We are
knee deep in an infrastructural moment in geography, reflecting growing
anxieties over environmental crises and fallout from decades of
austerity politics and a broken social contract. While geographers (and
allied thinkers) have explored the social and political dimensions of
vital infrastructures in varied and nuanced ways, especially as they
relate to urbanization (Anand et al. 2018; Gandy 2005, 2006; Hall et
al., 2014; Meehan 2013; Ranganathan 2018), the nature and character of
social infrastructures – especially in relation to labour and
reproductive struggles – have received less attention (c.f. Kaika 2017,
Simone 2004). Urbanization involves the material transformation and
expansion of city frontiers, but also an intensive transformation of
space that is the result of paid and reproductive labour, technologies,
and the undervalued work of housewives, children, immigrants,
communities of colour, and other peoples who allegedly threaten dominant
regimes.
This session invites papers that explore theoretical,
empirical, and epistemological approaches to social infrastructures. We
ask: who or what performs the relational work of cities, under what
conditions, and in service of what kind of futures? In advancing the
notion that urbanization as a relational process, what does the analysis
of social infrastructures offer as a way of addressing the relative
neglect of paid and reproductive labour in urban theory? How might a
critical labour perspective enrich our understanding of the material
life of cities? Or, put another way, what do social infrastructures
reveal about the state of cities, labour, its material foundations, and
the future?
