The sub/urban fix

ABSTRACT

There is no shortage of articles, books and prognostications on an urban future dominated by self-driving cars and related tech-driven alternatives. Technological innovation and unrestrained economic growth are generally unquestioned and seen to benefit all of urban society. This contribution to Debates and Interventions shifts the spotlight away from innovation and toward a logic of repair, highlighting the injustices and inequality of the technofix, and specifically the attempts by tech and car companies alike to further entrench the logics of automobility as the hegemonic form of mobility. I situate this dominant legacy in the uneven spaces of the suburbs. The contribution argues for both a forward looking and historical minded view of repair. It turns to circular economic thinking as a way of challenging the neoliberal paradigm of tech mobility: future suburbs can either reproduce the injustices of the automobility century or overcome those injustices with an attention to repairing infrastructural relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Automobility
• repair
• suburbs
• infrastructure
• technofix

Acknowledgement

This paper grew out of a workshop on suburban infrastructure as part of the Global Suburbanisms project. I wish to thank the organizers Pierre Filion and Roger Keil, and all the participants who helped give shape to the ideas in this paper. I would also like to thank the editors of Debates and Interventions, David Wilson and Andrew Jonas, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This point and the discussion that follows owes much to one of the anonymous reviewers who pointed out the ambiguities around repair and collective infrastructure which in the form of public highways have just as easily served automobile-centered lifestyles.