Historicity and Temporality of Infrastructure

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

ARQ, 2023

Focusing on the post-independence municipal administration of Santiago, this article presents a microhistorical exploration of how minor infrastructure projects, such as street paving and bridge repairs, shaped the city's urban fabric, unveiling the political, economic, and social dimensions behind these everyday processes.

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2015

BInfrastructural power^refers to how states Bpenetrate^their societies and also how local organizations resist such attempts. This essay explores the latter sense of infrastructural power. First, it notes aspects of local power in ancient Mesopotamia, tracing the existence of councils and assemblies over about 3000 years and establishing the concept of a Bheterarchy of power^in Mesopotamia, which is a counternarrative to assertions of totalitarian power by kings and central governments. There follows a cross-cultural review of selected other ancient cities and states in order to assess comparable and contrasting local organizations and degrees of infrastructural power. Finally, resistance to state power is explored, and a speculation about the qualities of stability and fragility of political power in early cities and states is advanced. Keywords Power. Early cities and states. Resistance. Fragility Cobb (2014) has recently responded in his essay, BThe Once and Future Archaeology,t o Keith Kintigh et al.'s (2014) article, BGrand Challenges for Archaeology^(Kintigh et al. 2014). Kintigh et al.'s (2014) article attempted to answer the question, BWhat are archaeology's most important scientific challenges?^(p. 5, my emphasis), and Cobb summarized (p. 590) that Bthe resulting challenges embody a strong bent towards a natural science model characterized by a materialist, positivist, and objective outlook.Ĉ obb further noted that

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2015

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and sy...

ARQ , 2023

This article explores the history of the concept of infrastructure, from its origins in 19th-century French railway legislation, its adoption as a metaphor for characterizing the social world, to its international expansion in both military and civilian domains.

Review Essay, 2019

The edited volume is dead, long live the edited volume! While we continue to hear rumours about the imminent death of this publishing format, the three recent edited volumes in infrastructure studies prove that this particular form of knowledge infrastructure still has great potential. Two of them also prove that infrastructure has become a vibrant topic of conversation in the field of social anthropology over the past few years, even if the debate on the agency of things, systems and materials in neighbouring disciplines is a few decades older...

Adaptive Reuse in Latin America: Cultural Identity, Values and Memory, 2024

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, José Bernardi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of José Bernardi to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

OA journal Roadsides, 2019

The inaugural edited collection of the OA e-journal "Roadsides" advances an argument that infrastructure is inherently lively and fragile because it is always a complex web of multiple temporalities. The texts in this collection show a few examples of the variety of temporalities that make and unmake infrastructure in the Canadian Arctic, in Tajikistan, in India, at the eastern borders of the European Union, in Switzerland and in England. Focusing explicitly on those temporalities should provide food for thought in terms of rethinking infrastructure as an asynchronic timescape (Adam 1998). Link to the whole collection: https://roadsides.roadworkasia.com/ejournal/

Urban Technology , 2022

This commentary advances "incompleteness" as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrastructure development as a process that is affected not solely by neoliberal interventions but also sociomaterial practices and inscriptions. As such, incompleteness transcends conventional and completist frames, and complements theorizations of infrastructure since Graham and Marvin's Splintering Urbanism.

Engineering History and Heritage Structures -Viewpoints and Approaches, 2017