Infrastructure as world-building

Stephen Read
Patrizia Sulis

Introduction
Movement infrastructures are often understood as engineering – as the
application, and therefore theoretically uninteresting (and politically neutral),
side of a city reduced to sets of abstract propositions. The city is reduced
again, below the level of the abstractions, to a Lego set of expensive but in
principle unproblematic physical-functional objects and elements, whose inter-
accessibility needs are met, again unproblematically, by ‘physical networks’ of
highways, railways, tramways, streets and paths. Space here is self-evident,
and the speed, reach and simultaneity of high-tech connections the means to
its ‘overcoming’. We suggest that any notion of the dynamic materiality of the
city and its self-productive or self-generative power is lost in this loss of the
object of the city ‘in itself’. And we are concerned here with reversing this
emphasis on the abstract or theoretical before the material, and want to
instead see the physical as already embedding and embodying its own
‘theory’. We’re interested in trying to “illuminate the object’s nature, or, if you
will the object’s relationship to nature, and reconstitut[ing] the process of its
genesis and the development of its meaning” (Lefebvre 1991: 113).
We attempt to track, in this way, some of the concerns of Henri Lefebvre who
attempted to get beyond the abstraction and ‘closure’ of social theory by
proposing an ‘urban society’ born in the relation between people and city. We
are concerned, as Lefebvre was, to find sources of intrinsic creativity and
genesis in this ‘urban society’ – as an alternative and possible counter to the
‘absolute politics’ of the state and its knowledge institutions, in which we are,
according to him, transformed into subjects of power. We seek instruments to
begin to understand the formative processes of this urban society, as a step
to eventually finding strategies to understand and build the city as “more or
less the oeuvre of its citizens instead of imposing itself upon them as a
system, as an already closed book” (Lefebvre 1996: 117).
As part of this process of finding instruments, we are interested here in
understanding infrastructures as material, socio-technological frames that
locate urban life, and urban subjects as knowing bodies. This takes us beyond
a functional determination – but also beyond the simple subjectivities of
individual points of view and into the ‘objectivities’ of immersive socio-
technical co-constructions where we live and understand ourselves and the
world, between things and other people. The spaces established are not only
of being and action but also of appearance and politics (Arendt 1970), and we
want to understand better how the city conditions and forms urban life in
practice, ultimately to inform our design and planning practice.

