Foreword

Penny Harvey

Doreen Massey opened her influential book For Space by suggesting that ‘it could be productive to think about space differently’ (2005, p. 1). She was looking for a way to reformulate political questions in ways that would lend more weight to relational understandings of the world. More than anything she wanted to contribute to existing debates about how things could be otherwise, by demonstrating that there were always alternatives, despite the sensation that the contemporary trajectories of global systems, capitalist aspirations, and entrenched identities seemed to be both dominant and inevitable. She set the scene for this discussion by describing one formative moment of encounter in what would become the unfolding history of ‘Latin America’. In November 1519, Hernán Cortés and his small army caught sight of the immense city of Tenochtitlán for the first time. She suggests that the Aztec leader, Moctezuma, had forebodings about the arrival of the Spanish army. The direction from which the strangers were approaching, coupled with calendrical alignments of diverse cosmological indicators, indicated a particular quality of time and space, and a potential fragility to what might otherwise have appeared as a solid position of power and authority. The Spanish forces were moved by an altogether different understanding of space as a continuous territory over which they could move, a surface on which they could act to impose their own, rightful future.

Massey had less to say about how this early modern European understanding of time and space prevailed. She was more interested in its limitations, and particularly in the consequences of its impoverished spatial imagination. The politics that she championed demanded a move away from thinking of space as a homogeneous surface and argued for the importance of conceptualising space as a site of encounter, a relational phenomenon where multiple trajectories confront and/or accommodate each other, hence the challenge to think about space differently, a challenge that has been taken up in many quarters over the following years. One of those ways has been to put infrastructures centre stage. So, what exactly has a focus on infrastructures brought to the table?

One key contribution has been to highlight the work of the material relations that underpin surface effects. Put simply, a focus on infrastructures is a focus on the otherwise mundane or hidden work involved in creating that sense of continuous space or surface that Massey wanted to challenge. Infrastructures are the mechanisms by which a seamless connectivity is achieved and stabilised. Close empirical study of infrastructural systems has also drawn attention to how the achievement of continuity is premised on choices and channels that exclude alternatives. The intrinsic political life of any infrastructure refers to these choices, the interests they serve, and the struggles they provoke. An empirical focus on infrastructures also disrupts the primacy of surfaces, the assumptions of linear temporalities, or homogenous agency. Infrastructures rely on other conceptual bridges (notions of interface and alignment come into play), and gaps (hence the importance of leakage, repair, and decay). Instability, interruptions, and fragility are highlighted by the effort required to maintain the experience of seamless connectivity and flow. The tensions between engineered design and improvisation becomes highly visible as soon as any specific infrastructural project is followed or investigated from close-up. Equally the limits of human agency are also continually revealed by the hubris of the modern aspiration to control and contain wider environmental forces.

All these issues have clear political valence as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. The infrastructures and circulations of an industrialised global economy have produced a glittering array of technological possibilities alongside massive challenges, social inequalities, unspeakable human suffering, and the mass extinction of many other-than human life forms. Brutal conflicts over mineral resources, over territory, political autonomy, and financial accumulation, coupled with the effects of climate change have provoked the displacement of human populations, as migrants and refugees search for a modicum of stability from which to build a life worth living. Latin America is no stranger to such movements.

In the light of these arguments, it is strange to recall that it was less than a decade ago that Hannah Knox and I were still discussing whether or not to present our ethnography of roads in Peru as a book about ‘infrastructure’ (Harvey and Knox, 2015). At the time, the foundational work on infrastructures was written by those working on communications technologies (Bowker and Star, 1999; Edwards, 2007, 2009, 2010; Star, 1999; Star and Ruhleder, 1996) and the concept of ‘network’ was more commonly debated by theorists of connectivity and circulation. However, in time ‘infrastructure’ proved to be a more grounded, more flexible, and more overtly political concept than the network. The focus it provided generated an ongoing stream of fascinating empirical research across the social sciences and humanities. The ‘infrastructure’ concept captured something of the anticipation and the promise of material transformation. It also pointed to the tangible often obdurate presence that prompted researchers to explore failed and abandoned experiments and to think about previous histories of future making, alongside those that continue to be generated today. Furthermore, as this collection clearly demonstrates, infrastructures are not limited to a notion of networked connectivity. On the contrary, the connectivity that infrastructures produce is intermittent, compromised, and partial in its distribution. Infrastructures are designed to constrain and channel movement but also routinely expand, extend, and leak not least because they provoke responses in and from the world they seek to order and constrain. And in the process, they consistently pose fresh questions and novel sites from which to consider the politics of material relations – whether in unnoticed everyday spaces, or in dramatic corporate and state-sponsored constructions, in the archive, the media, or in bureaucratic practices.

