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

Résumé :

Many imagined social futures and actively promoted ‘transition strategies’ rely on infrastructure development. But to what extent can, or even should, our social futures depend on such infrastructural foundations? This chapter examines infrastructures through three interrelated temporal registers: their lifetimes and life cycles; their day-to-day operation, maintenance, and functioning; and the mediatory role they perform between social pasts, presents, and futures. Drawing from observations of, and insights from, Western (European) urban contexts in which infrastructures are ubiquitous if unequal, it demonstrates how infrastructural environments shape dominant social temporalities by materializing them. The chapter argues that long-industrialized societies have inherited from the modern era a propensity to control social futures through infrastructures but that predominant forms of ‘infrastructure-based futuring’ engender ambivalent and even contradictory implications within the Anthropocene. To address this challenge, the chapter discusses key methodological, epistemological, and political considerations for researching infrastructural, urban-regional, and social futures in the making.