PREFIGURATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects

Amelia Thorpe

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2023, vol. 47, issue 2, 183-199

Abstract: This article examines the unsanctioned installation of infrastructure for walking and cycling as a site of possibility. In contrast to accounts of everyday urbanism that see in these kinds of interventions possibilities for a politics in which the state subsides, I find instead an effort to reclaim the state for more progressive purposes. I focus on groups calling themselves transformation agencies and departments of transformation to argue that DIY infrastructure is deployed on city streets not as an effort to subvert or supplant city authorities, but instead as prefigurative performances of city–citizen relationships ‘as if’ they were otherwise. Exploiting the plurality and contingency of the state and its legal forms, objects are installed to show how quickly things could be different, and sometimes they succeed in prompting significant shifts. Through guerrilla paint and pop‐up posts, transformation agencies work prefiguratively to imagine and enact forms of citizenship that are not centred on automobility.

Date: 2023
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