1st Edition
Infrastructures and Social Complexity A Companion
Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.
1. Introduction: Infrastructural Complications, (Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen & Atsuro Morita)
Part I: Development Infrastructures
Introduction, (Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen & Atsuro Morita)
2. Keyword: Infrastructure – How a Humble French Engineering Term Shaped the Modern World, (Ashley Carse)
3. Surveying the Future Perfect: Anthropology, Development and the Promise of Infrastructure, (Kregg Hetherington)
4. Containment and Disruption: The Illicit Economies of Infrastructural Investment, (Penny Harvey)
5. Infrastructure Reform in Indigenous Australia: From Mud to Mining to Military Empires, (Tess Lea)
6. Becoming a City: Infrastructural Fetishism and Scattered Urbanization in Vientiane, Laos, (Miki Namba)
Part II: Urban Infrastructures
Introduction, (Atsuro Morita, Casper Bruun Jensen & Penny Harvey)
7. On Pressure and the Politics of Urban Water Infrastructure, (Nikhil Anand)
8. Infrastructuring New Urban Common Worlds? On Material Politics, Civic Attachments and Partially Existing Wind Turbines, (Anders Blok)
9. Remediating Infrastructure: Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network and the New Autonomy, (Michael Fisch)
10. The Generic City: Examples from Jakarta, Indonesia and Maputo, Mozambique, (Morten Nielsen & AbdoulMaliq Simone)
11. Ecologies in Beta: The City as Infrastructure of Apprenticeships, (Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella)
Part III: Energy Infrastructures
Introduction, (Casper Bruun Jensen, Penny Harvey & Atsuro Morita)
12. Living with the Earth: More-than-Human Arrangements in Seismic Landscapes, (James Maguire & Brit Ross Winthereik)
13. Revolutionary Infrastructure, (Dominic
Biography
Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK
Casper Bruun Jensen is Associate Professor/Senior Researcher at Osaka University, Japan
Atsuro Morita is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Japan