Beyond the zenith view

We stand usually outside the world to imagine it. Doreen Massey, in a classic
paper, zooms in from terrestrial orbit, describing more and more geometries of
movement and flow as these flash into and out of focus. From the movement
of data between satellites, she zooms in to the traces of aircraft, people,
money and goods between continents and regions, on to trains, cars and
trams between and within cities – and eventually to a woman in sub-Saharan
Africa, transporting water on foot. Massey sees a power geometry here, linked
to what she calls ‘time-space compression’ (Massey 1994).
We map and imagine (and select, equalise and flatten) connections and the
things we see connected from the view from outside, and wonder from above
what causes what and from where? The history of these questions, and the
‘speculative abstractions’ (to quote Lefebvre) in which they are framed, fills
many libraries. We still don’t have clear answers, but are learning to distrust
the instincts that lead us into problems of what Lefebvre used to call ‘the
illusion of transparency’ – the idea that our thought is adequate to the task as
it is illuminated by our own designs on it. The way we frame questions has
also become less cut and dried as the ‘big categories’, like society, economy,
technology, are increasingly problematised by new viewpoints which
emphasise material processes connected to real people and places. The
notion of the social construction of reality has of course a relatively long
history in urban thinking, but the idea that society (or any other ‘big category’)
is already there and determining of other things is itself problematic,
especially in the context of contemporary changes that suggest society is
itself being remade in these processes.
We need to shift our viewpoint and find the worlds we practically inhabit rather
than try to see and command things from above. The surface of the shrinking
global world is not the space in which these questions are answered; rather,
we propose, this will be in a topology of situations, historically equipped and
practically inhabited by the people to whom the knowledge matters. Our
concern will be these other spaces, and the power geometries of
differentiated views on the world from within. Our starting point will be that the
world appears to all of us as something more or less coherent. It also appears
in different and particular ways depending on where we are and in what
collective construction we find and maintain our view on it. Then it is also, we
suggest, the practical context for life and action and for a practical knowing
and doing as these appear to someone, somewhere.
This multiplication and differentiation of coherent and perceived ‘worlds’
problematises space of course, but it problematises also what we think of as
‘world’. Lefebvre began (but did not complete) a move to a different idea of
‘world’ beyond the totalising tendencies of modern and Marxist thought.
Inspired indirectly by Heidegger, he proposed ‘globalisation’ was better
understood as something he called ‘mondialisation’ – or the way the world
becomes ‘world’ for people. He was interested particularly in the way the
world ‘worlds’ differently in different places and for different people. This is
clearly not the world as it might be understood by a physical geographer, as
something standing apart from human practices and processes of knowledge.
Here, our understanding and the sense of our being, become thoroughly
linked to the world; “the being of beings and the being worldly of things are
almost synonyms”. The human and the world are not related as two separate
things, but are both “enclosed … and disclosed together” (Elden 2008: 51;
53).1
It is a character of the patterns of thinking we have been bequeathed that we
overestimate the locus of coherency, intelligence and action in the mind of the
individual. We also underestimate the productive force of time on structures of
power and experience. Our most basic experience is not of an abstracted and
universal space and time, it is of the world, or ‘worlds’, we construct and
accumulate and share as ‘objective’ between us. These are ‘worlds’ into
which we are ‘thrown’ – to use Heidegger’s expression – whose rationales we
learn, often as unquestioned normativities, and whose structures make not
just our individual but also our collective understandings of our existence
coherent. These public ‘objectivities’, embedded in the world, include the
organisational structures and infrastructures that constitute spheres of
coherence – which are the means to our seeing and knowing our place in the
world.
But we need to ask first what are the natures of these spaces and places, and
what is the structure that already articulates them? Perhaps the first clue
comes from political geography, where there is a view that networks of cities
are somehow and at some level more fundamental than cities alone. It is an
idea that Peter Taylor has made the centre of his work – cities, for him, ‘come
in packs’. We are going to generalise this to say that an interesting way of
characterising places – or urban objects and elements in general, because in
a relational view of the world the ‘where’ and the ‘what’ of things collapse into
one another – would be by saying that places and other urban things come in
whole arrangements or networks. And these whole arrangements and the
individual things that make them up co-constitute one another and support
each other’s identities and meanings. This is like saying, everything needs a
context to be what it is, and that there are bounds to that context.

