that infrastructures are intrinsically invisible. Building on recent scholarship from the fields of human geography, STS, anthropology and the history of technology, it argues that infrastructures are rendered invisible – whether deliberately or unintentionally – in processes of socio-material assembling, disassembling and reassembling. By the same virtue, infrastructures can also be rendered visible, whether through selective modes of representation by providers, regulators and users or by infrastructural artefacts not following the script designed for them. I draw on earlier and ongoing research on the history of Berlin’s energy and water infrastructures over the past century to elucidate processes of making infrastructures visible and invisible. Illustrative examples will include: publicizing the role of utility services in unifying Greater Berlin in the 1920s, making the city’s infrastructure invisible to enemy bombers in the late 1930s, celebrating the inauguration of new power stations and gas works in West Berlin during the Cold War, infrastructure capacity failing to meet demand and concealing the contractual obligations surrounding the privatization of the water utility in 1999. Ultimately, the paper strives to transcend the simple binary of visible/invisible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the different forms infrastructural in/visibility can take and the different ends it can serve.