How to Mend a Fragmented City: a Critique of ‘Infrastructural Solidarity'

Abstract

Cities in Latin America in particular have been investing in new transportation networks such as bicycle systems, metros and bus rapid transit (BRT) technologies in recent years. These infrastructures are promoted as cures for trenchant social and spatial divisions as much as for traffic gridlock and vehicular pollution. This article unpacks the theory that infrastructures might mend cities that have been fragmented into disparate parts by uneven capitalist development. I argue that this ‘infrastructural solidarity' thesis relies on a troubled imagination—shared across urban design and strands of urban theory—that infrastructures are static, formal arrangements that concretize relations and enforce social cohesion or fragmentation. This article draws on qualitative research on the TransMilenio BRT system in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as on the work of Bruno Latour, suggesting that the political life of infrastructure is better revealed when such systems are understood as dense knots of shifting relations with complex temporalities. Arguments for the value of this type of actor‐network theory (ANT) reading often skew towards the esoteric, but the TransMilenio case shows how sorting through infrastructural ontologies actually matters in terms of how urbanists—academic and practicing—conceive of and work towards just and functional cities.

Social infrastructure and the public life of cities: Studying urban sociality and public spaces

“…They also make the observation that there is a sociality to this nonsocial infrastructure. A lot of informal human, political, and cultural work gathers around and goes into infrastructure (Amin, ; Cesafasky, ; Truelove, ). Simone () has taken this argument further, arguing that people themselves can be understood as infrastructure: They help the economy, communications, power, and water of cities to function (McFarlane & Silver, ).…”

Negotiating networked infrastructural inequalities: Governance, electricity access, and space in Rio de Janeiro

“…This partially responds to the criticism Cesafsky (2017) made vis-á-vis fragmentation research: “by connecting ‘bad’ infrastructural forms to various social and political ‘bads,’ fragmentation research does little to challenge the common-sense imagination that walls divide and channels connect” (p. 149). Instead, by approaching the heterogeneous governance structures in which the grid operates, this article has taken the fragmented nature of the city of Rio de Janeiro as a starting point for questioning the meaning of a near universal network.…”

Social infrastructure and public life – notes on Finsbury Park, London

“…With the term social infrastructure we are thinking about the networks of spaces, facilities, institutions, and groups that create affordances for social connection. Others in urban geography and urban studies have considered the sociality of infrastructure (Amin, 2014;Graham & McFarlane, 2015;Silver & McFarlane, 2019) -recognizing that a lot of human work can go into making infrastructure function (Cesafasky, 2017), or in some cases even replaces and substitutes for more typical hard infrastructures (Simone, 2004). Fewer have drawn attention to the infrastructures that facilitate sociality.…”