The service hub as bypassed social infrastructure: evidence from inner-city Osaka

Abstract

We shed light on understudied social infrastructure by focusing on the service hub, those conspicuous clusters of voluntary sector organizations designed to help the most vulnerable urban populations. Using Kamagasaki, Osaka as an exploratory case study, we find that the service hub acts as a distinctly inner-city social infrastructure marked by very close proximity of clients and services, as well as high accessibility, mutuality and provisionality, and clear motivations to ensure day-to-day survival. But the conversation between service hub and social infrastructure indicates that our case study must be understood as a bypassed infrastructure, unsung and out-of-sync with the market (but increasingly less so with the state). Kamagasaki suggested as social infrastructure of castoffs, standing apart and increasingly incompatible with current urbanism and its emphasis on privatization, gentrification and neoliberal co-optation, or even with the older 'infrastructural ideal' of the Fordist era, with its emphasis on large-scale universality.

Shadow care infrastructures: Sustaining life in post-welfare cities

“…State welfare and informal care provision are highly geographically uneven, reflecting substantial embedded costs (e.g. community centres) and social capital (Deverteuil et al, 2020). The materialities of deprivation are also uneven.…”

A research framework for the United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021–2030)

“…Community wellbeing is a key element of the Decade mission. However, despite the Decade Action calling on communities to foster the abilities of older people, there has been little exploration of the capacity of communities to do this, Wellbeing could provide a way to evaluate the sufficiency of community material resources (e.g., infrastructure and local economy) and relationships (e.g., sense of coherence and participation) (DeVerteuil et al 2020 ; Ryser et al 2021 ) as well as community narratives (e.g., as flourishing or left behind) (Li and Zehr 2020 ; Wiseman and Brasher 2008 ). Mapping diversities across these wellbeing domains could help us better understand the extent to which older people with the greatest need for age-friendly interventions do not always reside in places with the capacity to implement them (Cueva et al 2021 ; Winterton 2016 ).…”

Whose city? Which sociality?

“…The contributions to this special issue illustrate both the flexibility and the analytic utility of the concept of social infrastructure – which is drawn on to make sense of everything from the ways in which domestic lighting practices in East London can be used to cultivate intimate and hopeful forms of sociality (Ebbensgard 2020 ), to how an inner-city service hub in Osaka creates forms of “dense social connection” (DeVerteuil et al 2020 : 4), which simultaneously extend and circumscribe the capacity of voluntary organizations to care for those in need and transform the city, respectively. As the concept of social infrastructure gains traction, we hope to offer a series of reflections that build on the contributions here by considering the future use of the term whilst highlighting potential areas of further investigation.…”

“…At the same time as noting these valued effects, however, Ebbensgard also asks what role such practices might play in working to resist or extend urban inequality – whether they generate resistance or acquiesce, hope for a different future or simply desire to achieve a superior position within a stratified present. DeVerteuil et al’s ( 2020 ) study of a “service hub” in Osaka is even more pointed, highlighting how urban policy in Osaka has worked to carve out a great deal of autonomy for this hub, enabling it to create empowering forms of social infrastructure at a local scale while simultaneously constraining its transformative potential against the realities of urban poverty, or within urban policy, more broadly. These examples highlight the capacities of social infrastructures to generate multiple outcomes – beyond forms of sociality – and point to another productive avenue for future research, in investigating how these outcomes interact and counterbalance.…”

“…Or, to put the point differently, even when thinking heuristically, it may help to stop and ask ourselves when it is useful to talk about “social” infrastructures, and when, instead, it becomes more helpful to shift frames and talk about infrastructure in other terms such as infrastructures of endurance, improvisation, accountability, and so on – in ways that clearly encompass sociality, but focus more on how it forms a part of broader assemblages and leads to particular political ends, rather than taking sociality as an end in and of itself. Indeed, DeVerteuil et al’s ( 2020 ) study of a “service hub” in Kamagasaki, Osaka, performs this sort of reframing – taking an interest in social infrastructure primarily as a matter of connectivity between services, and an open-access, non-judgmental ethos, and discussing this in more specific terms as bypassed infrastructure , which by dint of its overlooked and relatively structurally unincorporated position, is able to create distinctive new assemblages.…”