Infrastructure That Connects/Infrastructure That Divides

Contents

• Introduction: Infrastructure That Connects/Infrastructure That Divides

  Matti Siemiatycki and Kevin Ward

• “Rail Linor Itu Pare”: Railways as Infrastructural Borders in Guwahati, Northeast India

  Prerona Das, Tim Bunnell and James Sidaway

• Infrastructures of Water and Ideas: The Struggle Against Environmental Racism in Black Urban Regimes

  Alesia Montgomery

• Infrastructures of Race

  Sawyer Phinney

• Whose Infrastructure is it Anyway?

  Astrid R.N. Haas

• Promoting Essential Green Infrastructure by Acknowledging Local Needs in Praxis

  Ian Mell and Tenley Conway

• Climate Resilient Infrastructure – Connecting and Dividing the Cities of the Future

  Cathy Oke

Infrastructure That Connects/Infrastructure That Divides

We live in an age of infrastructure, we are told repeatedly (Dodson, 2017). Around the world and across the ideological spectrum, firms and governments are dedicating trillions of dollars per year to infrastructure. Conservatives and Liberals, in the Global North and South, and in authoritarian and democratic regimes are championing major infrastructure programs. Infrastructure policy and spending is increasingly becoming a key tool in local, national and global statecraft.

While there is broad agreement across the ideological spectrum about the dire need to invest in infrastructure in order to achieve economic, environmental, and social objectives (as well as to make good on the damage done by past infrastructural policy), increasingly the term has become stretched to the point where we have seen the contesting of its meaning.

The most traditional and narrow definition of infrastructure refers to fixed capital stretched across space in networked facilities – roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, transit lines, water and sewage treatment facilities and pipes, power lines and associated generation plants and dams, energy pipelines, and telecommunication cables. These are what used to be known as public works, an underlying basis for a modern society.

Trees and naturalized habitats are also being categorized as green infrastructure, since they serve the same function as the built grey infrastructure that stores water or retains hillsides – only in many instances the green infrastructure is more successful. Ditto, blue infrastructure, such as canals and rivers, and their importance to urban metabolism.

More recently, we have seen the definition widening to include “social infrastructure,” such as care centers, hospitals, housing, libraries, and recreation centres. These are typically services provided in facilities on a single site, but are part of wider service networks. Because social infrastructure involves significant outlays for capital and maintenance and supports the social fabric of society, it is considered infrastructure. This includes new infrastructure but also repaired infrastructure. Now, in many countries, we are seeing the definition of infrastructure stretching ever further, with examples emerging of how activists and communities have sought to insert the notion of “care” into debates over working with existing infrastructural configurations. In the United States under the Biden infrastructure bill, for instance, we see the presentation of social services like childcare, health care, and elder care as the infrastructure of care.

Indeed, as the definition of infrastructure expands (Carse, 2016), it is becoming a magical term. Unlike more conventional spending on goods and services that get tied up in parochial debates, infrastructure is presented as an investment that is far sighted, visionary, transformational and non-partisan, paying dividends for future generations. Who could possibly be against infrastructure investment?

Of course, while infrastructure as a concept may have broad partisan and public support, particular infrastructure projects and political programs are most certainly contested, portrayed by opponents as wasteful, self-serving, politically motivated pork-barreling. For decades, there has been a visceral public and scholarly understanding of both the light and the dark sides of infrastructure. Infrastructure connects. However, infrastructure also divides. Infrastructure is not equally distributed, and the benefits and negative externalities of infrastructure do not affect everyone similarly.

Let us briefly outline the most glaring paradoxical and conflicting dynamics of infrastructure.

Infrastructure is central to the heroic founding mythology of many countries, but also played a key role in colonization (Cowen, 2020). In Canada, for instance, the construction of the Trans-continental railway physically and politically stitched together a massive and disparate country from sea to sea. Among the most iconic photos in Canadian history is the ceremonial driving of the last railway spike in 1885 by Donald Smith, Baron of Strathcona. A crowd of White men surround him. The railway was also critical in the dispossession of indigenous people from their lands as it brought settlers and state reinforcements to the West, and was built in part by Chinese labourers who faced deep-seated racism and discrimination. In the Global South, building energy and transportation infrastructure to serve the colonial imperative for control and resource extraction, rather than the needs of the local populations, left a legacy of uneven development (Táíwò, 2022).

Environmental racism is rife in the locating of infrastructure, with noxious and disruptive infrastructure facilities like stinking garbage dumps, polluting power plants and divisive highways disproportionately located in low income and racialized communities. The highways that were built through the Greenwood neighbourhood in Tulsa Oklahoma in the 1960s, Africville in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Hogans Alley, British Columbia, destroyed centres of Black economic activity and life in the name of urban renewal. It has only been in the past few decades that the state agencies that led these projects accepted responsibility for their actions. Nor is environmental racism a historic relic. The Flint water crisis, where polluted water and lead pipe contamination disproportionally affected Black residents, has widely been identified as stemming from environmental racism (Wilson & Heil, 2022). As Pulido (2016, p. 6) writes: “The decision to neglect infrastructure so that it becomes toxic must be seen as a form of violence against those who are considered disposable.” And, elsewhere in the world, as we witness the urbanization of rural societies in the Global South, we see examples of accumulation by dispossession and the displacement of indigenous and racialized communities. In some cases, the profits from these activities are then used to upgrade infrastructure in cities of the Global North, reinforcing the inter-connectedness of decision-making.

In an age of accelerating climate change, heavily carbon-intensive infrastructure in transportation, energy production and buildings are at the core of the climate emergency. Yet paradoxes and tensions abound. Global access to low-cost consumer products is brought about through huge investments in ports and logistics infrastructure, which is powered by carbon fuels and massive amounts of emissions. Air travel faces similar tensions – the prospect of mass global travel is so seductive as a means of connecting the world for social, cultural and business reasons; yet air travel is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions and privileges a small minority of frequent flyers who travel the bulk of the miles globally, becoming a key target for climate activists. Enormous spending in the electrification and greening of infrastructure is also providing the path towards mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, with many governments setting net zero emission targets for 2050 or even earlier. Initiatives such as building energy retrofits and massive tree planting initiatives in infrastructure programs point to the further ways in which climate change is forcing a rethink of the definition of infrastructure. However to date, adapting existing infrastructure to protect against a changing climate that is warmer, wetter and wilder than in the past has received far less funding than mitigation efforts, with ever more costly climate-related disasters occurring each year.

Infrastructure also bridges and reinforces inequalities. Transit mega-projects designed to provide improved service and accessibility to low income, racialized communities are being found, in some instances, to spur gentrification and displacement of exactly the communities they are intended to serve. Infrastructure networks are increasingly being unbundled, reconstituted as premium services like express airport rail links, privatized water wells in drought stricken cities, and priority internet connections delivering ultra-high speeds, for those most able to pay. Rising energy costs may reduce demand and spur conservation efforts that ultimately reduce emissions, but they are putting dramatic inflationary pressures on households whose wages have stagnated, with little relief in sight. It is little wonder that many major social movements are sparked by unequal or diminishing access to quality infrastructure – a mere 4% rise in bus fares in Chile’s capital city Santiago set off widespread protests in 2019 (Holland, 2019); water privatization and rising prices sparked mass protests in Bolivia.

Additionally, infrastructure has special political purchase as a job creator. In many countries, the aim of green infrastructure investment is to support a broader transition to a green economy and workforce. However, questions remain about “jobs for whom?” The infrastructure sector is overwhelmingly male dominated, on construction sites and in the boardrooms where investment and policy decisions are made (Siemiatycki et al., 2020). Coming out of a pandemic that disproportionately impacted women and sparked what has been called a “she-cession,” an infrastructure-led recovery will disproportionately benefit men in the absence of intentional gender-based policy.

Despite the big promises made for infrastructure investments, it is now widely acknowledged that infrastructure mega-projects are beset by a systemic pattern of underestimated costs and timelines alongside overestimated benefits. It is uncanny how often the words “boondoggle” or “white elephant” are used to describe infrastructure plans and programs. This pattern of mega-projects going over budget and being late belies simple technical explanations about the complexity of delivering large undertakings. It is rooted in the behavioural biases and political dynamics of the people and organizations involved in project planning and delivery (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). Planning, approving and delivering infrastructure projects is a very human activity, with all the human conditions and failings that this entails.