Urban relations
We are also saying that all generic urban entities – cities, neighbourhoods,
buildings – come in networks of related entities, and indeed that their status
as genera depends on this. The relation between genus and particular is
interesting. A city is a city through relating to other cities, and, Amsterdam is
what it is through the fact that it relates to Rotterdam and Utrecht. But it is
neither Rotterdam nor Utrecht; it is different. It is this sort of ‘difference’ that
holds ‘worlds’ together by making things meaningful. The particularisation and
realisation of a generic adds richness and detail rather than diminishing the
concept, or becoming an imperfect version of an ideal. The generic is, in fact,
as network and context, as real as the particular – and is a necessary part of
the way we engage reality. It is a factor of coherence and sense, part of the
‘knowability’ factor in the real. In relationality, a particular is a development.
We can reject the idea that we can define any place or object in vacuo. The
point about networks is not the connecting of already made and known
1
Eugen Fink, Spiel als Weltsymbol, quoted in Elden 2008.
objects, it is about objects becoming what they are in networks. The emphasis
shifts from questions of fact and function, understood and defined from
outside the system, to questions of coherence and sense and the ‘seeing’ of
things as what they are from the inside. Things and ideas about them come to
be together – are produced, and co-constitute one another in whole networks
that are something like what Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigms’.
The Greek concept of tekhne emphasises the inseparability of skill,
procedures, knowledge and attention (Ingold 1996), and it is through our
technique of the built environment that we find a way to answer questions of
order and coherence. The genesis of things depends on technique (which is
also to say ‘making’), interpretation and embeddedness. The view we outline
here does not deal with experience through an interior mentality or subjectivity
but takes experience out of the subject and into a relation with the urban world
itself. This relation happens via (collective) technique or procedure, as
material and organisation supports and emplaces us, secures our relations
with things and endures. This makes technique an integral part of our
structure of experience. At the same time it suggests that our worlds are
shaped not by abstracted theory so much as by the organisation and
structures we build into our worlds. This movement away from abstraction and
the view from outside (or above), with its dis-placing or de-worlding of thought
(or of rationality in general) makes of knowledge a relation between the
knower and the known. What is brought to or disclosed in thought will depend
very profoundly on the material conditions which pertain – which we maintain
organisationally and technically.
The radical part of this is that all our knowledge of the world will depend on
our relation to it – and may change as we change our situation with respect to
it. Fields of perception and experience are, and have always been, shaped by
the technical, and the way different technical paradigms support different
situated views on the world. We live immersed in collective and historical
constructions that are power regulating architectures that differentiate and
coordinate different ranges and scopes of being and action. And the
procedures and techniques of urban space are not just means to control the
body but also, as Foucault insisted, the means to freeing it. We live between
things and places. All lives are a complex trajectory and a putting-together of
the diverse components of real lives. The issue for the city is not only the
functional details of these chaînes opératoire, but also how we are able to
‘see’ our way to getting it all done.
We will suggest therefore that we live in immersive technical worlds of objects
we act on and towards: ‘object worlds’ that are not so much ‘scopes’
(instruments for extending vision) as ‘optics’ (sets of coordinates for seeing).
The Panopticon is one case, but many other technical systems also open, and
have always opened, synoptic views on the ‘worlds’ they are themselves
responsible for articulating (see Latour & Hermant 2006). Movement
infrastructures, including road, rail, metro and airline systems define places
and coordinate things in their range and scope; they constitute places and
regions as they connect them, making them knowable and coherent and part
of local, urban, regional and even global structures of knowledge and action.
Technology, in a material and embodied view of life and things, is not
abstracted or distanced from human life. Technologies, in their reality, and in
their relation to particular people whose lives they affect, become the means
by which ‘worlds’ are disclosed to us; they become structures in which we
know and do things. How may the world be what it is for us if not through
techniques of environing, inhabiting and doing (Heidegger would say,
‘Building, Living, Thinking’), and through the carefully emplaced equipment
with which we surround ourselves? This is a world that we know in the way
we build our ‘worlds’, rather than in disembodied thought or theory. Space and
time, society and economy, or others of these ‘big categories’, are outcomes
of techniques and constructions and the resulting material processes that
articulate and animate our world.
Against the abstractions of Marxian, modern, and even later Heideggerian
views that totalise the history of technology, technology is seen here as a
concrete and particular affair. Technology has also always defined what we
know through it. There is no pre-technological mondialisation – it would be like
suggesting Europeans could have known China before ships and camel-
trains! It makes ‘worlding’ plural because the ‘world’ disclosed, in which we
are disclosed-enclosed, depends on the particular technologies practically
absorbed in particular knowing and action. Globalisation is seen today, from a
position of abstraction somewhere outside the process, as a universalisation
of the effects of technology in a generalised progress towards a ‘technification
of nature’. Mondialisation is, on the other hand, about the way particular
technologies (some of unprecedented power) have given some particular
places and the particular people they connect enormous power advantages in
terms of the ‘worlds’ they see and know and their capacities for acting in those
worlds.
We experience infrastructures from the inside, and they radically alter our
perceptions of the world around us. We might even imagine we inhabit a
different society and a different city when seen from a freeway from the airport
to the downtown hotels than when seen from the streets of the decaying inner
city that the freeway skirts. The issue today is not how a new ‘technological
paradigm’ of microelectronic technologies and biotech (Castells 1989)
fundamentally alters our view on the world, so much as the clarification of a
metaphilosophical basis for the thinking of the space of the world in general,
with its pressing issues of justice and sustainability.