This collection clearly acknowledges the multivalence of engineered infrastructures, and the capacity of these material forms to exceed the purposes for which they were designed. Thus, we find an echo of Massey’s call to think differently about space, and to show how and why infrastructures emerge as sites of political action. Designed to deliver a seamless flow, these systems become obvious targets for those seeking to disrupt the complacency of an unexamined status quo. As I write, the ‘Insulate Britain’ movement is taking radical action to block one of the UK’s main motorways, the M25 that was built to enable the circulation of traffic around the Greater London area. The activists are seeking to draw attention to the causes and effects of climate change. Their challenge is to a government, and to voters, who argue that it is criminal to cause misery to motorists and/or to disrupt the workings of the economy, but who show little concern to the misery of those whose lives and livelihoods have been decimated by climate change. Their aim is to disrupt the complacency of space as surface, to show what it feels like to live in a space of disruption, and to pose the question of priorities, to ask what matters, and who it matters to. It is precisely because of the enabling function of infrastructural systems, and the simultaneity of connectivity and disconnection that infrastructures afford, that the politics of space can turn so quickly to a struggle over the grounds for life itself.

Thus, despite the continuing enthusiasm for infrastructural solutions to all manner of human difficulties, there is no sense in which such solutions have any intrinsic emancipatory quality. On the contrary, the weaponisation of infrastructural systems has been grasped with alacrity not only by protest groups but also by powerful state and corporate actors. Eyal Weizman’s classic work on the politics of Israel’s architecture of occupation (Weizman, 2007, 2017) reminds us of the centrality of infrastructural systems to the politics of territorial containment and control. These strategies of containment do not emerge from an impoverished spatial imagination. On the contrary they embrace the ambiguities and uncertainties of continuity and disruption, of visibility and invisibility, and of open-ended relational space. Wars are fought strategically, and in these circumstances the infrastructures that sustain life will always become key sites of vulnerability. Attacks on roads and bridges, on food and water supplies, on shelter and communications have always shaped human conflicts. The surprising element of Weizman’s study (2007) was his elaboration of the extent to which the Israeli army was strategically mobilising the work of Deleuze and Guattari, thinking with Massey about how to move beyond the surface, open to the possibilities of material elasticity, understanding the importance of infrastructures, of the sub-surface, of the air, of the possibilities of moving through space in unexpected ways. The confrontations of both war and protest are experimental in the sense that they emerge from the search to find new and surprising geometries of space, new possibilities for surveillance and attack. Contemporary warfare does not necessarily involve face-to-face combat. But this is not to in any way diminish the importance of the huge investments made by those who work tirelessly to bring more liveable worlds into being (Escobar, 2018). Here again infrastructures come to the fore, in the architectures of collaboration and mutual commitment, and in the materialisation of the aesthetic and affective possibilities of living otherwise. The excitement of thinking through the politics of infrastructures lies squarely in these spaces of possibility – the acts of inclusion and exclusion that make for both life and death, the need for connection and for autonomy, the strategies and counterstrategies for containment and disruption. Infrastructures thus not only create the grounds of possibility for specific forms and ways of life but also for the expansive connections that both sustain and potentially undermine very diverse ways of being. Liveable worlds must constantly be made and remade, always adjusting and confronting possibilities that others, often distant and anonymous others, put in place.

