4 - Shifting Regimes of Historicity and the Control of Urban Futures through Infrastructures: Continuities, Ambivalences, and Tensions in the Anthropocene

Summary

Introduction

Whether ‘smart’, ‘resource-efficient’, ‘low-carbon’, or ‘resilient’, most of today's imagined, desired, or actively promoted futures seem to rely on infrastructural development. So too do most so-called transition strategies. Arguably, as pervasive and long-lasting apparatuses, networked infrastructures across various sectors – energy, transport, communications, digital, and so on – can be assumed to play a prominent role in shaping individual and collective social futures; and, as I will contend, they have done so over the past two centuries. This raises important questions, both scientific and political, about the ways our futures could, or even should, rely on the development of infrastructure.

In this chapter, I first explore this admittedly broad question by examining infrastructures through three interrelated temporal registers (1) their lifetimes and life cycles; (2) their day-to-day operation, maintenance, and functioning; and (3) the link – both ideal and material – they perform between social pasts, presents, and futures. I hold that, through these three registers, infrastructural environments crucially shape dominant social temporalities by materializing them. I then argue that long-industrialized societies have inherited from the modern era a propensity to (seek to) control social futures through infrastructures. Yet predominant forms of ‘infrastructure-based futuring’, which as any future-oriented action essentially consists in promoting some types of futures and hindering others, entail ambivalent and contradictory implications under contemporary conditions. Indeed, incumbent infrastructure systems tend to simultaneously support contemporary presentism and perpetuate modernist futurism when the challenges associated with the Anthropocene likely call for other, non-modernist forms of futurism, and consequently other infrastructural paradigms. I close with a discussion of some methodological, epistemological, and ultimately political aspects of researching infrastructural, urban-regional, and social futures in the making. In this venture, I rely primarily on observations of, and insights from, Western (European, even) urban contexts in which major energy, transport, communications, and other utility infrastructures are ubiquitous (if unequally distributed across places, groups, and individuals).

The temporalities of modern infrastructures

The infrastructural dimension of modernity

Extensive scholarship emphasizes the connections between the development of infrastructures and the progressive enforcement and expansion of the modern condition since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.