Infrastructure is also now increasingly at the heart of global geopolitical struggles and tensions. At one time, Western development banks, national overseas aid departments, and multilateral agencies had a monopoly on financing infrastructure in low-income countries. The World Bank and other investors typically attached “structural adjustment” conditions to loans related to economic liberalization, anti-corruption, human rights, transparency and democratic governance. The rise of China as an overseas infrastructure investor has created new geopolitical competition and tensions. China has become a major infrastructure investor in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America, using a model that emphasizes loans as a business and political transaction rather than a vehicle to impose social, economic or governance transformations. In one model known as Resources-for-Infrastructure, Chinese banks provide loans to countries that may otherwise struggle to attract investment at competitive interest rates, with the loans secured against local resources. There is considerable debate about whether the arrival of China as a major international player in the global infrastructure sector frees countries from the paternalism of self-serving Western powers by providing another option, or is a form of “debt book diplomacy” that represents a new form of colonialism. Some analysts have gone so far as to question whether we may be entering a new cold war, with infrastructure investments a key site of global geopolitical engagement (Schindler et al., 2022; Singh, 2021).

The contributions to this Interface section highlight the dynamics and tensions that beset infrastructure.

Prerona Das, Tim Bunnell, and James D. Sidaway zero in on networked infrastructure as physical and symbolic connectors and borders. In vivid detail, they show how a railway line in Northeast India reflects and reinforces hierarchies of power, first extending British colonial power when initially built and more recently serving as a barrier dividing communities along ethnic, confessional and linguistic lines.

Alesia Montgomery examines the roots and struggles against environmental racism in Black urban communities with a spotlight on the water sector. Montgomery’s contribution forcefully highlights how physical, financial and ideological conditions together cause the uneven and deeply inadequate water systems in many majority-Black cities in the United States.

Similarly, for Sawyer Phinney, infrastructure plays a key role in racial capitalism. The financialization and practices of state austerity in majority-Black cities in America is a key driver of uneven infrastructure development.

A number of the contributions grapple in different ways with the politics of scale when it comes to infrastructure decisions. The key question at the core of Astrid Haas’s contribution is who gets to decide what gets built when there are multiple stakeholders involved, each with their own sets of interest. Drawing on the situation in Kampala, Uganda, Haas shows how local stakeholder interests mingle uncomfortably with those of foreign governments deciding how to allocate their aid budgets, international institutions and global investors.

For Ian Mell and Tenley Conway, the primary challenge is how to build support for urban greening as a form of infrastructure that delivers major public value, where it is often overlooked, downplayed and contested. The answer, Mell and Conway argue, lies in deep meaningful engagement in local practice so that green infrastructure responds to community needs and redresses the burdens that historically disenfranchised communities have faced.

Finally, Cathy Oke reflects on her experience as a local government politician in Melbourne, Australia implementing key climate resilient transport infrastructure. She shows how decision makers grapple with the ways in which critical infrastructure investments can be accelerated or stymied by deeply local narratives, memes and pressure that influence how choices are weighed and made.

Taken together, the fault-lines inherent in infrastructure are wide ranging, interwoven and cascading. The notion that infrastructure connects, and that infrastructure divides has many meanings – socially and spatially, culturally and economically, ideologically and politically, and as a tool of global geopolitics and geostrategy.

Notes on Contributors

Matti Siemiatycki is Director of the Infrastructure Institute and Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. [email protected]

Kevin Ward is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester and editor in chief of Urban Geography. [email protected]

“Rail Linor Itu Pare”: Railways as Infrastructural Borders in Guwahati, Northeast India

It seems almost a truism to note that urban infrastructure both reflects and reproduces hierarchies of power and privilege and plays a constitutive role in everyday socio-spatial dividing practices (Angelo & Hentschel, 2015; Lemanski, 2020). It connects some spaces and communities while excluding others. Infrastructures also shape everyday life and sensibilities within cities. In the words of Steele and Legacy (2017), “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” (p. 3).

On the one hand, we see the distribution of infrastructural systems or networks across and between state territories. On the other hand, we argue it is its omnipresent, place-based forms that act as an interface with the user (Larkin, 2018). Through such material urban forms, everyday urbanism intersects with larger scales, revealing the potential and power of infrastructure. Here we examine how a branch line of the railway infrastructure that connects the city of Guwahati in northeastern India to the rest of the country simultaneously borders urban lives and imaginaries. Locally, this line demarcates ”us“ and ”them“ – people on one side of the track differentiating themselves from those on the other (”rail linor itu pare“) – in ways inflected by a variegated (geo) politics of national belonging.

Railways and Partition (Geo) Politics in India’s Northeast

Indian Railways began as a key component of colonial infrastructural investment intended to connect British-controlled parts of extended India, both internally – across what are today the national territories of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan – and as part of a wider globalizing imperial economy. Railways facilitated exports of raw materials from India and transported people across imperial South Asia. This project intertwined railway technology, time and infrastructure with daily lives of Indians, signifying the presence of the colonial state at the everyday scale (Prasad, 2015). Railway infrastructure has retained prominence in the socio-spatial fabric of cities after the Partition and Independence of India. The railways remain important to urban life, not merely as a mode of transportation, but also as an agent shaping urban experiences and mental maps, and situating communities in relation to ”others“ at various scales. Otherwise divided, interactions with railway infrastructure that intersect urban spaces constitute a common experience for city residents. Yet within Indian cities, the railways also foster an awareness of difference and demarcate socio-spatial segments on ethnic and confessional grounds, tied to the geopolitics of Partition.

In northeastern India, connections/disconnections aided by railways become particularly visible; railways connect this frontier to what is often referred to as ”mainland“ India through the narrow Siliguri corridor, and railway infrastructures cutting across the region reinforce ethnic, confessional, linguistic and class divides, especially within cities. As a strategic geopolitical frontier, the northeast was both a settlement and a resource frontier of British India; the primary purpose behind the construction of the railways was to secure the region, facilitating a plantation economy. The construction of Assam-Bengal Railways commenced in the late nineteenth century primarily to boost the tea industry in Assam (Guha, 2016). The northeast was then thinly populated and the British imperialists sought labor for the tea trade and other plantations. The railways served as a cost-effective mode of transportation to transport workers from more populated areas like eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh) and Bihar (Das, 2022). This resulted in demographic change and bolstered ethno-confessional diversity in the region. Amidst the demarcation of an imagined Assamese community in the state of Assam, the Bengali Muslim population that migrated from eastern Bengal were perceived as ”others“ by Assamese Hindus who were the majority. Such tensions inflicted violence, as imagined borders, as well as new political borders, that defined who belonged where were hardened due to partition (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Map of Assam-Bengal Colonial Railways (exact date unknown). Source: Assam State Archives, Guwahati.

In 1947 when the Radcliffe line was drawn across the subcontinent, yielding India and (East and West) Pakistan, the railway network was also partitioned, almost cutting off northeast India from the rest of the country (Van Schendel, 2017) and reinforcing the peripheral status of the region. However, railways facilitated the movements of refugees from east Bengal (East Pakistan) to Assam during Partition, and concurrently railway stations and tracks also became sites of communal violence (Das, 2022). Hence, there was a historic intertwining of railway infrastructure with geopolitical and communal turmoil in the frontier of northeast India.

In Assam, the last decade has seen the reanimation of post-Partition contestations between communities Violence against minority Bengali Muslims increased in the state, especially after the pro-Hindutva Bhartiya Janata Party formed a national government in 2014, and came to power in Assam in 2016 (see Saikia, 2020). This became evident during subsequent turbulence over the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). We argue that railway infrastructure continues to play an important role in reproducing the wider (geo) politics of exclusion in everyday life within Assam’s largest city of Guwahati.

Railway Infrastructure as Everyday Borders in Guwahati

Different types of borders cut across urban spaces, including zoning laws, socio-spatial segregation, infrastructural exclusion, physical barriers, and imagined divides (Breitung, 2011; Jirón, 2019). Multiple bordering processes (re)demarcating identity and territorial claims intersect Guwahati, overlapping with other socio-spatial urban divides. This British administration-built railway line, originally a branch line of Assam-Bengal Railways (Barpujari, 1992), includes tracks and railway gates that cut across and serve to demarcate parts of the city. One of us grew up in Silpukhuri, a locality in east Guwahati divided by the railway line. It is home to communities including Assamese Hindus and Bengali Muslims, producing a “peculiar cosmopolitanism” (Kikon & McDuie-Ra, 2021). The railway tracks are a part of the area’s urban ecology, affecting socio-spatial dynamics and residents’ mobility patterns. Silpukhuri is also the location of one of the thirteen railway crossings of the Northeast Frontier Railway. The Railway gates close whenever a train passes through the locality, preventing commuter traffic. This can greatly increase residents’ travel times, and many therefore seek to avoid crossing the tracks as part of their daily commutes.

