Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations

• Published in: Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland) Vol. 55; no. 4; pp. 720 - 732
• Main Authors: Lawhon, Mary, Nilsson, David, Silver, Jonathan, Ernstson, Henrik, Lwasa, Shuaib
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England Sage Publications, Ltd 01.03.2018; SAGE Publications; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Artefacts; Cities; Critical commentary; Disruption; Historiska studier av teknik, vetenskap och miljö; History of Science, Technology and Environment; Inequality; Infrastructure; Power; Public utilities; Regionalism; Sanitation; Scholarship; Transportation; Urban areas; Urban studies; Urbanism; Urbanization; 关键词基础设施; 南半球理论; 地方化理论; 城市政治生态学; 城市理论; Uganda; Kampala Uganda; 城市理论; 南半球理论; urban theory; 地方化理论; infrastructure; provincialising theory; 基础设施; urban political ecology; 城市政治生态学; Southern theory
• ISSN: 0042-0980; 1360-063X; 1360-063X
• DOI: 10.1177/0042098017720149

Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (HICs) which resonates with existing scholarship on Southern urbanism. Second, we argue that thinking through HICs helps us to move beyond technological and performative accounts of actually existing infrastructures to provide an analytical lens through which to compare different configurations. Our approach enables a clearer analysis of infrastructural artefacts not as individual objects but as parts of geographically spread socio-technological configurations: configurations which might involve many different kinds of technologies, relations, capacities and operations, entailing different risks and power relationships. We use examples from ongoing research on sanitation and waste in Kampala, Uganda – a city in which service delivery is characterised by multiplicity, overlap, disruption and inequality – to demonstrate the kinds of research questions that emerge when thinking through the notion of HICs. 基础设施研究证明了南北半球的城市之间有着广泛的差异，也瓦解了根据北半球城市圈的经验发展起来的城市理论。以历史和文化为根基，北半球发展了普遍、统一基础设施的标准理想；基础设施研究批判了这一理想的普世化。在本评论中，我们首先引入了“异质基础设施配置”(HIC) 的概念，这一概念与现有的南半球城市研究相呼应。其次，我们指出，按照 HIC 的概念思考，有助于我们不仅限于从技术和性能的角度解释实际现存的基础设施，在此之外提供了比较不同配置的一个分析框架。按照我们的方式，就能更清晰地分析基础设施物，不仅将其作为个物，也作为具有地理广度的社会技术配置之一部分：这些配置可能涉及许多不同类型的技术、关系、能力和操作，随之而来的是不同的风险和权力关系。我们使用的例子来自对乌干达坎帕拉市卫生和废弃物的持续研究——这座城市的服务交付以多重性、重叠、分裂和不平等为特征。我们用这些例子来说明以 HIC 的概念思考时涌现出的研究问题。