Stephen Graham, urbanist, geographer, author and networked city infrastructure expert looks at our ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude towards the facilities that we use to define ourselves as ‘civilised’.
“The secret ambition of design is to become invisible, to be taken up into a culture, absorbed into the background. […] The highest order of success in design is to achieve ubiquity, to become banal.”
- Bruce Mau, “Massive Change”
By sustaining flows of water, waste, energy, information, people, commodities, and signs, the massive complexes of contemporary urban infrastructure are the embodiment of western Enlightenment dreams. They are the dreams of the control of nature through advances in technology and science that are a prerequisite to any notion of modern ‘civilization’. Through their endless technological agency, these complexes help transform the natural into the cultural, the social and the urban, yet the more developed and complex the infrastructure, the more hidden they tend to become; driven underground and ignored – until something goes wrong.
As the great demographic and geographic shift of global urbanisation intensifies, humankind will become ever more reliant on functioning systems of urban infrastructure. Indeed, the very nature of urbanisation means that every aspect of people’s lives tends to become more dependent on the infrastructural circuits of the city to sustain individual and collective health, security, economic opportunity, social well being and biological life. Moreover, because they rely on the continuous agency of infrastructure to maintain normal life-functions such as eating, communicating or waste removal, urbanites often have few or no real alternatives when the complex infrastructures that support these needs are removed or disrupted.
Infrastructural elements thus provide the fundamental background to modern urban everyday life. This background is often hidden, assumed, or even naturalised. This is most common in wealthier, western cities where basic access to a suite of communication, energy, water and transport systems have been to some extent universalised as the basis for modern, urban, citizenship.
In conditions where continuous access to key infrastructure circuits has become broadly the norm, anthropologists Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh-Star stress that “good, usable [infrastructure] systems, disappear almost by definition. The easier they are to use the harder they are to see. As well, most of the time, the bigger they are, the harder they are to see.” Within social scientific writing about cities, especially, the vast infrastructural circuits of the city have often emerged as little more than “the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place” – a mere technical backdrop that is the preserve of engineers only.
When infrastructure achieves such a status as a ‘black box’, few modern urbanites venture to understand the inner workings of the technology or the giant lattices of connection and flow that link these network access points seamlessly to distant elsewheres.
How many of the world’s burgeoning billions of urbanites, after all, routinely consider the mass of servers, satellites, glass fibres, routers – and, indeed, electrical systems – that bring our ‘virtual’ worlds of play, socialising, e-commerce or communication into being? Or the global supply chains that populate a supermarket shelves with produce?
In many cities of the Global South, by contrast, access to energy, water, waste, communications, and transport services is anything but assumed. In such places, especially in informal settlements, large parts of the population must continuously improvise to gain reliable water, power or sewerage supply. Often these are simply not available. This means that basic infrastructural politics infuse urban life in such contexts. It is crucial to stress then, that, beyond the discourses of the powerful, infrastructure services have, according to urban geographers Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford, “always been foregrounded in the lives of more precarious social groups – i.e. those
»Such events render the huge material systems of infrastructure as instant
ruins of modernity.«
with reduced access or without access or who have been disconnected, as a result either of socio-spatial differentiation strategies or infrastructure crises or collapse.”
It is equally important to question western histories which suggest that relatively standardised and ubiquitous infrastructure grids tend, over the history of a city, to become generalised and universally accessible as cities become more modern and as infrastructures are regulated to cover all spaces. In many cities of the Global South, for example, access to networked infrastructures has always been highly fragmented, highly unreliable and problematic, even for relatively wealthy or powerful groups and neighbourhoods.
In contemporary Mumbai, for example, many upper middle class residents have to deal with water or power supplies which operate for only a few hours per day.
Their efforts to move into gated communities are often motivated as much by their desires for continuous power and water supplies as by hopes for better security. The pervasiveness of such infrastructure disruptions in Mumbai is used by the city’s boosters to invoke major infrastructural edifices and large-scale demolitions of informal settlements, as they strive to overcome continuous infrastructural disruptions. In so doing the aim is to become ‘more global’ or ‘the next Shanghai’, an example of a city that successfully leveraged infrastructural change for modernisation and development.