Because of the aesthetics and sensibilities associated with railway tracks and other infrastructural forms that sever spaces (Salomon, 2016), they become a feature of people’s mental maps, situating themselves and imaginatively separating “others.” In Silpukhuri, the UNB Road refers to the northern side of the railway tracks. Assamese middle class Hindus predominantly inhabit it. Across the tracks on the southern side, there exists Gandhibasti settlement, populated by Bengali Muslims who are mostly engaged in menial/low wage jobs such as construction work, street cleaning and ”rag-picking.“ The residents of Silpukhuri frequently use the expression ”rail linor itu pare“ in Assamese, which translates to ”the other side of the tracks,“ to refer to the residential segments on the other side. The majority of the families in Gandhibasti settlement have lived in Assam for generations and possess the legal documents to have their names included in the National Register of Citizenship. Yet the majority residents of Guwahati often deem them as Bangladeshi immigrants living on encroached railway land, where criminal activities such as drug peddling and gambling take place. Assamese Hindu residents of UNB Road who have security-related anxieties about Gandhibasti settlement – anxieties that are themselves felt differently along lines of age and gender, and according to the time of day – use the railway tracks as a point of reference for separating the two sides.

Conversely, residents of Gandhibasti settlement view the railway tracks as a boundary beyond which resides the affluent population of the locality/city. In terms of basic civic infrastructure such as water supply, drainage and roads there is some visible difference between both the sides. Residents from both sides of the tracks also face common problems such as shortages of drinking water and flooding during the monsoon. Nonetheless, the prevailing view amongst Gandhibasti settlement dwellers is that connections to local politicians and municipality officers privilege Assamese Hindu UNB Road residents, affording them better infrastructural access on their side. Regarding this (perceived) difference a woman from the settlement lamented, ”On the other side of the tracks (rail linor itu pare) many influential people live and they have good access to infrastructure facilities, but they don’t come forward to help us improve the infrastructure on this side.“ For the Gandhibasti settlement dwellers, therefore, the bisecting railway infrastructure is an everyday reference or reminder of the marginalization that they experience in the city and the nation more widely. The tracks are not just part of the material urban fabric, but also cognitive maps and everyday discourses reinforcing disconnections and wider communal divisions.

Conclusion

The agency of infrastructure takes the most potent form in certain urban nodes, where it simultaneously connects and disconnects communities and places. Connection and disconnection become legible at different scales and sites. However, in widespread infrastructural networks, we observe the intensified bordering processes most acutely in micro-urban sites. Massive infrastructure such as Indian railways had a major role to play in shaping the colonial and postcolonial socio-material history of India. However, in contemporary urban spaces it becomes a part of the ordinary, ”everyday“ urban materialities and imaginaries, reinforcing various connections and disconnections. In localities such as Silpukhuri where communities divided on confessional and ethnic lines live in proximity, interactions with everyday infrastructure such as railways become significant markers of wider geopolitical borders and identities. Large-scale, networked, colonial-derived infrastructure such as Indian railways (that in turn connect with planetary-spanning transport infrastructures) thus assume another local function and meaning as a dividing infrastructure.

Notes on Contributors

Prerona Das is a postdoctoral research fellow at Singapore Management University’s College of Integrative Studies. Her doctoral research was on borders reinforced by urban infrastructure in Guwahati, northeast India. As a research fellow she is currently working on a project about politics of smart city policy transfer in Southeast Asia. [email protected]

Tim Bunnell is professor of human geography and director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. His urban research has included examination of the planning and development of cities in Asia, and the lives and aspirations of people who call them home. [email protected]

James D. Sidaway has served as Professor of Political Geography at NUS since 2012. Following doctoral research on the intersections of conflict, planning and territory in Mozambique, he has worked on histories of geopolitics and cross-border relations of Portugal, and on urban geopolitics in Cambodia, Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Singapore’s Indonesian borderlands. [email protected]

Infrastructures of Water and Ideas: The Struggle against Environmental Racism in Black Urban Regimes

From the failure of the levees in New Orleans to the mass water shutoffs in Detroit to the lead poisoned water in Flint to the dry faucets in Jackson, water crises in majority Black cities of the U.S. have made headlines. Despite the proliferation of these cases, reporters often frame each disaster as a rare event. The reality is that aging systems for drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater – in need of an upgrade in much of the U.S. – have reduced a capacity to withstand severe weather and other stresses (ASCE, 2021; Christian-Smith et al., 2012; Deitz & Meehan, 2019; McDonald & Jones, 2018). Low-income racialized communities disproportionately rely on water systems that suffer from vast underfunding, inadequate regulation, and environmental degradation, which makes it hard for these systems to provide flood protection and safe, affordable drinking water.

Ideological and material conditions combine to shape the danger. Historian Carl Smith (2013) describes how, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the physical infrastructure of the first municipal water systems that were built in the U.S. by white elites was inseparable from their ”infrastructure of ideas“ about society and nature. The pumps, pipes, and wheels of the early waterworks, enclosed in neoclassical architecture, were at once engineering feats and monuments to the aspirations of the rising business class for purity, power, and elegance. Critical environmental justice (CEJ) scholars argue that today’s austerity discourse – proceeding from a neoliberal logic that has roots in African enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and ecological exploitation under racial capitalism – hinders the upgrade of U.S. water systems in racialized communities (Pulido, 2016). The water infrastructure of these communities crumbles within a deadly infrastructure of ideas about race and nature. This ideological infrastructure frames residents of Black urban regimes as children of nature who must have (fiscal) discipline imposed on them. CEJ scholars borrow the term ”racial capitalism“ from historian Cedric Robinson, who notes that, since the rise of the modern world system, the ”development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology“ (Robinson, 2000, p. 2). Robinson posits a dynamic relation between racial capitalism and the Black radical tradition, which seeks to expand freedom for Africa and its diaspora. Gilmore (2011) brilliantly articulates how this dynamic relation unfolded in battles over infrastructure during the civil rights movement of the 1960s:

The Freedom Riders and much of the civil rights movement targeted, of all

things, infrastructure for desegregation. They targeted schools, they

targeted highways, they targeted mass transportation. Their focus … sought

to put into the landscape, the land around us, something new: the capacity for

us to determine for ourselves protections from calamity and opportunities

for advancement, inspired by a long-term vision to shift the foundations for the struggle

for freedom ….so that freedom wouldn’t turn into…simply the absence of cuffs…or being in a cage.

Gilmore frames a (material | mental) struggle for collective self-determination that strives to liberate people by transforming the physical and ideological infrastructures that gird the social order. She juxtaposes the vision of abolition geographies against the nightmare of carceral geographies – jails, prisons – used to manage the anger and desperation of young people who live amid crumbling infrastructure in impoverished, racially segregated communities.

At this historical moment, Black urban regimes are critical sites of this (material | mental) struggle for freedom. I raise questions about the ethics of how scholars and practitioners of diverse races (you and I) participate in this struggle as we study or design infrastructure in Black urban regimes and other racialized communities. My questions emerge from my research: For over a decade, I have studied the extent to which African Americans of different classes are able to ”put into the landscape“ of Black urban regimes ”protections from calamity and opportunities for advancement.“ I am especially concerned about how the water systems of these cities – essential to life – are maintained and upgraded.

Between 2010 and 2012, I lived in Detroit and studied its green redevelopment projects, which were staffed by international and local teams of technical experts (engineers, architects, planners) and cultural workers (artists, activists, street scholars), affiliated with a wide array of firms and universities, who had been hired by philanthropic and business interests (Montgomery, 2020). These projects included innovative ideas – rooted in the urban vision of the mostly white experts – that included designs for green and blue infrastructure to improve air quality and to capture and clean stormwater. While this green vision was uncontroversial, it was embedded in a plan for rightsizing the city that stirred fear and anger among some Detroiters. They worried that rightsizing – aligning infrastructure investments with the population size and market potential of neighborhoods – might accelerate gentrification in greater downtown while depriving needed services from residents in depopulated, high poverty areas. The planning process included outreach, but it did not enable low-income Black residents to have decision-making power.

