Between Promises and Ruptures: Infrastructural Realities of our Built World

The human-built world abounds with infrastructures that dominate many aspects of human lives (Hughes 2004). One of the most important insights scholars have shared is that infrastructures are sociotechnical systems; they are constitutive of the social and technical aspects of our world. Steve J. Jackson et al. (2007) coined the phrase “infrastructural imagination” to point to “a way of thinking and acting in the world capable of moving between the separate registers of technical and social action.” The way political leaders, government bureaucrats, policy planners, and technical experts imagine and shape the design and implementation of infrastructures, provides glimpses of infrastructural imagination and promises. However, the infrastructural imagination often undergoes complicated processes (Anand et al. 2018), encounters disruptions, ruptures, and fractures on the ground (e.g., Graham 2010), and fails to live up to some of its promises (Davies 2023). The encounters between top-down planning and development and everyday usage of infrastructures can produce unexpected outcomes and disconnected realities. Uncertainties of the environment can also produce unintended consequences. Additionally, infrastructures also require retrofit, maintenance, and repair to stand and hold to their promises (Howe et al. 2015, Henke and Sims 2009). Building on the works of scholars who have examined the opportunities and limits of infrastructures and how certain schemes to improve the human condition failed (Scott 1999), we plan to hold a workshop that will examine how infrastructures imagined for certain functions or put in place in society have unintended effects, break their promises, do the opposite intended effect, or even forbid the smooth functioning of society.