This means that in many world cities, infrastructural circulations are not rendered as mere ‘technical’ issues which simply merge into the urban background. Far from it: Their politics dominates urban life and urban political discourses to a powerful extent. Where infrastructure is absent or can only supply needs sporadically, it is highly present and visible – a constant open question in many people’s lives and a tool for development.
The startling counterpoint in the areas where the rendering of taken for granted energy, communication, transport and water grids as ‘normal’, culturally banal, invisible, even boring, is that it takes the sudden interruption or disruption to such systems to make them visible on the urban scene. Such events render the huge material systems of infrastructure as instant, albeit often temporary, ruins of modernity. When the web site is not available, electricity is blacked out, the subways cease to move, or the tap fails to deliver clean water, the infrastructural backstage of urban life becomes startlingly visible. Whether through technical malfunctions, or other means, interruptions in resource supplies in the contemporary city quickly breed a sense of emergency. The ‘black box’ of the infrastructure system is thus momentarily opened; the politics of infrastructural assemblages become a sudden preoccupation within media and public debate.
It is worth considering a few examples to help illustrate this point.
In the Spring of 2010, the interruption of global airline systems by the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull filled the world’s newspapers with detailed technical analyses of how jet engines deal with ingested dust. The cascading disruptions and devastation of urban Japan through the Fukushima earthquake-tsunami-nuclear catastrophe a year later filled the same newspapers with detailed cross-sections of different styles of nuclear reactor, highlighting their various levels of resilience to power outages.
»Infrastructure disruptions render the arcane worlds of technically-facilitated mobility both visible and highly political.«
And the unintentional severing of a transoceanic fibre optic line off the coast of Egypt by an Egyptian fishing trawler in February, 2008 – which instantly brought to a halt much of the digitally mediated economy of Dubai, Mumbai and beyond – fleetingly revealed the global strands of interurban cable which bring the supposedly ‘virtual’ world of the internet into being.
As well as being experiences which tend to destroy any prevailing myths about the ‘technical’ nature of infrastructure, infrastructure disruptions render the arcane worlds of technically-facilitated mobility both momentarily visible and highly political.
Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. He previously taught at Durham and MIT, among other universities. His most recent books are Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail (Routledge, 2009) and Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, 2010). His next book, Vertical: The Politics of Up and Down (Verso) is currently in preparation. To read more on the subject of this essay, see Stephen Graham’s essay “Disrupted” in Urban Constellations, Ed. Matthew Gandy (Jovis, 2011).
Sources for this article include:
Bruce Mau, Massive Change, London Phaidon, 2003. pp. 3-4.
Geoffrey Bowler and Susan Leigh Star (2000), Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.
Susan Leigh-Star (1999), “The ethnography of infrastructure”, American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377-391. 379.
Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford (2008), “Political Infrastructures: Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 32.2 June 2008 363–74
Bowker and Leigh-Star even define the tendency to “becomes visible upon breakdown” as one of the eight characteristic of technologies that are socially constructed to be ‘infrastructure.’ See Geoffrey Bowler and Susan Leigh Star (2000), Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.
See also the author’s recent edited book, which seeks to do exactly that: Graham, Stephen (Ed.), Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail, New York: Routledge.
But infrastructure disruptions also present a major opportunity to understand cities better. By removing the complex, stretched-out flows that continually sustain modern urbanism, such events, paradoxically, work to make such flows more visible – before they are rendered into the urban background once ‘normal’ service is resumed. Critical analysis of urban life needs, therefore, to exploit infrastructure disruptions as what sociologists call ‘heuristic devices’ – opportunities for learning in ways that render the banal and ordinary as contested worlds of dynamism and action that are absolutely crucial in constituting the contemporary city as process. Events where taken-for-granted movements of energy, water, waste, commodities and communications are interrupted are much more than ‘technical failures’: they are windows into the remarkable processes that sustain urban life.
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