Acting in ‘worlds’
What makes up the ‘worlds’ we inhabit and do things in, and how are they
organised? One influential way of approaching this problem is to say that we
pick and choose the places of our individual lives and put them together
ourselves in movement and time-budgets (Dijst 1999). In this view, subjects
do all the acting, not to mention the calculating of spatio-temporal constraints
and efficiencies, while the places and objects, to that which the action is
aimed, remain inactive.. In this view subjects occupy a transparent mental
space, unconstrained by materiality, while objects are tied into a three or four
dimensional ‘block universe’ which ties down the location of all and
everything. Our view is that this is inadequate: it misunderstands the spaces
we inhabit, and underestimates both the organisational patterns and
structures that already constitute our ‘worlds’, and the extent of our
commitment to these structures through the embedding which is a condition of
our inhabitation.
Understanding systems from the inside, the locus of subjectivity and action
shifts from the actor to the actor-technology or actor-network relationship.
What acts is not simply the actor with his or her stock of ideas and
motivations, but the actor integrated with the technical and social-
organisational systems that enable the action and make it coherent. We end
up with diverse and even diversely motivated, but perceptually coordinated
and co-located people and material, embedded in networks of places and
doing things between them.
Karin Knorr Cetina has proposed the idea of ‘epistemic cultures’ which are not
social or mental constructs, but sets of ‘arrangements and mechanisms’
including people, objects and technologies associated with the processes of
producing and interpreting knowledge (Knorr Cetina 1999). Epistemic cultures
imply common modes of doing things in common situations and settings. The
knowing of how to interpret things, and how and when to act, is supported in
organised situations supported by technics. At the same time, a technically
coordinated space and time is constructed in the apparatus, as well as a
common set of objects, and a language to describe them. The question of
how things remain together in arrangements is crucial, but simple to answer.
There is a material basis to the meaning and significance of entities, in being
with other entities, and in order to remain durably what they are, they need to
be built into and maintained in place in synthetic and realised arrangements –
in what we call ‘networks’ or ‘infrastructures’.
Knorr Cetina has been studying the working practices of financial traders for
many years and what she finds, in place of ‘global networks’ is a
“microstructured network architecture” demonstrating “patterns of coordination
and behaviour that are global in scope and microlevel in character” (Knorr
Cetina 2003: 7). A global culture, consisting of common objects,
understandings and practices, is localised in precisely engineered and
connected situations. The relevant factor is not the ‘flow of information’, which
is in any event illegible in its pure informational form, but the objects and
subjectivities and ways of doing things that belong in the infrastructure.
Knorr Cetina argues that many of the actions and interactions that matter
occur not in direct face-to-face or even person-to-person situations but in what
she calls ‘synthetic situations’ technologically rendered and maintained.
These maintain a background condition for action with a routine set of objects
and practices and structure of expectations. People act through synthetic
situations and in a technologically maintained space and time. And much
depends, she says, “on getting the synthetics right … [t]his in itself implies a
shift in power and relevance from the interaction to the situation” (Knorr
Cetina 2009: 70).
Action is a joint achievement of actor and synthetic situation, and actors,
objects and practices working together construct larger entities – like the
financial market, or the neighbourhoods, cities or regions which we will
discuss next. These are experienced as ‘worlds’ from the inside. They
maintain epistemic cultures by maintaining commensurability of knowledges,
standards and equipment across the different sites in the network, and across
working times and spaces. Places like trading floors will be separated, and
even secured, from places outside the network, even though these other
places may be proximate. The systemic ‘world’ is both connected and
bounded by its technics. Knorr Cetina’s ‘technological paradigm’ is no
abstraction: it is a practical and technical organisation set up in specific sites
and networks of sites, and the project from here on becomes to understand
how human activity and agency have always depended upon a sited
technicity which has often gone unnoticed, or treated as if it were a constraint
on more abstract processes.