My interviewees in Detroit included local community organizer and ecologist Charity Hicks. Hicks was a founding member of the People’s Water Board, a grassroots group that advocates for human rights to water and sanitation. (Two years after my initial interview, Hicks would be hailed as a ”water warrior“ as she fought for low-income Detroiters during the mass water shut-offs of 2014.) Hicks had served on the Mayor’s Advisory Task Force for the public-private partnership that was developing a green city plan. Hicks liked some of their ideas, but she told me that they paid more attention to the physical infrastructure than the human infrastructure. She charged that some of them regarded low-income Black Detroiters as ”dredges“ and did not engage in authentic dialogues with them:

The aim is for a more efficient municipal operation, but you haven’t retooled the people. How do we invest in those structures, in those operations, that promote investment in people. How do we embody respect for people, not calling them dredges or prostitutes or the illiterate…. [We need structures] that will get underneath crime, that will get underneath a carjacking, that will make people feel worthwhile.

I interviewed a few members of the technical and outreach teams: One technical expert told me that what is possible to build is different from what is ideal: ”Capitalism is built on inequality. I don’t know if we can ever have justice, but we can further justice.“ Similarly, some cultural workers on the outreach team told me that the history of urban renewal made them cautious, but the public-private partnership had money to redesign Detroit (a rare resource in the city), so they had decided to work with it to make a difference.

I remain troubled by neoliberal planning that prevents low-income African Americans from democratically debating and deciding urban futures, but I am even more alarmed when I read about the water struggles and policy battles in Jackson, Mississippi. I see a growing interdependence between neoliberal planning and the construction of societal ignorance about environmental racism and ecological destruction. The city of Jackson – the capital of Mississippi – was named after Andrew Jackson, a U.S. president and planter who grew wealthy from the labor of enslaved Africans. He is also notorious for signing the Indian Removal Act, which forced thousands of Indigenous people from their ancestral homelands. The city of Jackson, located on land seized from the Choctaws, prospered in the early twentieth century as oil and natural gas industries boomed in the region, but the life chances of its Black residents were limited. In the 1960s, the civil rights struggle exploded in Jackson; the jailing of Freedom Riders ensued in 1961, and then a white supremacist murdered Medgar Evers, a NAACP leader, in 1963. In the 1970s and 1980s, after federal courts ordered school desegregation, white families fled Jackson for the suburbs, taking their wealth with them. Jackson became a Black urban regime, and similar to others, Jackson suffers from high poverty rates and a reduced tax base. Yet, as a capital city, it sits uneasily within the borders of conservative white power in the state.

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba describes his city of Jackson as ”the poster child of the infrastructure challenges that we see in this country“ (Democracy Now, 2022). On Monday, 29 August 2022, Lumumba, a Black Democrat, declared a water system emergency in Jackson. That night, Governor Tate Reeves, a white Republican, did likewise. The flooding of the Pearl River in a severe storm had caused the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, its operation already strained by aging equipment and inadequate staff, to lose water pressure. No water came out of the faucets for much of the city. Families – lacking water to drink, bathe, or flush their toilets – lined up at bottled water distribution sites. As tap water began to flow again, the city remained under a boil-water advisory because of contaminants – a problem that preceded the storm.

The city and the state were ill-prepared to handle the scale of the crisis in 2022, despite the disaster not being an entire surprise. State officials knew (and local residents knew that they knew) that conditions at the treatment plant made it vulnerable to the severe weather caused by climate change. Thus, the need discursively to manage inaction. When a winter storm led to a water outage and requests for help by the city of Jackson in 2021, Governor Reeves had framed the city as fiscally irresponsible (Murray, 2022). Tax policies limit Mississippi’s capacity to fund infrastructure upgrades. Months before the 2022 water system disaster, Reeves had signed the largest tax cut in Mississippi’s history (Vance, 2022).

This discursive maneuver of Reeves – characterizing residents as unwilling (not unable) to pay their water bills – mirrors what I saw in Michigan. However, added to the toolbox is a new tactic to ease government inaction. Conservative politicians in Mississippi and other U.S. states fight disclosures about climate change and systemic racism – disclosures that, among other things, might increase public understanding (and outrage) about the forces that shape the water crises in Jackson and other cities. Joining with governors from fifteen other U.S. states, Reeves had sent a letter to President Biden opposing a new rule, proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, that would require publicly traded companies to disclose their climate related risks and impacts (Warren, 2022). The governors argued that this rule would hurt oil and gas companies. The signatories of this letter overlap with the governors – including Reeves – who oppose the teaching of ”critical race theory“ (which they do not clearly define). In March 2022, Reeves signed a bill that bans teaching critical race theory (CRT) in the public schools – spanning kindergarten through high school (K-12) and higher education institutions – of the state (Lynch & Grisham, 2022). The vagueness of the law is perhaps a ”feature not a bug.“ Teachers may feel so intimidated that they avoid teaching about racism, unsure if it might be considered CRT. This silencing of critique secures the aging infrastructure of racist ideas, while the aging physical infrastructure in racialized communities crumbles.

As urban crises unfold, technical experts and cultural workers (you and I) are faced with a choice: Do we keep silent and operate strategically in line with the punishment and reward structures of the racist neoliberal order? If we do, can we subvert the system to further justice, or are we drawn inextricably into aiding the ideological and material reproduction of inequitable infrastructure? Do we have (or rather, can we craft) other options? To safeguard lives in Black urban regimes and other racialized communities as they endure the impacts of centuries of racial capitalism, which include climate change, dangerous conditions must be addressed in both the physical infrastructure and the ideological infrastructure that constitute water systems. Inequitable infrastructure forces a descent into carceral geographies as affluent communities barricade themselves in an attempt to ”ride out“ the floods. In the words of the late, great poet of Watts, Wanda Coleman (2020):

It’s raining dirty water all over America….

The Arks are slowly filling with unknown species and new breeds

What happened to the brave? Have they departed with the free?

Think of the gutters crammed with souls gone needlessly to waste….

think of them, deeply injured, as disturbances unresolved.

Notes on Contributor

Alesia Montgomery is an Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IoES). An ethnographer, Montgomery studies the environmental justice challenges of low-income, racialized communities. Her book, Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit, focuses on battles over green redevelopment. [email protected]

Infrastructures of Race

How does infrastructure weave through lives? What role does race play in reproducing economic power through infrastructures? How do infrastructure inequalities fragment, silence, and leave behind lives?

As Salamanca and Silver (2022) remind us, infrastructures are vital technologies in the configuration of uneven geographies. Thinking through raced processes and colonial legacies, ”infrastructures as technologies“ has become entangled in alternative historical-geographical trajectories that continue to shape racialized political economies of infrastructure across the Global South and North today. Infrastructures are informed by regimes of race and segregation where racialization is a spatial process intimately connected to the planning, governing, financing and operation of infrastructures that enables racial hierarchies to be symbolized through socio-political constructs and materially experienced.

The formation of Black-majority U.S cities reflects the interconnections of infrastructure and race that is reflected in the governing and political economy of localities. Black-majority cities can be understood as liminal urban spaces – as they have moved through a transitional process, from once major seats of power within the Fordist cluster of developed cities in the Global North, to now occupying a place in the shadows of declining cities (see Sugrue (1996/2014). The Great Migration, between 1910 and 1970, involved millions of African Americans fleeing poor economic conditions of the Jim Crow South to industrial and manufacturing urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest (Bouston, 2017; Gregory, 2005). However, during this period industrial cities still consisted of largely white populations. For instance, in the 1950s, 84% of Detroit’s population was still white. As of 2019, this figure now stands at 14% (U.S Census Bureau, 2019). Similar trends exist in other Black-majority U.S cities, such as Baltimore and Cleveland. In the years following 1970, there was an out-migration of white residents away from the inner city into the suburbs, a process referred to as ”white flight.“ This was due to post-war suburbanization in the form of the movement of manufacturing plants out of cities in the search for cheap land, subsidized detached homes and the construction of inter-state highways and underfunding of urban transit. All of this coupled with urban divestment and the decline of manufacturing jobs created infrastructural divides along racialized lines within these metropolitan regions. Out-migration by whites was also and undeniably underpinned by racism. The Federal Housing Authority’s lending guidelines were explicitly racist, instructing banks not to write mortgages in redlined neighbourhoods, or areas with Black residents that were deemed undesirable. The FHA also subsidized the construction of suburbs with overt covenants excluding developers from selling to Black homebuyers.

This history brings to light how race and space played out in housing and job discrimination, and specifically how segregation became more deeply entrenched in the physical space of cities versus suburbs in the United States. These cities are still coping with the infrastructural legacies of segregation, neglect and dispossession from the federally financed development of white suburban enclaves. In many ways, infrastructural inequalities are the products of racial and economic power (i.e racial capitalism) that characterize many Black-majority cities in the Midwest and Northeast today.

