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Redeploying Urban Infrastructure
Jonathan Rutherford
Redeploying Urban
Infrastructure
The Politics of Urban
Socio-Technical Futures
Jonathan Rutherford
LATTS
Université Paris Est
Marne-la-Vallée, France
ISBN 978-3-030-17886-4 ISBN 978-3-030-17887-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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Preface
Over the past twenty years, urban infrastructure has come to be seen
and studied as one of the key sites and vantage points of global urban
transformations. Cities are facing the ongoing challenge of reconciling
social inclusion, economic prosperity and environmental sustainability
in their socio-technical systems (energy, water, communications, trans-
port…). Scholars have responded by unpacking and critically investi-
gating the shifting capacities of diverse actors to shape these systems,
the various means they use to envision, enact and contest change, and
the wide-ranging implications of systemic urban transitions. There is a
meaningful politics of infrastructure which is and will continue to be a
crucial and productive arena of debate and conflict over the directions,
forms, modalities and outcomes of future urban change. This book
seeks to substantively develop and demonstrate, both conceptually and
empirically, this fertile politics of urban infrastructure.
While infrastructure is increasingly present in urban studies and
there is something of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the wider social sciences
(see for example Harvey et al. 2017), much of this work remains quite
piecemeal and diffuse across disciplines, sectors or contexts. There is
still work to be done to bridge between technology scholars seeking
v
vi Preface
efficiency and optimal solutions and social scientists concerned by con-
tingent ‘softer’ relations between actors, and a sense that generalizing or
theorizing across these various boundaries—moving towards “a com-
parative theory of urban infrastructure” (Graham and McFarlane 2015,
p. 13)—remains a difficult task as we seek broader understanding of
why and how infrastructure matters or comes to matter in and between
situated urban contexts. Paying more attention to the materiality of
infrastructure can help in this undertaking.
It is perhaps here that infrastructure demands what Jackson et al.
(2007) call a ‘sensibility’: “a way of thinking and acting in the world
capable of moving between the separate registers of technical and social
action”. Redeploying infrastructure in theory and in practice involves
a recognition that social and technical worlds are not carved off neatly
one from the other, but are always untidily intertwined. This calls
forth particular views and enactments of human–technology relations
which are highly contingent and consequential for shaping futures.
Infrastructure creates and maintains “the conditions of possibility for a
particular higher-order objective” (Carse 2012, p. 540), while its redis-
tributive nature means that particular configurations always work to the
advantage of some groups and entities and to the disadvantage of others
(Jackson et al. 2007). Not only do the material and physical qualities
of infrastructure make a difference to its functioning, to how it works
and is developed and taken up, but they also (increasingly?) have politi-
cal consequences and indeed constitute political (im)possibilities (Barry
2013; Mitchell 2011).
I use urban infrastructure as a window to explore shifting relation-
ships between cities, humans, technologies and ecologies, as imperatives
to sustainable urban futures continue to be promulgated, but for var-
ying, often contradictory, visions, rationales and interests. Continuing
exploration of the relationship between infrastructure change and urban
transitions is required to analyse how and why socio-technical systems
are put to work for wider sociopolitical projects and the implications
and contests this implies and draws out. To do this I develop a rela-
tional socio-technical perspective which sees urban infrastructure as an
emerging material political process or achievement in which technolog-
ical components and social relations are fully entwined and mutually
Preface vii
constitutive. Here, the urban is at once the context, constituent and
consequence of infrastructural processes: simultaneously shaping of and
shaped by, but also, crucially, fully constitutive or actively formative of
actual and possible pathways. In other words, while cities are a milieu
of socio-technical change (with historical and territorial specificities)
and an outcome of change processes, they are also constantly emerging
material political configurations through which change actually comes
about. Understanding the urban as a socio-technical process through
which materiality becomes political, rather than as a pregiven state or a
set measure of density/centrality, helps to underscore that studying how
infrastructure becomes debated or disputed is to explore how urban
socio-technical change comes about.
There are three main objectives of the book. The first is to use orig-
inal empirical studies of urban infrastructure change processes in
European cities, and to show these to be at the heart of crucial, ongo-
ing debates over urban futures. The second is to straddle and inter-
face engagement between the latest theoretical advances and empirical
investigation of urban planning practice and socio-technical engineer-
ing of systems and flows, forging new reflections and perspectives
across distinctive worlds of infrastructure. The third is to open out our
understanding of urban infrastructure by tracking different rationales,
materials and flows through the urban arena as they are employed to
connect to, disconnect from, and contest wider urban political projects.
In so doing, it contributes to reflections around the role of urban infra-
structure and its multitude of actors in enacting more desirable, pro-
gressive and collective urban futures.
I begin in Chapter 1 by setting out a conceptual framework for
exploring the politics of urban infrastructure which draws on a vari-
ety of resources from across urban studies and science and technology
studies (STS). By engaging with, and bringing together, debates around
sustainability transition processes, urban materialities and ecological
urbanisms, I develop an overarching perspective on the material politics
of urban socio-technical change which situates theoretically the stories
of urban infrastructure of the following chapters.