Political spaces; territorial synoptics

We tend to forget the political dimension of infrastructures. Infrastructures are
expensive and no one builds them without very powerful motivations. The
good reasons for the huge investments involved have included the
consolidations and restructurings of empires and nations and the restructuring
of cities in response to periodic crises of a capitalist economy. Cases include
Hadrian’s consolidation of the Roman Empire through the building of roads
and cities, and Napoleon’s and Napoleon III’s building of road and rail
systems as part of the nation-building and industrialisation of France. These
cases point to infrastructure’s role in establishing and consolidating political
territories, one that is occluded in a functional perspective reducing territorial
networks to accessibilities.
Urban boulevards and freeways have been political instruments in the hands
of Haussmann and Robert Moses, and metropolitan freeway building today
works to reinforce and distribute suburban consumerist lifestyles and their
economics – including the mortgages that have been absorbed into a global
financial market (Harvey 2008). Infrastructures are strategic, focused
interventions that respond to and transform the functional shapes of
territories, but embody also specific visions of and for territories. Some sort of
design or plan is necessarily involved. They consolidate or change things to
some end, and institute and embody specific rationalities that make certain
structures of expectations and actions coherent.
We need to be a little careful with this notion of coherence: what we don’t
mean is that all actions are determined by the infrastructure and its strategies
and intentions; rather all actions that occur in a given infrastructure will be
contextualised by the logic of the infrastructure – as an action or idea is
related to a paradigm. It is in the context of the paradigm that the action or
idea makes sense, or not. Action is not simply limited or constrained by this
relation, rather its sense (or non-sense) is disclosed in the relation.
Infrastructures are about the establishment and realisation of some strategy
or rationality by the institution of some normative space. Infrastructures realise
specific normativities while establishing synoptics on territories. They link
visions of territories to visions on territories – not always with ultimate fidelity,
but with a certain objective finality. Infrastructures establish the reality of
territories.
This brings us to the next thing we forget about infrastructures which is their
historical specificity. They are built in specific times and to specific purposes,
but are then themselves historical and liable to change. They will be products
of a certain time in more ways than one: at one level an infrastructure will
implement a strategic response to some perceived need or conceived vision;
at another, the infrastructure will institute, or consolidate, a structure of places
as a network of the generic urban elements we mentioned earlier. Then, while
the visions and embedded rationalities may change (a trading network may
become a military alliance; an industrial centre may become a regional
shopping hub), the structures of places will have extraordinary powers of
persistence. We are governed by orders and arrangements we may not even
see – because they are part of our equipment for seeing; and not all of our
structures of power are down to language. The governance of people’s
expectations and conduct incorporates all manner of technical-organisational
orders and effects, which will include the place-structures of regions or
territories.
London is the famous underground map realised – at least to people who are
travelling by underground. The infrastructure is invested with a diagramatic
topology as it realises a territory with a specific place-structure. This is not just
a convenient representation. The structure is a distribution of districts and
neighbourhoods with well-defined names and relations to each other, and
once grasped through the infrastructure, these places and relations stand in
for the underground map as much as the other way round. The map may be
smaller and handier, but in topological terms, and as a synoptic, map and
infrastructure are identical. This identity is one of a sense or coherence,
founded in the relations between places and their relation to a territorial
whole. These relations found a ‘world’ of significant places. The infrastructure
both responds to a pre-existing structure of places and its connective fabric,
and consolidates this overground network. Other systems complement and
support the territorial vision instituted with the underground system. The effect
is that today the whole is locked into a synoptic every Londoner understands
as London, with all its well-known places made visible and present.
The equipment here may not be as high-tech as in Knorr Cetina’s example,
but is no inconsiderable matter. Beside the transportation systems themselves
and their signalling, scheduling and other support systems, there is housing
built in a systematic relation to transportation systems, business and industry
to which employees, suppliers and clients need to be connected, and all
manner of other technical and support systems, including street and line
maintenance, energy, water and drainage systems, kerb profiles, street
planting and traffic signs. This is an historical and practical objectivity which
informs every movement and every action – as well as every further
intervention – in the space of London. It is, we are proposing, the objective
space of London.
An historically instituted network of neighbourhoods exists in a relation of
parts to the whole of a city. London, as a synoptic objectivity, is
simultaneously and indivisibly, percept, concept and culture or practice, a
patch of territorial order realised. The places are consolidated or stabilised not
only by their articulation and definition in underground and other technical
movement systems but also by their ‘generic realities’ as ‘neighbourhoods’
and ‘city’. What is real is not just the places but also the, coherence-giving,
sense-making structure of part, whole and scale. This is an artifice, a device,
a construction, which constitutes a particular urban territory and locks it in
place. This construction has a remarkable level of stability and persistence as
a place-structure, but also, to a lesser degree, as a located, territorially
coordinated diversity of cultures and practices. What these cultures and
practices share; what they have in common between them, is, before all else,
this structure of places.
Integrating a new (metropolitan say), synoptic, at a different territorial scope
and scale into this means having to deal with an already constructed,
consolidated and instituted whole. The establishment of a metropolitan region
requires a new act of construction, or the consolidation of something which
might already exist in insipient form. This new construction will not, except by
destruction, be able to transform the structure of places of the old one. It may,
by a number of effects we do not have the space to go into here, effect a
decline in certain parts or in the whole of the old, but the places and their
structure as a whole will remain.

