Infrastructuring with Care in Cities of the Global South

Abstract

Cities of the Global South are infrastructurally diverse and entangled with multiple coexisting infrastructural formations, be they planned or unplanned. They offer unique opportunities to study, design, intervene in and develop systemic approaches related to infrastructural configurations encompassed by the processes and dynamics of urban infrastructuring. In this chapter, we draw from the contributions to this volume to propose that infrastructural scholarship and practice contribute to the production and reproduction of potentially violent forms of infrastructuring. Such infrastructuring carries implications for human health, human wellbeing and sustainability more broadly. We argue that whether and how infrastructuring can act to transform infrastructural configurations and entanglements towards greater sustainability is fundamentally an ethical question. We suggest that an ethico-politics of care should be embedded in systems approaches to infrastructuring in both research and practice. To become sustainable, infrastructuring (as a transformative process) must be aligned with the ethico-political position of caring.

An Experiment in Transdisciplinary Systems Mapping: Architecture and the Water–Energy–Sanitation Nexus in Brazil

“…Architecture is implicated in the process of development since architects design the buildings and urban environments within which patterns of everyday life are generated, take place, and aggregate to shape the trajectories of production and consumption, resource use, pollution, and ultimately, social, economic, and environmental change [8]. Despite architecture's stated commitment to addressing long-term sustainability challenges, architectural practice and architecture-related research often appear to perpetuate narrow perspectives, marked by an aversion to engage with matters beyond the confines of the object, building site, or master plan [9][10][11]. The discipline's apparent failure to recognize architectural interventions as integral elements of larger dynamic systems hinders the development of comprehensive approaches that consider the complex relationships between architecture (as a practice, process, and built form) and its larger contextual frameworks.…”