Critical Urban Infrastructure

The infrastructure age is upon us. Or at least that is the impression given as the task to address growing pressures brought forth by urbanization, under investment of social and public forms of infrastructure (e.g. social housing and public transport) and growing spatial inequality mounts. Big infrastructure projects are variously spruiked on the political stage, serving as lightening rods for community aspirations and frustrations. However alongside the mega-project national economic and security critical infrastructure politics and bluster lies the everyday nature of infrastructure that weaves its way ubiquitously through time, space and place. This is the taken for granted infrastructure that quietly co-exists in the form of digital technology, sewerage systems, energy, communications, global financial systems, food systems, housing, nature strips and urban tree programs etc. – until something goes wrong and human dependencies and vulnerabilities are painfully exposed.

Urban infrastructure, despite its pervasiveness and criticality, is an under-explored area of critical urban research, policy and practice. The study of infrastructure has been described by Star (1999, p. 376) as “mundane to the point of boring, involving things such as plugs, standards and bureaucratic forms”. In the Ethnography of Infrastructure she invokes an image of infrastructure as “frequently unexciting with lists of numbers and technical specifications, and hidden mechanisms subtending those processes more familiar to social scientists” (p. 377). It has been largely the purview of engineers and “big end of town” politics, as opposed to local scale community sovereignty and responsibility. Yet urban infrastructure shapes our cities socially, environmentally and politically. Infrastructure can divide communities and bring communities together; it can address one environmental concern and create a new one; it can be bought sold and co-owned. Urban infrastructure decisions may also affect different parts of the city to different degrees, which can result in varying patterns of socio‐spatial disadvantage and inequity. Whilst infrastructure can change urban landscapes, it is also shaped by and through the forces that act upon it.

Following Troy (1999, p. 1) this special issue seeks to address this by “focusing interest in and debate on” the critical urban infrastructure networks and rationalities that shape and define the city. Part of this agenda is around expanding our understanding of what constitutes critical urban infrastructure, which is far more than merely the sum of its physical parts. Whilst Troy’s emphasis was on urban institutions as opposed to critical infrastructure, the degree to which the two concepts are enmeshed and overlap is increasingly complex, if not always recognised or acted on. To this end the public and/or private nature of infrastructure, its regulation by government intrumentalities, it’s relationality to other infrastructures, communities and institutions through interconnections and interdependencies are all a critical part of the contemporary infrastructure story that need to be better understood and communicated. Simultaneously both visible and invisible, the data, networks and technologies of critical urban infrastructure paradoxically inhabit the nexus of the polemic: being both mundane and the revolutionary; serving the esoteric and the necessity of the human condition.

In particular Troy (1999) lamented that at the end of the twentieth century there were few women who focused on urban ignitions/infrastructure and “this problem, this limitation” might one day be overcome with a greater number of female scholars and collaborators working in the area. This special issue is co-edited by two female urban scholars with backgrounds in planning, geography, literature and philosophy, and a number of the contributing authors are women, alongside our male colleagues. We hope that this diversity of contribution and perspective helps to extend the lens through which we see infrastructure: as relational; ecological; as everyday practice; as inherently political; as embedded in questions of human and non-human justice and equity, fiscal transparency, institutional accountability; and with a particular emphasis on the critical role of infrastructure as part of a public urban commons.

Our collective ambition in this special issue is to reframe critical infrastructure as an interdisciplinary agenda that offers important insights into the priorities, fetishes and organising systems and technologies of the age in a climate of change. In the words of Star (1999, p. 377): “to restore narrative to what appear to be just dead lists”. We focus here on two key themes that cut across the papers in this special issue: (1) the public good (which focuses on urban policy and planning manifestations of infrastructure); and (2) the infrastructure imagination (which attends to the conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenge and opportunity currently afforded us).

The public good

In the Australian city there has been a growing concern about the disconnect infrastructure planning and delivery has to strategic planning (Dodson 2009). In addition to the strategic planning “gap”, the delivery, procurement and ongoing management of urban infrastructure expose the extent to which infrastructure planning has been influenced and shaped by neoliberal forces in urban planning favoring market forces (O’Neill 2010). This is compounded by decision-makers privileging economic rationality as the foundation for urban infrastructure decision-making, rendering invisible social and environmental measures upon which decisions can better align with broader “public interest” goals (Campbell and Marshall 2000, 2002).

To address these concerns the creation of statutory infrastructure agencies foregrounds the criticality of urban infrastructure planning and delivery across Australian State and Commonwealth policy agendas. In Australia and since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) there has been a plethora of infrastructure oriented policy announcements by all tiers of government, but namely federal and state governments to build and maintain economic prosperity through the creation of jobs. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, when facing the threat of a recession following the GFC, in 2008 announced a stimulus package to fund “critical infrastructure” (Brisbane Times 2008). This was observed acutely through the introduction of the Social Housing Initiative as part of the Commonwealth Government’s two year $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan in 2009–2010 (Australian Government 2008). Perhaps also reflecting calls for further investment in critical social infrastructure such as affordable and social housing which had remained underfunded in recent years (Milligan and Pinnegar 2010), there has been an observable shift towards thinking about housing as infrastructure reflecting the job creating opportunities that arise (Maclennan et al. 2015, Pradolin 2016). In contrast to housing, public transport remains a second order priority to large-scale road building efforts in Victoria (East West Link, Western Distributor, North East Link), New South Wales (Westconnex) and Western Australia (Perth Freight Link) despite efforts to build light rail and expand heavy rail services in these states.

