Material and "providential" social infrastructures: a foundational economy perspective

Filippo Barbera

Chapter 18 in Handbook of Social Infrastructure, 2024, pp 350-363 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Social infrastructure is grounded on the interlocking of social and material dimensions and, from the user perspective, every kind of infrastructure is an “interaction regime” where technical, spatial and social elements coalesce. Social infrastructure are key to the “foundational economy”: they are material (utilities and daily fundamentals), overlooked (pubs, cafés, and shops) and providential (welfare and social policies) goods and services that make the fabric of the daily-life of people-in-places. Social infrastructures are also meaning-making devices through which people shape places; moreover people are themselves infrastructure, a standpoint that is often associated with the role infrastructure plays in the Global South and/or in impoverished contexts. Social infrastructure, so conceived, is open to three distinctive modes of planning: place-based planning, social planning and ad hoc planning. A major consequence of this perspective on social infrastructure is that every kind of planning mode should explicitly address the interplay between the formal and the informal dimension which every infrastructure consists of.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Geography; Sociology and Social Policy; Urban and Regional Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800883130.00033 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:20560_18

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().