Succinctly to summarize the logics of racial capitalism, capital depends upon the social construction of race to reproduce and extract value whereby ”economic value is derived from devaluing spaces, places, and labour of racialized groups of people“ (Ponder, 2017, p. 15). According to Lowe (2015, p. 150), capital expands itself by ”seizing upon colonial divisions, identifying particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations for exploitation and others for disposal.“ As an analytical framework, racial capitalism brings distinct forms and logics of colonization together into a relational ”global history of colonial modernity“ (Morgensen, 2011, p. 65), organized around racial hierarchies and ideologies. Others focus on the more contemporary moments of racial capitalism, such as how forms of racial warfare, working through housing markets (Bonds, 2019; Taylor, 2019), the environment (McClintock, 2018; Pulido, 2016), policing and mass incarceration (Gilmore, 2007; Wang, 2018), and logics of finance and urban governance (Jenkins, 2021; Ponder, 2021).

In narrowing-in on the urban, work in Black geographies has interpreted patterns of urban development as unfolding relationally vis-a-vis Black and white infrastructures in the U.S (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; Purifoy & Seamster, 2021). White urban and suburban built environments have developed via the devaluation of Black spaces through seemingly race neutral structures of property ownerships and public finance (Delaney, 2010; Taylor, 2019). Purifoy and Seamster (2021) discuss the ”creation“ of white development through the persistent predation of Black built environments using complex forms of local governance, special districts, urban planning, and rules of legal jurisdiction (p. 52). Racialized underdevelopment is a key dimension of racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000), with the predication of value for white spaces on the devaluation and unmaking of Black places. Kobayashi and Peake (2000) for instance describe racialization as a process, ”by which racialized groups are identified, given stereotypical characteristics, and coerced into specific living conditions, often involving social/spatial segregation and always constituting racialized places“ (p. 393). In this sense, racialization is framed as always having a specific geographic dimension where inequalities between racial groups are operationalized through spatial relations and materiality (Bonds, 2013, p. 399).

Clarifying mutual and interconnected processes of racialization working through capitalist relations generates new understandings of infrastructural inequalities across public services vital to social reproduction, such as water or transit, but also through space itself in the form of policing. For example, historical trends of anti-Black violence in the St. Louis Metropolitan area, such as in Ferguson, Missouri, can be related to policies of regressive taxation, fees, fine farming (incarceration for failure to pay municipal and civil fines) to generate revenue by the local government (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019, p. 15). The neoliberalization of cities means municipal debt is financialized and funds to pay for municipal services and infrastructure are increasingly provided by the municipal bond market, where local governments become more accountable to creditors than the public and their residents. Austerity urbanism is now operating through complicated legacies of uneven racialized geographies within and between U.S cities (Ponder, 2017; Ponder & Omstedt, 2019; Pulido, 2016; Ranganathan, 2016). Thinking through the contemporary dynamics of racial capitalism, we see the embedding of race and space in the extraction of urban infrastructures from a public good to capital asset – through both its privatization and financialization.

Locating the particulars of racial capitalism allows understanding its global reach. Drawing attention to the multiple and overlapping ways in which infrastructure is governed and folded into wider neoliberalization processes, Black-majority cities constitute an attractive new node for financializing investor projects where their only option to finance repairs is through the bond market. Due to their economic vulnerability through urban conditions of white flight and disinvestment that categorize these cities as having a higher risk of default, Black-majority cities have had to pay to municipal bondholders higher interest rates on their bonds. Geographers have rarely focused on the relationship between race and municipal finance, and therefore, have overlooked the functioning of government debt and the overall municipal bond market in legitimating and accruing white racial advantages based on the role that race plays in structuring assessments of municipal creditworthiness (Jenkins, 2020). To that end, municipal debt is essential to the development of white America and the underdevelopment of Black America, most visibly in Black-majority cities (Jenkins, 2020, p. 210, 2021). The racial implications of this have meant these municipalities have been under fiscal stress in managing their debt obligations, leading to long-term austerity measures, such as increasing the cost of local services and reducing the quality of services for their majority- Black residents. In using these finance mechanisms, they have dispossessed Black households from some of the basic needs of survival, such as water. Debt and finance have worked to structure the living conditions of racialized populations through means of disposability and dispossession where investment in white spaces has come at the expense of Black neighbourhoods. The devaluation of Black spaces leads to higher costs of borrowing to access finance to pay for day-to-day local services as poorer Black cities and neighbourhoods are viewed as a higher investment risk. Rather than exclusion, financial inclusion in the municipal bond market becomes an extractive tool to reproduce racialized uneven development.

The privatization and financialization of municipal services and infrastructures delivering those services, are examples illustrating the decisive role that race has played in reproducing power through physical infrastructures. Cities have been central targets of financialization, through infrastructural development (Furlong, 2020), as well as debt-led forms of financing to fund basic city government services and social provisioning, such as water and sewer, housing, transit, health care, and education (Peck & Whiteside, 2016). For example, debates on the relationship between financialization and neoliberalization emphasize how neoliberal forms of public-private partnerships and other urban governance strategies allow for the speculative infrastructure development in cities (Fainstein & Novy, 2019). Other analyses of austerity governance highlight the underfunding and privatization of infrastructure and the retrenchment of public sector spending that impact working-class, racialized and low-income communities (Lobao et al., 2009).

The effects of financialization were realized after the 2008 financial crisis in the form of austerity policies and a further dismantling of the social state. Municipalities struggled to manage their increasing debt and downloaded these costs even further onto residents through privatization, outsourcing, cutting back services and higher rates and fees (Davidson & Ward, 2018). Governance and finance have made residents in Black-majority cities vulnerable to expulsion, marginalization and dispossession through water infrastructures, fracturing spaces of everyday life and social reproduction. Understanding the neglect and deteriorating water dams, water mains, increased flooding, and toxic lead pipes prevalent in Black-majority cities is pivotal for understanding the contemporary urban crisis and the relationship between infrastructural failure, long-term austerity, and race in post-industrial contexts (Phinney, 2022; Silver, 2021).

Communities of color and low-income neighbourhoods are targeted by polluting industries. At the same time, people of colour are more likely to be exposed to high levels of fine particulate air pollution (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf4491), which causes tens of thousands of deaths every year (Pulido et al., 1996). Other work has looked at similar forms of environmental racism. In the case of the Flint, Michigan’s water crisis in 2014, both Pulido (2016) and Ranganathan (2016) debate the underlying causes of the city’s lead poisoning through a long-standing, historical devaluation of Black populations. Ranganathan (2016) views the decline of federal and state support to Flint, along with decline of their tax base, as rooted in structural and historical processes of racialization. By tracing periods of white flight, and property depreciation in Flint, Ranganathan describes how these events facilitated water infrastructure abandonment.

Capital flight is not the sole producer of infrastructure abandonment, but Ranganathan (2016) argues it depends also upon a culture of racial liberalism, that is, anti-statist notions of the welfare state based on racist ideologies. Value-weighted concepts rooted in liberal-democratic norms of municipal governance, such as ”best possible use“ of land/resources, are ascribed to by local governments, harming Black spaces which do not fit into such formulations.

As Robinson (1983 [2000], p. 26) has emphasized, ”The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was not to homogenize but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.” Thus, the history of capitalism is connected to differentiation in human value via racial regimes and associated with spatial colonial divisions between possessors (i.e. colonial empires) and the dispossessed. These social relations and geographical forces can be read as technologies of power. Race not only is a social construct but also grows out of physical infrastructures. Today we can see it in the brown-coloured water pouring from taps in Jackson, Mississippi or mass water shut offs in Detroit or the lead poisoning in Flint’s water system. Contemporary urban manifestations of neoliberal forms continue to operate through uneven and unequal geographies of racialized development that divides and conquers the connective tissue to our everyday lives – infrastructures.

Notes on Contributor

Sawyer Phinney currently works as a labour economist for the Greater London Authority doing research on green jobs and skills. Previously, they have worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Heseltine Institute at the University of Liverpool. In 2022, they completed their PhD in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. Their research interests include municipal finance, racial capitalism, and transformations in urban governance. [email protected]

Whose Infrastructure is it Anyway?

One of the main jobs of elected governments should be to determine, on behalf of their citizens, how scarce resources are best allocated to optimise benefits. This can be a complex process given their diverse set of preferences. However, a democratic political process assumes one can slice through this complexity and have the citizen’s voice ”heard“ and acted upon accordingly. This, in turn, is the basis of the social contract between the government and its people. As noted, in all contexts, this process is deeply complex. However, it becomes even more so when the number of stakeholders, especially those operating outside the democratic process, grows, and thus accountability lines become increasingly blurred.

