From problematisation to propositionality: Advancing southern urban infrastructure debates

Abstract

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Researching infrastructures and cities: origins, debates, openings

“…The methodological challenges involved in apprehending the various facets of infrastructuration can also be read as an indicator of the fairly significant heterogeneity of infrastructural configurations (Jaglin, 2014;Lawhon et al, 2018;Guma, 2020). Recognising this heterogeneity also entails an ontological shift, as it questions the very modes of existence of infrastructures, extending it to user practices but also to the various labour activities that are integral to the functioning of infrastructures (Simone, 2004: Baptista andCirolia, 2022). Liza Rose Cirolia and Andrea Pollio (Cirolia and Pollio, 2024) challenge this scholarship on infrastructural heterogeneity to go beyond its descriptive character (Chapter 11).…”

Storage city: Water tanks, jerry cans, and batteries as infrastructure in Nairobi

“…Andueza et al, 2021; Barua, 2021; Besedovsky et al, 2019). Other authors have pointed out that the increasingly ‘fuzzy boundaries’ of infrastructure may jeopardise sharpness and usefulness for academia and practice (Baptista and Cirolia, 2022: 930; see also Howe et al, 2016). Yet, a ‘wider infrastructural ontology’ (Barua, 2021; see also Addie, 2021) holds opportunity and value to fully grasp how basic services and resources are provided, distributed and accessed within and through configurations or systems ‘without which contemporary societies cannot function’ (Edwards, 2003: 188).…”

“…Ultimately, for present and future cities – especially but not only in the Global South – researching storage can provide new insights and recommendations for urban making through infrastructures. Recent provocations build on critical analyses of urban infrastructures in Africa to provide propositions to explicitly influence ‘decision-making processes with a diversity of possibilities for action grounded on situated knowledges and practices’ (Baptista and Cirolia, 2022: 936; see also Lawhon et al, 2022). Accordingly, the notion of the storage city , and further related research, may provide material for various disciplines of city-making – from design (e.g.…”

Life funds, urban development, and the experimental practices of financial sociology

“…He takes issue with the treatment of the US and UK as exemplar, essentially bounded 'national' economies, and the concomitant 'black-boxing' of the socio-spatial configurations of the institutions, functions, and models of finance. This latter issue has been picked up since in scholarship addressing how the dominant 'political economy framing' of financialization scholarship veils the financial relationships at work in the infrastructural development of urban economies (O'Brien et al, 2019;O'Neill, 2019) and southern urban infrastructures (Baptista & Cirolia, 2022;Cirolia, 2020). Fully understanding the 'functions, processes and flows of cities and urban economies' (O'Brien et al, 2019(O'Brien et al, , p. 1298) means investigating how they actively participate in their own funding and financing arrangements, not treating these details as a backdrop to political economy concerns.…”