Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations

Mary Lawhon, David Nilsson, Jonathan Silver, Henrik Ernstson and Shuaib Lwasa
Additional contact information
Mary Lawhon: University of Oklahoma, USA
David Nilsson: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Jonathan Silver: University of Sheffield, UK
Henrik Ernstson: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; and The University of Manchester, UK
Shuaib Lwasa: Makerere University, Uganda

Urban Studies, 2018, vol. 55, issue 4, 720-732

Abstract: Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (HICs) which resonates with existing scholarship on Southern urbanism. Second, we argue that thinking through HICs helps us to move beyond technological and performative accounts of actually existing infrastructures to provide an analytical lens through which to compare different configurations. Our approach enables a clearer analysis of infrastructural artefacts not as individual objects but as parts of geographically spread socio-technological configurations: configurations which might involve many different kinds of technologies, relations, capacities and operations, entailing different risks and power relationships. We use examples from ongoing research on sanitation and waste in Kampala, Uganda – a city in which service delivery is characterised by multiplicity, overlap, disruption and inequality – to demonstrate the kinds of research questions that emerge when thinking through the notion of HICs.

Keywords: infrastructure; provincialising theory; Southern theory; urban political ecology; urban theory; 基础设施; åœ°æ–¹åŒ–ç †è®º; å —å Šç ƒç †è®º; åŸŽå¸‚æ”¿æ²»ç”Ÿæ€ å­¦; åŸŽå¸‚ç †è®º (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098017720149 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:55:y:2018:i:4:p:720-732

DOI: 10.1177/0042098017720149

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().