An illustrative example of this complexity is the decision-making process with respect to infrastructure investments across many developing countries. One of the most substantial sources of financing for infrastructure for these countries, given the significant resource constraints around the public budget, is from foreign financial assistance. This assistance primarily comes in the form of grants and debt, both concessional and non-concessional, from a host of different bilateral and multilateral partners. These resources can make up a significant share of a government’s budget. In Uganda, for example, total debt as a percentage of GDP has steadily increased over time, reaching 45.5% in 2021 (Deloitte, 2022). This is expected to rise even further, as Uganda is taking on more loans to finance its infrastructure portfolio.

Borrowing to finance infrastructure is not particular to developing countries, but the fact that these loans are often inextricably tied to various conditionalities is what makes these cases distinct. Perhaps the most well-known example of conditionalities, are the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), implemented during the 1980s and 1990s. Although these programmes have subsequently been abandoned, due to their overall detrimental economic, political and social effects (Forster et al., 2020), the notion of making lending (or granting) conditional, is still the convention even if some of these conditions may be implicit. For example, it may be that the loan will only be disbursed if the government selects a certain type of infrastructure.

A pertinent question therefore arises with respect to the social contract: who gets to decide what investments happen and to whom are the decision-makers accountable? As noted from the outset, governments should be accountable to their citizens. Analogously, assistance funded by foreign government’s budgets, including from their tax revenue, mean that these governments should be accountable to a different set of citizens. Multilateral institutions, like the World Bank, are answerable to their Boards, which in turn are made up of several different countries, albeit in proportions skewed to lenders rather than borrowers. In short, the actors providing the financing for infrastructure have little to no accountability lines to the citizens meant to benefit from the infrastructure.

In these cases, the question becomes whether the investments made in infrastructure connect citizens and strengthen the social contract? Or does it not reflect the prevailing preferences of the end-user, and is therefore potentially divisive? I explore this question through three different infrastructure investments in Uganda. The choice of these cases highlights how the question of ”whose infrastructure,“ can occur irrespective of its type.

Bus Rapid Transit System

Uganda was amongst the many countries required to adopt SAPs in the 1980s and 1990s to qualify for support from the World Bank and the IMF. Amongst a host of conditionalities that were imposed, one involved the removal of government subsidies in conjunction with the privatisation of many public infrastructures. This included urban transport and thus drastically reshaped the public transport landscape. For example, public bus companies that had emerged in Uganda’s post-independence period quite quickly went bankrupt after government support ceased (Behrens et al., 2016). This is perhaps unsurprising, given there is hardly any functional public transportation system in the world that is profitable and operating without significant government subsidies (Agarwal, 2018). To fill the ensuing void and meet the demand for movement, particularly in cities, a wide-reaching and largely unregulated informal transportation system emerged, which still dominates the transport landscape in Uganda.

Amongst the many challenges that come with an unregulated transportation system, dominated by low-capacity vehicles, is that it cannot meet the increasing demands of rapidly growing cities. To address this gap, the World Bank has once again emerged as a key player in shaping the urban public transport landscape. In Kampala, for example, the World Bank has been promoting the urgent need to introduce mass public transportation. Their preferred technology, as it is across many other African cities, is the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. As such, they have financed several feasibility studies to move this work forward (IBIS, 2010; Ministry of Works & Transport, 2014a, 2014b). The firms contracted to carry out these feasibility studies are almost universally international, with teams coming in from abroad on short term visits to carry out their work. Big advisory, construction and transit vehicle contracts are at stake, often primarily for foreign companies, if the projects proceed.

It would be difficult to find a resident of Kampala who would not agree that the current transportation system is highly dysfunctional, and most would agree that some form of mass transportation is required. However, only a select few have been consulted in the choice as to whether the BRT is the appropriate technology and, more broadly, how their overall transportation system should be shaped. In fact, the resistance that is forming because of this lack of consultation, is preventing the implementation of the BRT. For example, many of the current transport providers oppose the BRT as they are unclear how they will continue to be involved in the overall transportation system (Spooner et al., 2020).

Ironically, therefore, one of the legacies of the SAPs is a disrupted and dysfunctional urban transport system. This in turn has now impacted the emergence of a mass transportation system. Yet during neither period were many of the actual users and providers of the existing system, in other words the intended beneficiaries, consulted.

Expressway

The lack of consultation with the target audience of infrastructure projects is not just a problem of large multilateral development institutions. It is a similar challenge when it comes to bilateral development partners. Currently, China has emerged as one of the most significant actors when it comes to financing and building infrastructure in developing countries (Economist, 2022). Much of this is done under the auspices of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and is implemented through various different instruments and by both public and private sector actors. Chinese investment involves all parts of the infrastructure value chain from design, financing, construction, and operation.

The recently completed expressway road between Kampala and Uganda’s main airport, located about 40 km away in the neighbouring municipality of Entebbe, provides numerous insights. From the outset there were several challenges stemming from an overall lack of consultation, as the construction of this road was sole sourced to a Chinese contractor because of direct negotiations between them and the President of Uganda. Lending from China’s Exim Bank has been critical to moving forward with the Entebbe Expressway project, while Chinese firms have played a leading role in all stages of the project (Nambiru, 2018).

As infrastructure professionals would understand, there are numerous downsides of sole sourcing of such a large and expensive infrastructure. Most notably, it is likely to significantly increase costs compared to if it was procured under a competitive approach. In this case, this is evidenced by multiple contract renegotiations, which have meant this expressway is now the most expensive road (per km) in the world (Mukiibi, 2022). Similar challenges exist with the actual design of the road which, due to a dearth of intersections and exits, means that users, outside those driving to the airport, derive far fewer benefits from it.

The significant burden of funding this road will fall on every tax paying Ugandan for decades to come, as the tolls are unlikely to recover costs. This begs the question of whether citizens, if asked, would have chosen to spend their limited resources on this road, given the prevailing alternative priorities. More generally, it re-enforces the concerns that, where resources are limited such that governments depend on significant outside support for financing infrastructure, the accountability mechanisms between citizens and their own government are substantially weakened.

Markets

These concerns are not by any means limited to transportation infrastructures. The design and construction of markets provide another good example. A lack of formal jobs in many African cities, mean that most urban residents are confined to operating in the informal sector (Lall et al., 2017). In Uganda, one of the main occupations is vending agricultural produce coming from rural areas. Many city leaders would prefer to have vendors located in more organised and formalised market structures, as this also enables them to collect revenue in the form of market fees. This has led many cities to construct dedicated market spaces to which vendors are required to relocate.

To support this, the African Development Bank (AfDB) is financing the construction of twelve markets in nine municipalities and two cities across Uganda (AfDB, 2014). Consultants AfDB designed the three and four-storey market structures. A 93.73 million USD concessional loan to the government of Uganda is financing them.

One of these markets is in Kitooro, which has 1075 stalls and 330 lock-up spaces (The Independent, 2022). Yet, although the ground floor is fairly well-occupied, the upper storeys remain largely empty. Furthermore, vendors continue to abandon operating in the market due to the high fees. As such, the revenue for the municipality from the market fees are falling as well. The picture is similar in the recently opened market in Soroti city, in eastern Uganda. In discussions with the vendors, many note they cannot take the risk of committing to pay the high fees for renting market space, given their volatile incomes. Furthermore, given many of them sell standardised agricultural produce, they rely heavily on foot traffic to sell their goods. As such, a market vendor selling tomatoes on the 4^th floor of the market will not be able to compete with a market vendor selling the same product on the ground floor.

In informal discussions with leadership in two areas where these markets are being built, they noted that they had expressed their strong concerns with the chosen design from the outset, highlighting that it was not reflective of what their cities needed nor what their citizens, in this case as market vendors or as consumers, would want. Yet they were ignored, and the loan and construction went ahead anyway.

Given the large, and rapidly growing infrastructure deficits across cities in Africa, including Uganda, foreign assistance will remain a substantial and required source of financing. Of course, there are many examples where foreign financial support in infrastructure has been positive. However, what these three examples highlight is that infrastructure investments, which are a core component of the social contract as well as a significant financial cost, need to be designed with and for the diverse needs of different end-users if they are going to bring positive results. This is complex and requires extensive stakeholder consultations from the outset. At present, foreign technical assistance and financial support for infrastructure in countries such as Uganda, whether it is bilateral or from multilateral institutions, means that policy and commercial decisions – and therefore accountability – live overseas. Understanding and continuing to be acutely aware of this, through sufficient dedicated consultations with all stakeholders involved, will help ensure that the infrastructure financed connects rather than divides.