What then of the notion of Latin American infrastructures? If infrastructures are the many different and often conflicting material conditions of possibility for multiple life forms, and forms of life, through what lens do they acquire a regional, or even local identity or significance? The question brings me back to the significance of this collection of essays that works with the recognition of infrastructures as both open-ended systems of connectivity and circulation and as identifiable assemblages that affect lives in particular ways, in specific times and places. The empirical questions that infrastructures pose always include both the identification of connections and circulations that are supported, and those that are curtailed or closed off. Thus, we can ask about the intended effects of specific designs, and the responses that these designs elicit over time. But such questions can only be answered with reference to specified encounters.

The editors have identified three key themes that emerged across the diverse case studies presented here: nation, state, and citizenship; development, promise, and progress; disappointment, failure, and decay. These themes clearly point to sites of powerful intersection and encounter that justify a regional focus. At the same time, the chapters also reflect more localised regional sensibilities and a clear awareness of the overarching effects of the histories of imperial politics from Europe, the USA, the Soviet Union, and most recently from China. These intersections conjure a sense of encounter that both re-creates and threatens the relevance of any specific regional political agency. These shifting scales of association return me to my starting point, this time via the work of Mol and Law (1994) and their interest in the contrasting social topologies that structured responses to the incidence of anaemia caused by malnutrition. Working, for sake of example, with the spatial entities of ‘Africa’ and ‘the Netherlands’ Mol and Law were interested in the different relational assumptions embedded in three contrasting figures: regional clusters, networks of stable relations, and what they refer to as ‘fluid spatiality’ where contingency, mutation, and variation come to the fore. There are clear resonances here with our current experience of the coronavirus pandemic and the politics of space. In December 2021, a new variant of the virus, omicron, threatens human populations. Many different possible infrastructures of contagion are considered as points of vulnerability, including regions, networks, and fluid spatialities. Thus, we find whole ‘regions’ identified as dangerous. From the perspective of the UK government, it is currently the African nations that are designated as the most hazardous, and travel to and from this region is curtailed. These acts of spatial generalisation have taken many different shapes over the past two years. Several months ago, it was Latin America. More locally in the UK itself, some regions of the country were locked down, while others were encouraged to stay open. While the regional confinements come and go, all are asked to be attentive to their social networks, the proximity of inter-personal encounters is also regulated in public spaces. The precautions are imposed as infrastructures for health (masks, vaccines, hygiene, proximities, ventilation, etc.), that in turn create new challenges of isolation, of mistrust, of unevenly distributed regulation, etc. In practice the agile mutations of the virus demonstrate a far more fluid spatiality, its own infrastructures of mutability not yet clear enough to those who work to limit its capacity to spread.

Perhaps more important than anything at the current moment is the need to search for a diplomatic awareness of the positioning of others. Again, the empirical chapters in this collection are instructive because they were researched in close relationship to people actively looking for ways to produce or imagine liveable conditions for engaging uncertain futures. It is in such spaces that even the most spectacular of infrastructural initiatives becomes mundane, ultimately the assemblage is no more (and no less) than what it can and does deliver in the everyday. At the same time, as numerous writers have taught us, the everyday is made in the shadow of previous encounters. The specific ways in which prior events registered and affected people’s lives resonate and form the ground of future possibilities.

References

Bowker, G. and S.L. Star (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Edwards, P.N. (2010) A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Edwards, P.N. et al. (2007) Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design (Ann Arbor, MI: Deep Blue).

Edwards, P.N. et al. (2009) ‘Introduction: an agenda for infrastructure studies’, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 10 (5): 6.

Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Harvey, P. and H. Knox (2015) Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

Mol, A. and J. Law. (1994) ‘Regions, networks and fluids: anaemia and social topology’, Social Studies of Science, 24 (4): 641–71.

Massey, D. (2005) For Space. (London: Sage Publications).

Star, S.L. (1999) ‘The ethnography of infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–91.

Star, S.L. and K. Ruhleder (1996) ‘Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces’, Information Systems Research, 7 (1): 111–34.

Weizman, E. (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso Books).

Weizman, E. (2017) Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books).