More recently, and as evidenced by the recent Commonwealth Smart City Plan, the centrality of economic benefit arising from infrastructure investments endures. Policy language continues to privilege jobs creation, innovation and growing local and regional economies as the frame upon which infrastructure decisions and investment priorities are determined. Despite an ongoing focus on cost benefits, a shift to prioritising social and green infrastructure is evident in countries including Canada where the Federal government of Canada, under Justin Trudeau, announced $60 billion of infrastructure over 10 years (including the promises made under the Conservative Harper government totalling $125 billion) to be spent on public transit, green infrastructure and social infrastructure (Hall 2016).

As Australian cities are challenged by mobility problems, including those related to access and accessibility (Curtis and Scheurer 2016), independent reports such as the Victorian Auditor-General’s (2013) continue to reveal the many ways in which Australian cities are becoming more inequitable. And as the Australian city continues to physically expand, Dodson and Sipe (2008) argue the growing vulnerability of those living in the outer suburban communities across metropolitan regions to fluctuations in oil pricing and availability, which is reinforced by a lack of alternative transport infrastructure. Concerned that the politics of infrastructure planning hampers efforts to deliver “needed” urban infrastructure in the areas of the city of greatest “need”, a call to depoliticize infrastructure planning and delivery fails to acknowledge that the very act of determining how scarce resources will be distributed across the city in the form of new infrastructure is inherently political: who decides how investments are distributed, the sequencing of delivery, the source of funding, not to mention the design, technology, management and ongoing operations can often form the basis upon which communities and local governments resist or welcome infrastructure investments.

Beyond government policy, unsolicited and market-led proposals, which are punctuating urban infrastructure debates, are raising important questions about the role of the market and strategic planning in steering investment proposals, and how the governance of these kinds of proposals might come to be. Critical engagement with the recently announced Consolidated Land and Rail Australia (CLARA) proposal to build a high-speed rail project to activate land development and employment creation along its corridor, exposes ongoing fractures between strategic planning and infrastructure building. CLARA currently provides yet another example of market encroachment onto the strategic and public planning of Australian cities and landscapes. Much of the arguments against the CLARA proposal focus on the economic viability over and above its social and environmental benefits as Australian capital cities in the east struggle to accommodate growth in population and the restructuring of their economies. Transport experts warn that this plan is nothing more than a “property development idea”. But this project also renders visible the challenges besetting governance oversight and strategic engagement with infrastructure planning and raises interesting questions not only about what types of infrastructure (e.g. housing, IT, transport, etc.) and technologies (e.g. buses versus light rail) ought to be considered critical or not, but also highlights the social and political processes upon which criticality is claimed, and who is driving these processes.

The infrastructure imagination

How we conceive of urban infrastructure is critically important to the ways in which it will ultimately be framed, accepted and understood within the broader community. Critical infrastructure as a multidimensional and lived phenomenon is as much about space, place, ecology and culture, as it is about pipes, scaffolding, wire and concrete. As Graham and Marvin (2001) highlight, infrastructure systems enable the circulation of knowledge, meaning and power, as well as facilitate the mobility of people and goods. To this end new ways of conceptualising critical urban infrastructure need to be embedded within the interdisciplinary work that is beginning to take place. As O’Neill (2010, p. 1) observes critical urban infrastructure requires “new thinking and approaches in the twenty-first century”.

In particular insights from political ecology, socio-technical studies, critical geography and anthropology have helped to broaden the infrastructure imagination and conditions of possibility. Anthropologist Star (1999, p. 381) for example, defines the critical features of urban infrastructure as:

•	Embedded – infrastructure is sunk into and inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies.
•	Transparent (and largely invisible) – infrastructure once established, reappears only at moments of upheaval or breakdown.
•	Defined by its reach – infrastructure extends beyond particular spatial or temporal locations.
•	Learned – infrastructure becomes taken-for granted as a part of membership within particular professional, social, or cultural communities.
•	Deeply linked with conventions of practice – infrastructure both shapes and is shaped with other forms of routinized social action.
•	Built on, shaped and constrained by its relationship to an already installed base.
•	Fixed and changed in modular increments infrastructure shifts through complex processes of negotiation and mutual adjustment with adjacent systems, structures, and practices.