Notes on Contributor

Astrid Haas is an urban economist, working in both research and practice, around municipal and infrastructure finance. She is an Extraordinary Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Pretoria and a Fellow at the Infrastructure Institute at the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. [email protected]

Promoting Essential Green Infrastructure by Acknowledging Local Needs in Praxis

Cities across the globe are in an on-going state of flux, constantly subject to expansion, contraction, economic uplift and downturns, and ecological damage leading to conflicts about the provision and management of urban infrastructure. Since 2006 and the release of Benedict & McMahon’s seminal work on Green Infrastructure (GI), one set of solutions to these problems has been calls for a more direct engagement with environmental thinking to navigate the pressures being placed on urban systems, by recognising the contributions nature makes to cities. Within this debate GI is defined by (Benedict & McMahon, 2006, p. 12) as a:

natural life support system – an interconnected network of waterways, wetlands, woodlands, wildlife habitats and other natural areas; greenways, parks and other conservation lands; working farms, ranches and forests; and wilderness and other open spaces that support native species, maintain natural ecological processes, sustain air and water resources and contribute to the health and quality of life for America’s communities and people

Benedict & McMahon illustrate the value of aligning socio-economic, political, and ecological thinking within a holistic approach to urban development. However, the definition and subsequent use of GI remains complex, and in many locations contested, as politicians, urban decision-makers, engineers, the environment sector and local communities debate any attempt to mainstream planning from an ecological perspective (Matsler et al., 2021). Within this space there is an ongoing concern that the local need for GI is marginalised by the dominance of prominent development institutions, i.e. the construction industry.

To redress this imbalance, we propose that GI be considered essential infrastructure within development debates, including brownfield re-development and new construction. When nature is considered as infrastructure it elevates its value to many urban development stakeholders. This uses terminology that is (a) common and (b) implies that investment is necessary, as GI becomes aligned with discussions of transport, commercial and residential infrastructure as being essential components of an urban area. We argue that successful urban systems require the natural environment to function without impediment from grey/built infrastructure (Koc et al., 2017). Urban planners, and the decision-makers shaping their plans, acknowledge that GI has economic and socio-cultural benefits comparable to other forms of built infrastructure (Mell, 2021). Labelling GI as essential asks planners to approach development as a nexus of transport, housing, economic and ecological considerations. Within this space, ecological systems (including water) become critical, challenging the disciplinary norms of economic-focussed development that restrict GI from being an essential component of urban functionality. Thus, by framing urban nature as essential, there is greater respect for its role in regulating local environmental conditions, supporting biodiversity, and fostering socio-cultural activity that underpin liveable cities (Wang & Banzhaf, 2018).

A wealth of evidence is available linking the positive impacts of urban greening on economic uplift (Vivid Economics & Barton Willmore, 2020), public physical and mental health and well-being (Lovell et al., 2020), and adaptation and mitigation to climate change and biodiversity loss (Meerow, 2020). The alignment of ecological data within these debates illustrating the added-value of planning with/for GI has been successfully used in many cities to address the complex socio-economic and ecological needs of urban areas (Dushkova & Haase, 2020). Yet, there are stakeholders within normative development debates who continue to question the extent to which GI can meet specific urban needs, i.e., sense of place or flood mitigation, when compared to traditional grey infrastructure provision (Hoover & Hopton, 2019). In many cases, GI is considered an amenity that is desired but not essential (Nesbitt et al., 2019). Moreover, where investment is focused on ”iconic“ destination greenspace projects it does not always serve the everyday needs of local communities but is design for visitors to a place (Loughram, 2014). Consequently, an ongoing dislocation exists between the evidence for GI investment and the acceptance of this information into decision-making.

Continued questioning of the necessity of GI investment from urban development institutions places a burden on environmental advocates to ”prove“ that GI can deliver socio-economic and ecological benefits, and on local communities to advocate for the type of GI that will meet their needs. Despite the acknowledgement from planners that urban areas are in a constant state of flux, demand continues for GI advocates to make definitive statements that demonstrate the added economic value of these investments via Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA), Return on Investment (RoI) or Willingness to Pay (WTP) (Mell, 2021).

Furthermore, when GI is included in development plans, the specific environmental, social, and cultural characteristics of the area are often not fully considered. This is particularly true in marginalized communities, which are most vulnerable to the urban stressors that GI can help mitigate. Unfortunately, there is a growing reliance on quantitative metric driven analysis linked to environmental objectives that overlooks whether investment in green infrastructure meets local needs or supports use. For example, the square meters (m²) of GI per person, or number of specific environmental or recreational elements are becoming increasingly common as indicators of sufficient provision (Rigolon et al., 2018). However, these metrics fail to show the variability in quality or functionality, particularly in the context of local needs. Situations therefore arise where cities can quantitatively state they have provided sufficient GI, but do not consider whether they meet local needs, potentially limiting critiques from communities—as data show they have been provided GI (Dennis et al., 2020).

To ensure that cities meet both local and strategic needs requires a detailed acknowledgement of the links between urban functionality and the interactivity of provision, quality, and equitability of GI. Invariably strategic GI planning is focussed on the delivery of economic growth, societal health and well-being, city-scale water and pollution management, and larger-scale ecological connectivity, and feeds into broader development management debates. Whereas local-scale GI planning concentrates more frequently on the form and function of specific sites and their utility to an individual and/or community, and involves the environment, non-governmental or community sectors. To advance this way of thinking urban planners need to:

1. More effectively promote GI in practice and policy/political discourses,

2. Ensure legal, policy and financial support for the development, delivery, and management of urban greening,

3. Incorporate all interested communities in the decision-making process via meaningful consultation, and specifically the co-design of new development and co-production of nuanced management plans for GI to promote equity and limit disenfranchisement, and

4. Ensure that local GI needs are respected, including quality, access and supported uses.

Addressing these four points requires greater clarity regarding who holds the responsibility and authority to advocate for GI, and how its principles can become embedded within decision-making and community thinking to press for more ecologically minded design, management and funding for urban development.

The pathway to integrated GI praxis though remains challenging due to the diversity of those with a stake in urban debates. The complexity of what urban form constitutes, who it is for, and who derives benefits from it has historically marginalised local voices at the expense of overarching development objectives, as city planners, officials, and politicians work to address strategic targets (Anguelovski et al., 2018). The use of GI as a tool promoting equitability in urban planning attempts to address this imbalance by effectively integrating local knowledge of environment value now, and in the future, within development debates. To achieve this, we call for recognition that a combination of qualitative and quantitative indicators of quality, access, and supported uses needs to be taken into account to avoid negatively impacting a location’s community well-being and ecological conditions.

The disaggregation of the local from the strategic in city planning limits the inclusion of community voices from formal development discourses, especially where those populations are disenfranchised due to age, gender, ethnicity or income (Rigolon et al., 2018; Wolch et al., 2014). As an alternative, GI advocates have called for a more equitable form of development that places a primacy on the local. This focusses on the inclusion of community scale knowledge into the design, development, and management of urban form, and particularly investment in GI that is specific to local conditions.

While the identification and inclusion of local needs is critical to successfully integrating ecological thinking into development, debates regarding how to incorporate communities’ needs are unresolved. These concerns are particularly acute for those historically -disenfranchised communities, who may also lack the capacity required to advocate for their needs. While the needs of more privileged communities are often incorporated into decision-making and planning by default, those considered most vulnerable have the additional burden of advocating for their specific needs. We call for planners and others to share the responsibility of investing in locally specific GI to reduce burdens disenfranchised communities face.

Through an engagement with the issues raised above it is possible to reframe GI as an essential component of urban development debates. To achieve this requires an acknowledgement that existing practices are failing to address the current needs of urban areas, especially for those communities disenfranchised from setting investment and management debates. Thus, advocates promote GI to align technical, socio-economic, and ecological knowledge that explicitly links the local/strategic and qualitative/quantitative examinations of urban functionality to plan for future resilience. Without a recognition that urban systems are a complex amalgam of grey, green, and human infrastructure it will remain difficult to plan effectively for climatic, infrastructural, economic, and demographic change. This requires planners and policy decision-makers to acknowledge variations in local conditions and forefront community needs, particularly of disenfranchised communities, above vanity projects. GI is not without its limits, and it should not be considered as working with a blank canvas in any location; it should be introduced in a manner that attends to rather than deepens existing forms of social and spatial inequalities. If respect is given to these issues, then GI provides opportunities to respond more effectively to shortcomings of built infrastructure, which can be moderated via investment in nature.

