Redeploying Urban Infrastructure: The Politics of Urban Socio-Technical Futures

By Jonathan Rutherford. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, ISBN: 9783030178871

Andrew Karvonen (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) reflects on the material politics of urban infrastructure networks and its hidden influence on sustainable urban development. Urban infrastructures are often overlooked but have critical lock-ins, path dependencies and social values for making urban policies and strategies.

Over the past two decades, a small but influential group of academic researchers in the fields of geography, planning, architecture, anthropology, political science, history, and innovation studies have engaged in a vibrant discourse on the sociotechnical study of urban infrastructure. Inspired by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’s foundational 2001 book, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition, these scholars have combined ideas from science & technology studies (STS) and urban studies to examine the social and cultural implications of large technical systems. The work includes theoretical insights and empirical findings on water, wastewater, energy, transport, and communication networks in cities of the Global South and North. There is a particular emphasis on sustainable development agendas where infrastructure upgrades are key to aligning environmental, economic, and social goals. The sociotechnical perspective is useful for revealing the multiple contestations that arise in reorganising the relations between people, nature, and technology.

In Redeploying Urban Infrastructure: The Politics of Urban Socio-Technical Futures, Jonathan Rutherford extends this sociotechnical perspective through the development of a material politics of urban infrastructure. Rutherford draws on more than a decade of qualitative research in Paris and Stockholm, two European cities with long-standing ambitions to become global leaders of sustainable development. His case studies focus on a wide variety of contemporary infrastructure topics including urban expansion dynamics, energy and low carbon initiatives, and smart and eco city ambitions. The work demonstrates how the rebundling of infrastructure networks is rife with inherent tensions and hidden contestations, the very stuff of urban politics. As Rutherford notes, “infrastructure constitutes a key political site through which urban futures are negotiated and forged” (p. 3). The book is particularly valuable for academics and practitioners who are working to change infrastructure systems to realise more sustainable cities.

At the heart of the book is a continual emphasis on materiality as a critical but often overlooked quality of infrastructure networks. The empirical findings from Paris and Stockholm emphasise the context-specific and enduring physical characteristics of the large technical systems that serve each city, such as the long-standing reliance of nuclear power in France, the changing occupational practices of summer cabins in Stockholm’s archipelago, and the conflicts between steam and hot-water district heat networks in Paris. This focus on materiality challenges universal understandings of collective service provision by highlighting the geographical and historical specificities that characterise infrastructure services in particular locales. It also emphasises how particular social and cultural values are embedded in design and function of these networks, resulting in lock-ins and path dependencies that are difficult to reorient towards sustainable aims.

Rutherford’s material politics also brings infrastructure to life by arguing that pipes, wires, sensors, and standards are lively actors or actants in urban political processes alongside politicians, policymakers, lobbyists, and activists. Such a post-structuralist, more-than-human perspective situates these sociotechnical networks at the centre of contested debates about urban change. As Rutherford argues, “infrastructure is not an existing foundation upon which pre-existing rational politics take place, but it is both constitutive of new political possibilities around urban futures, and shaped itself by these” (p. 176). This book’s rich perspective encourages readers to abandon simplistic narratives of smooth and rational sustainable transitions and instead, to examine complex sociotechnical dynamics that are characterised by ruptures, discrepancies, misalignments, and uncertainty. This embrace of mess as a recurrent and unavoidable urban condition does little to facilitate the negotiations over sustainable futures but it does provide a more accurate and insightful perspective on the challenges faced in reworking the very fabric of cities.

Ultimately, Rutherford’s theoretical and empirical conributions provide a novel transdisciplinary perspective on the values being promoted and sustained by a diverse range of human and non-human actors to transform incumbent collective services. The case studies reveal how the upgrading of infrastructure networks to create more sustainable, resilient, and liveable cities involves particular choices about sociotechnical relations that are contested and value-laden rather than informed by common-sense, straightforward principles. Academics can use these insights from the book to problematise proposed changes to large technical systems while practitioners, particularly planners and policymakers, can use the work as inspiration to contemplate alternative infrastructural configurations that embody different values and assumptions about our shared existence. The book is a valuable contribution to the study of urban infrastructure and highlights the messy contradictions and tensions of contemporary cities while providing suggestions for how these dynamics might be steered towards improved urban futures.

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