For social scientists infrastructure can be understood as a sociopolitical agenda focused on institutional relations and historical concentrations of power, control and access. As Dourish and Bell (2007, p. 415) highlight this involves both: (1) the practical organisation of space – how spatial arrangements provide an infrastructure for the ongoing achievement of concerted action; and (2) the cultural organisation of space – how the organisation of space becomes an infrastructure for the collective production and enactment of cultural meaning. They describe this as the infrastructure of experience which focuses

not so much on the ways in which infrastructures reflect institutional relationships and more on how they shape individual actions and experience … the ways in which infrastructure, rather than being hidden from view, becomes visible through our increasing dependence upon it for the practice of everyday life. (p. 416)

Their focus was to:

… draw attention to the ways in which, in turn, the embedding of a range of infrastructures into everyday space shapes our experience of that space and provides a framework through which our encounters with space take on meaning. The experiential reading of infrastructure, then, sees infrastructure and everyday life as coextensive; accordingly, it encompasses not just technological but also the social and the cultural structures of experience (Dourish and Bell 2007, p. 417).

More recently Graham and McFarlane (2015) in their book Infrastructural Lives emphasise the importance of everyday infrastructure in context. They argue that the everyday is significant for it is “both a key domain through which practices are regulated and normalised, as well as an arena for negotiation, resistance and points of difference” (p. 2). To this end they point to four key guiding themes for re-engaging the critical infrastructure imagination in research, planning and policy:

(1)	Knowing infrastructure – understanding the relations between infrastructure and urban life.
(2)	Being excluded from infrastructure – understanding violence and dispossession.
(3)	Producing and managing infrastructure – understanding processes of normalisation.
(4)	Experimenting with infrastructure – understanding the creative process of infrastructure.

This special issue works across these critical vectors to focus attention on critical urban infrastructure as a contemporary urban research, policy and planning agenda. What’s critical about critical infrastructure is the driving question in the conceptual article offered by Wendy Steele, Karen Hussey and Stephen Dovers. In particular they highlight the shifting nature of criticality within urban infrastructure and argue that what is critical in urban infrastructure regimes is not just recognition of their vulnerability and interconnectedness, but the key linkages between critical infrastructure and human and environmental systems integrity and equity. Crystal Legacy picks up the theme of urgency and explores how it can be used to support subversions to the governance of infrastructure planning. Drawing attention to the political, institutional and economic context that infrastructure planning is embedded within the paper raises questions about how contextual frames reproduce certain rationalities and motivations, over other frames that might inspire more just and ecologically centered responses.

With a critical focus on digital infrastructure and urban governance Sarah Barns, Ellie Cosgrove, Michele Acuto and Donald McNeill highlight the contested politics of the “smart city” with reference to international developments. In particular the article draws attention to the digital infrastructures that underpin the urban polity, the impact of this digital infrastructure on the strategic agendas set out by local governments and the role of global technology providers in shaping the urban governance agenda around digital policy. Pierre Filion and Roger Keil extend this international lens to the global urban periphery with their focus on the political economy, political ecology and politics of suburban infrastructures. To this end they focus on the politics of suburban infrastructures and argue that suburbs provide both: (1) an ideal object of study to identify infrastructure shortcomings in the urban age: and (2) are a key source of emergent infrastructure innovation.

Managing the private financing of urban infrastructure is the theme of the article by Phillip O’Neill who critically examines the intersection of private finance and the delivery and operation of urban infrastructure. The shift to private infrastructure financing for urban planning in the ownership and control of Australia’s urban infrastructure is highlighted, as is the concomitant impact on the economic directions of Australia’s major cities and resulting political, social and environmental consequences is explored. This theme is developed in the article by Crystal legacy, Carey Curtis and Jan Scheurer focused on how the politics of infrastructure planning is performed in and mediated by neoliberal planning settings. The paper challenges conventional decision-making structures shaping transport planning by offering three contemporary illustrations of how these structures and governance settings can inspire conflict and spur politicization, which is enacted in different ways by disparate community and state actors in the city. The issue concludes with a Practice Review by Jago Dodson. Expanding on his earlier work exploring Australia’s “infrastructure turn”, in this piece Jago draws our attention to the global reach of this turn and also challenges us to give fuller attention to the practices of infrastructure planning. Casting a conceptual and analytical lens, Dodson argues that examining discourse, instrumentality and the politics of infrastructure is central to understanding the complexity of infrastructure processes and how these processes are shaping the twenty-first Century City.

As you will see from this special issue there is nothing boring, inherently masculine or excluding of the broader remit of the critical social sciences intrinsic to the notion of critical infrastructure as we have presented it. On the contrary it is a vital interdisciplinary arena that warrants greater attention by scholars and practitioners in urban research, policy and planning. Whilst twentieth century critical infrastructure research was overwhelmingly undertaken by engineers and developers (often with commercial in-confidence prohibitions to accessing the research), the next generation of infrastructure research and practice will be markedly different. Disciplines such as urban studies, geography, sociology, philosophy, socio-technical studies, economics, cultural geography enrich our understanding of infrastructure as complex, relational and political; as networks, systems and date, but also the everyday spaces and places that shape and are shaped by the cities and regions that inhabit and/ or use them. Building the infrastructure imagination and its capacity for public good is a key urban policy and research agenda for the twenty-first century – rich with new conceptual understandings and practical approaches.

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Steele [grant number DE120102428]; and Legacy [DE140100364].

Wendy Steele
Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne
[email protected] Legacy
Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne
[email protected]