Notes on Contributors

Ian Mell researches the role of Green Infrastructure as a facilitator of socio-economic and ecological enhancement. His work spans discussions of government, development, and the environment sectors in the UK and internationally. [email protected]

Tenley Conway researches the intersections of environmental geography, environmental studies, and urban ecology to improve our understanding of urban forest governance and examine patterns of trees and other urban land covers. [email protected]

Climate Resilient Infrastructure – Connecting and Dividing the Cities of the Future

Together, growing urbanisation and climate change create complex risks, especially for those cities that already experience poorly planned urban growth … But cities also provide opportunities for climate action … (Debra Roberts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022)¹

Climate resilient infrastructure will make or break our cities of the future. Witnessing or experiencing first-hand more frequent floods and fires, and reading the latest IPCC reports, we know that climate change impacts are already stretching and stressing the capacity of local governments the world over – and without urgent action to mitigate and adapt urban infrastructure against climate change, the consequences for cities’ citizens and nature are dire (IPCC, 2022; Lwasa et al., 2022). Our urban centres’ aged or poorly designed infrastructures, be that physical, natural, technological, governance, political, cultural or societal, that keep citizens housed, connected, moving, educated, healthy are failing, and building our ever-expanding urban centres via a business-as-usual mode is just not viable. Young people are on city streets demanding action. Yet, even though over two thousand local governments formally acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis (Climate Emergency Declaration, 2022), many risk not fulfilling their promises of action, when so many decisions to future proof critical infrastructure are at best delayed, or worse halted due to bureaucratic, political and other competing processes (or more powerful interests) at all levels of government.

The various infrastructures that make or break a city – the transport, housing, green open space networks that can spectacularly, innovatively bring people in our city centres to connect and thrive – already feature divisive, poor design, fostering un-equal access to climate resilient futures for all citizens (or non-human species that continue to call cities their home). Policy compromises caused by budgetary, jurisdictional or ideological constraints, create the risk that cities won’t play their part for collaborative global climate action. However, if new or retrofitted urban infrastructures are built, through a holistic systematic lens, with materials factoring in mitigation and adaptation in equal measure – then, the global challenge of climate change could genuinely be acted upon on the local stage (Frantzeskaki & McPhearson, 2022; Huddleston et al., 2022).

Three threads, two dubious decisions by nearby local governments, and a very clever meme attracted my attention to causes of division as cities pursue resilient urban infrastructure. The opaque nature of decisions made by governments and resulting mixed or confusing messaging, call into question whether cities can truly be the ”secret weapon“ (Lynch et al., 2021, p. 3) for nations to meet their commitments for emissions reduction, per the Paris Climate Agreement. As a former local government politician, often making announcements heralding action to mitigate or to adapt our city to climate change, I know how transformative action can so easily be postponed, cancelled, or stalled by a myriad of competing challenges or challengers. Responses were dependent on how we communicated and how we evidenced the decisions being made. There would be celebration, comfort and cause for optimism for some, but often derision from those adversely impacted, or not included in a city-shaping policy decision or announcement.

A social media thread that grabbed my attention, supporting this reflection of opaque decision making, was triggered by a populist broadcaster’s outrage at the pace of city cycle infrastructure being built in response to the City of Melbourne declaring a Climate and Biodiversity Emergency (City of Melbourne, 2022). The pandemic-shuttered city meant delivery on 40 km of low emission transport infrastructure (bike lanes) could be sped up on quieter than usual city streets. An alarmist, headline-grabbing news article led to a recommendation from management that Council should stop this roll out of cycle lanes. The resulting Council meeting showed, at least from my viewing of the meeting via a Twitter thread, a lack of clarity on the decisions being made. An extremely lengthy Council debate, in front of an informed and engaged public gallery of pro-cycling community, resulted in a year-long deferral. The cyclists tweeted their dismay and confusion in the decision-making process post-meeting (10 June 2022), including:

A lot of people into bikelanes are learning a lot about politics of dog parks this evening… (@pittaniacal)

Disappointing from councillors at @CityofMelbourne. The language has not been clear as to why the year-long deferral has been endorsed. The detailed designs are….not complete? Under-resourced? Need to be changed according to community feedback? (@mcp_morley)

If tonight’s decision has taught me anything, is that if this is how democracy is supposed to work, democracy is broken. Every single speaker has spoken out against this motion, yet it’s not really up for debate. This has been set in stone who knows how long ago. (@LiveableMelbourne)

I’m honestly a bit confused. I haven’t heard a good argument for why it’s important to defer projects by a year. If this is important to ensure a good outcome and get support from more stakeholders I would have liked to hear about this (@alexandersheko)

The point here is that even with informed and engaged citizen groups encouraging city leaders to accelerate implementation of climate friendly infrastructure, the risk-averse nature of local government and or the fear of many politicians that negative commentary might impact their longevity in office, will continue to create conflicting or confusing messages on how serious they are in implementing their climate action plans.

A second reflection on this topic of conflicting messages from local government on climate resilient infrastructure was prompted by my university colleague’s distress at a beautiful tree being cut down in her street without notice or consultation. She found out, after phoning her Council, that it was cut down to protect a heritage building. I don’t know which street, which tree, or which building, but I do know very well this juxtaposition of cities wanting to protect post-colonial heritage of a city on one hand, while wanting to implement climate positive infrastructure on the other.

There has been some progress within planning schemes on the vexed issue of protecting heritage features of buildings whilst also allowing energy efficient upgrades such as solar panels or gardens on rooves. However, difficulty remains on how to implement greening of public and private spaces in our cities in an equitable and holistic manner. I’ve heard, ”I love trees, but not that one,“ ”I love trees, but don’t remove my car park.“ ”I don’t want that new park near me, least it bring the wrong type of people to my side of town,“ or ”you must keep that tree [despite it being a non-climate resilient species] because that is what we are used to.“ Resolving the myriad of opinions on which plants where is crucial, especially given these too often individualistic responses to planting in neighbourhoods. There is a need to engage in all the co-benefits of urban nature if local governments want to implement transformative scale planting needed to cool our cities. Huge demand for open space during Covid-19, could be a key to citizens being more engaged in the multiple benefits of nature at a whole of city rather than street or precinct scale (Moglia et al., 2021), and clear and compelling communication strategies will be key for all citizens to have, as a right, equal access to quality green infrastructure (Rutt & Gulsrud, 2016).

The third and final thread that piqued my interest was the meme a European colleague currently working in Melbourne recently posted online featuring her rugged up in woollen hat, jacket, and blanket, to work from home in a typical un-insulated Melbourne house. It alarmingly resonated not just to me, often typing with fingerless gloves through winter – but many people confirmed their similarly uninsulated work from home (and office) situations, not just in Australia, but also across the globe. This picture reminds us that the division and connection within cities are not limited to the physical structure and pattern of the cities. The inclusive and equitable provision of safe and high-quality infrastructure is a less regarded dimension of forming cities as a connected and united entity. This issue also hinders achieving resilient cities and slows the pace of climate actions. A recent literature review by Hürlimann et al. (2022) highlights this point. Known climate consequences for infrastructure must be rapidly incorporated into updated and legislated building standards, planning schemes, built environment frameworks, so that renovations, retrofits and new homes can function in a warmer climate with predicted more extreme weather conditions – and so that citizens, especially the most vulnerable, aren’t left behind.

We know that solutions exist to embed efficiency, low emissions, or renewable energy into our future urban infrastructure (ClimateWorks Australia, 2020; Coalition for Urban Transitions, 2019), solutions that are inclusive, connecting cities physically and uniting the citizens in terms of receiving equitable services. While many challenges and gaps exist in local government capacity to deliver climate resilient infrastructure, targeted innovation and research can address some of these. To that end, and to close, I highlight the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy’s City Research and Innovation Agenda (CRIA) (Oke et al., 2022), namely because it identifies critical knowledge gaps, from a city perspective needed to assist the scaling up city climate action. In the CRIA, infrastructure knowledge gaps are interlinked by cross cutting issues such as access & reliability, engagement & participation, and systems approaches to climate mitigation & adaptation. Highlighting the complexity of decisions city leaders are making to plan for and develop just and equitable future urban infrastructure, emphasises the need for a holistic approach that brings all citizens and all levels of government along the climate action journey, at the scale and pace deemed by climate scientists to be required.

Notes on Contributor

Associate Professor Cathy Oke is Enterprise Principal Fellow, Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, and Associate Director (Enterprise and Impact) Melbourne Centre for Cities, University of Melbourne. She is an advisor to the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and was a City of Melbourne Councillor 2008–2020. [email protected]

Notes

1 Speaking as the IPCC Working Group II Co-Chair on the release of The Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Working Group II report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability February 27 2022, Quoted at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/resources/press/press-release/.