From ‘infrastructural worlds’ to centres

Beyond a view of technology as a generalised factor of modernisation and
progress, or of a synchronic optimisation or efficiency, it becomes instead a
strategy and a construction of stable perceptual ‘worlds’. But much of this is
impossible to fully understand or even see in a dis-placed and de-worlded
thinking. Some of the effects of this will be even less easy to see. We have to
get beyond abstractions and the universalisations of language to find the
effects of synoptic technologies and place structures on the everyday lived
orders of cities. The example we use here is of the city of Milan.
Figure 1. The Milan region, highlighting the freeway system.

Milan exists in a region (figure 1) in which it is the dominant centre. The region
has today become urban, a metropolis consisting of Milan and a number of
other centres distributed through the region. Milan centres regional
movements, a large proportion of which start or end in Milan. We imagine a
border between Milan and the region, but in reality none exists. But Milan
does not dissolve into the regional territory; it maintains its coherence and
integrity as a centre, as do the other centres in the region. So what does it
mean to be in Milan? Something does indeed change in the transition,
because at one moment we are going to Milan and the next we are in Milan.
What has changed is that in the first case we are immersed in metropolitan
elements and equipment and between places which are towns and cities; in
the second we are immersed in urban elements and equipment, and between
places which are neighbourhoods and urban centre. Being inside means
being in a different infrastructure, and a different perceptual ‘world’. And we
can map this, so while we cannot put a line to the edge that separates the
inside of Milan from the outside, we can most certainly map the movement
networks that constitute being ‘inside Milan’ as well as those that constitute
being ‘outside Milan’ but ‘inside the region’.

Figure 2. Milan, highlighting the metro system. Size of metro stops relates to
diversity of users.

Figure 2 shows the Milan metro system – the subject of the research that
these drawings are part of. Being in the metro means being part of a synoptic
that, for those moderately practiced at it, is the whole of the city of Milan. The
Metro doesn’t connect things arbitrarily; it connects things that are understood
to be the parts of the whole city. And in the process it constructs and
stabilises the city as a whole and as a distribution of parts. Most of these parts
are neighbourhoods but closer to the centre we also find some anomalies,
with civic and commercial functions and areas.
Figure 3. Milan, highlighting the 19th C boulevard system. Size of metro stops
relates to diversity of users.

Figure 3 shows a movement network that articulated, at a different point in the

city’s past, the city of Milan. Here, as well, the city was built and consolidated
as a whole. The parts were connected by a movement network of streets and
boulevards, and most of the civic and commercial functions mentioned above
were the parts in the whole city at this point in time. A whole city was
constructed then which has transformed but never been deconstructed. The
metro was a strategy, at the time, for constructing a new or ‘greater’ Milan.
The older city is still experienced as a whole city today, in a different
(somewhat slower) technology and infrastructure of places. It is a city within a
larger city – which is itself within a region, and we see a layering of wholes,
each with their appropriate parts and infrastructures and establishing layered
structures of places. It is a layering that profoundly affects the activity,
intensity and perceptual values of places. The most vivid and diversely used
places in the city today are those that incorporate the most layers of ‘city’.
Figure 4. Metro system transects showing use of stops by different user
groups.

This vividness and intensity has nothing to do with centrality if by centrality we

mean being at the centre of an area seen in the zenith view – places are
central by virtue of the way they situate us in technically constructed ‘worlds’
that open out onto other ‘worlds’ in a construction and perception of the city in
depth. Centrality is an effect of people and of their embeddedness in the
strategically constructed perceptual and political ‘worlds’ that make up cities.

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