Chapters 2–6 each start from and focus on a distinct pretext and
process of change (suburban planning, low carbon, energy transition,
viii Preface
eco-city integration, smart urbanism) as implemented in Stockholm and
Paris, two European cities which have been at the forefront of sustain-
able urban development and where debates over the orientations and
outcomes of this development have been intense. This is not a compar-
ative study of the two cities, and the aim is not to provide a compre-
hensive overview of each city, but to delve into a handful of illustrative
examples of how infrastructure is implicated in realizing more sustain-
able urban futures. They are close to what Braun (2014, p. 52) calls
‘vignettes’ which “resist being read in totalizing terms as examples of an
overarching ‘plan’ of government, but nevertheless reveal in their details
particular ways in which urban life is ‘managed’ or ‘administered’…”.
These vignettes are thus not presented as emblematic of urban sustaina-
bility in practice but in order to explore and expose a material political
process in which particular socio-technical configurations, flows, sites
and visions are negotiated and disputed in specific urban contexts. As
mentioned above, the idea is that foregrounding the politics of infra-
structure can shed light on how urban socio-technical change takes
place. The research on which the chapters are based has been conducted
over a number of years across different projects. In each case, qualitative
methods were privileged involving in-depth semi-structured interviews
with stakeholders, site visits and participant observation, and analysis
of secondary material, reports and documentation. While the research
was done at different times and the focus and results are therefore nec-
essarily distinct and uneven, there was always a particular emphasis on
engaging a socio-technical methodology by trying to understand the
technical functioning and operations of infrastructure configurations,
the activities they support, as well as seeking out different viewpoints
and controversies concerning the wider social significance and political
implications of these configurations.
Chapter 2 focuses on water infrastructure systems which are cru-
cially important in extending and reworking socionatural suburban
spaces. These systems have always either accompanied and supported
or preceded and stimulated urban growth. Yet, paradoxically, the actual
ways and processes of making and remaking suburban infrastructure
configurations are largely ignored. Mixing insights from socio-technical
Preface ix
studies and infrastructure situations and experiences in the South, the
chapter reflects on infrastructure planning and engagement as an ongo-
ing provisional socio-technical achievement in the Stockholm archipel-
ago area where particular hybrid configurations of water infrastructure
are at the heart of changing forms, modalities, and outcomes of local
development and modes of residence.
Chapter 3 is focused on the material politics of low carbon agendas
in Stockholm, the first Green Capital of Europe. There has been signif-
icant debate over proposed visions for Stockholm’s future ‘green’ devel-
opment. This debate was captured by the question of whether the city
was concretely aiming to be both or either ‘fossil fuel free’ by 2050 and/
or ‘world class’ in 2030, and by the different means and resources which
were attributed to working concretely and materially towards these
objectives. The chapter tracks ongoing struggles over urban energy–cli-
mate issues through a number of material settings of transition around
policy trajectories, resources for environmental work, district heating
infrastructure and mobility politics. This highlights how socio-techni-
cal change is understood, negotiated, experienced and practiced through
the multiple arrangements and mobilisations of urban materiality by
particular interests and groups.
Chapter 4 is an attempt to make sense of the nature, modalities,
outcomes and possibilities of urban energy transition in Paris. This
transition process is examined in the context of a variety of equally
meaningful stakes and strategic objectives around decarbonisation,
municipal control of infrastructure and the continuing role of nuclear
power. Each of these concerns emerges through debates and knowledge
controversies around the make-up, functioning and use of particular
objects or materials including resources, pipes, contracts, reports and
radiators. This captures a processual notion of transition as characterized
by work and activities at different sites and levels, and as constituted by
the effectivity of material circulations, flows and stabilities which reveal
and highlight key issues and contentions, become open to claims and
appropriations, and defy, resist and remain unruly.
Chapter 5 explores the complex and contested processes and prac-
tices involved in rebundling infrastructure systems as part of ecological
x Preface
urbanism objectives in Stockholm. Focusing on the well-known eco-dis-
trict of Hammarby Sjöstad, I trace some of the important disjunctures
between vision, discourse, practice and material politics in and around
the reconfiguring and integration of energy, waste and water systems,
within the context of wider debates and tensions over future urban
planning in the city. Across model and conception, limits and devia-
tions in practice, and evaluation and transfer, eco-city integration and
circularity is exposed as a struggle to contain and control systems, flows
and engagements which are often intractable.
Chapter 6 examines the nature and implications of urban enhance-
ment propounded by recent smart urban initiatives. Using a short ana-
lytical vignette of the reconfiguration of energy system flows in a district
level smart grid project near Paris, it reflects on the implications of
smart logics and what these may say about the temporalities of urban
planning, the boundaries and scales of urban projects and experiments,
and the prospects of devolving agency and control of urban systems and
flows to technology.
Finally, a short conclusion offers summary reflections on the argu-
ments developed across the chapters, around why infrastructure mat-
ters, how infrastructure comes to matter and what can be gained from
pursuing explorations of urban infrastructure futures. It tenders some
thoughts on future concerns and priorities for research and practice in
this area.
Marne-la-Vallée, France Jonathan Rutherford
References
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Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32:
49–64.
Carse, Ashley. 2012. Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the
Panama Canal Watershed. Social Studies of Science 42 (4): 539–563.
