Urban infrastructure as materialized consensus

Abstract

Infrastructure that shapes and facilitates daily life, such as pathways, conduits and boundary walls, constitutes one of the most dynamic forms of architecture in both ancient and modern cities. Although infrastructure is conceived and designed with particular goals and capacities, its temporal and spatial scale means that it is a constant work in progress that engages numerous agents: civic authorities design and implement infrastructure; designated agencies maintain and repair infrastructure; and ordinary people utilize, modify, ignore or destroy it. Infrastructure can be thus analyzed as a materialization of ongoing communication, in which there are often conflicts among different constituents to achieve consensus. The linguistic concepts of expert language and turn-taking are utilized to assess three brief case studies: historical New Orleans; a multipurpose micro-park in Vienna, Austria; and the archaeological city of Sisupalgarh, India.

Keywords:

• Infrastructure
• communication
• performance
• identity
• consensus
• turn-taking

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to my colleague Professor Rabindra Kumar Mohanty for co-directing the Sisupalgarh and Talapada projects, to the many students and staff who worked with us, to the Archaeological Survey of India, the Odisha State Department of Archaeology and the American Institute of Indian Studies. Funding has been provided by the National Science Foundation; the National Geographic Society; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the Ahmanson Foundation; the Department of Anthropology and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh; and the UCLA Academic Senate, Department of Anthropology and Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Thanks go to the Department of Anthropology, UCLA, and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, Brown University for initial presentation of these ideas. I also appreciate the insightful comments provided by Elizabeth DeMarrais and four anonymous reviewers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (USA) Directorate for Biological Sciences [BCS 0550035, BCS 9903399]; National Geographic Society [6525-99, 8165-07]; Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Monica L. Smith

Monica L. Smith is Professor of Anthropology and the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research experience includes more than twenty years of fieldwork in the Indian subcontinent as well as in the Roman Mediterranean and the American Southwest. Previous publications include The Social Construction of Ancient Cities (edited, 2003) and A Prehistory of Ordinary People (2010).