1 Making Spaces through Infrastructure – Introduction

In this book, we explore the ways in which infrastructures, as well as the discourses and practices of envisioning, planning, implementing, and using them, and spaces are related to one another. How do existing spaces shape infrastructural development and the scope and forms of access to vital services such as transport and water? How have imaginations of spaces as “empty” and not being anyone’s property justified the implementation of massive projects of infrastructural conquest whereby such areas were opened up, linked to global trade and tourism, and penetrated by networks of provision? How have spatial formats such as nation-states, empires, and colonies come to provide the major frames within which infrastructural provision of different kinds have been organized thereby linking individuals to ruling states and transforming them from people into subjects and citizens?1 And how have infrastructural formations been perpetuated or transformed as they were inserted into, or aligned with, different spaces across different historical periods? Conversely, we also ask, how have infrastructures animated certain understandings of space? What roles do they play in keeping certain spatial formats, including their boundaries, and the relationships among centres and peripheries stable over time? In other words, how do infrastructures stabilize, or undermine, the spatial formats in which we live, which shape our everyday practices and which regulate our access to services and resources?

Much has been written about spaces and infrastructures by historians, geographers, and social scientists. Yet, it seems that the intrinsic relationship between space-making and infrastructure is so obvious, so unquestionable, and intuitively clear and prosaic so that in scholarly literature it often appears to be taken for granted, little problematized, and rarely explicitly addressed. Contrary to that, in this book the authors tackle the relationships between space and infrastructure head-on, with the intent of illuminating not only how deeply the infrastructural and spatial dimensions of modern life are related but also how the same infrastructural good can circulate through highly divergent spatial arrangements.2

There has been an “infrastructural turn” in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences, which, in our perception, is based primarily on the vagueness of the definition of infrastructure with which many scholars operate.3 This vagueness affords infrastructure multiple qualities, that of the technical and of the social, of supratemporal institutions and of concrete everyday practice; social relationships and hierarchizations seem to be inscribed in it; it designates non-places as well as institutions that seem to open up spaces and save time. Infrastructures make it possible to broaden horizons and set circular processes in motion, but at the same time they also make it possible to control or limit these very horizons and social processes.4 In its imprecise meaning, the term seems to be one that fits our times.

Yet, strikingly few scholars examining infrastructure are interested in the concrete materiality or technology of these facilities, for instance in the composition of road surfaces, in calculating the appropriate intersections of drainage pipes, or in the advantages and disadvantages of certain radio frequencies, although these are certainly exciting stories.5 Neither is there much interest in the infinitely laborious work involved in creating or maintaining infrastructures, for which specialized professions and functionaries often working in the background are responsible.6 Only recently have scholars began to pay closer attention to the role of engineers, plumbers, and other technical experts in the co-production of spaces and infrastructures and their maintenance.7 Many of the far-ranging descriptions of infrastructure show little concern with the seemingly prosaic levels of technology or administration. Instead, the term is often equated with any kind of public service that falls into the purview of the state, the municipalities, or the respective infrastructure provider.

What seems to be of particular interest about the infrastructure complex at the moment is, on the one hand, its significance for the emergence of the networked society and, on the other hand, its special role as a field that eludes the simple polarity of up and down, inside and outside, rich and poor, and so on. As Nick Couldry as well as Marian Burchardt and René Umlauf in their chapters argue (in this book), the rise of the digital technologies and the network society come with an infrastructural revolution where we see massive economic investments of states and multinational corporations. These investments may help to reproduce the unequal positions and stark hierarchies of global spatial orders, as it has often been argued with regard to the “digital divide”. But they may also lead to the levelling of certain disadvantages, for which the success of mobile phones and information and communications technology (ICT) in Africa is a major example.8

The sociologist Eva Barlösius also recently spoke of a new infrastructural regime.9 One of the indications of this, in her view, is an exponentially increasing use of the category “infrastructure”, especially in previously unfamiliar areas such as wellness, the election campaign, gastronomy, religion, mental structures, and the like. The emerging new regime is primarily about the provision of knowledge and information as “infrastructures”. According to Barlösius, it is the masses of information produced daily by research and increasingly held digitally that are now understood as infrastructures for continued knowledge generation.

It may ultimately be futile to try and define infrastructures. In contrast, it seems meaningful to analyse infrastructures in terms of their role in processes of spatialization. In this book, we are primarily interested in the “classical” infrastructures, that is to say those of transport (e.g. land and waterways, railroads, cable cars, air traffic, etc.), communication (i.e. not only telegraphy, telephony, and radio technologies but also as a prerequisite for radio, television, and the internet), those of supply (i.e. not only the mostly piped distribution of water, gas, and electricity but also the networks of logistics), and those of disposal (i.e. sewage, faeces, refuse, and other things that infrastructure complexes put out of our sight and mostly out of our mind).

Our main question in this volume is, how are these classical infrastructures linked to different spatial regimes, spatial formats, or spatial orders? Mostly leaving out the pre-modern era, authors in this book focus on modern conceptions of space. We contend that with the onset of modernity, spatial conceptions and spatial imaginations are refashioned under the sign of efficiency or human usability of spaces and resources and thus acquire new qualities. Building infrastructures became the main pursuit of planning engineers; of designers of local, national, or even global territories; and of politics and administration. And all of these actors began to address issues linked to the common good, in which different interests were to overlap and amalgamate. They became the carriers of a “spatial literacy” – a spatial knowledge that, in our view, was often technocratically grounded, that is to say, oriented towards efficiency criteria.

The spatial orders of the early modern period were still characterized by dangerous and difficult-to-calculate ship passages, with ports as multimodal and multicultural transhipment points, in addition to foot, horse, or ox-driven transport to the respective hinterlands. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, territories were then increasingly profiled as nationally demarcated spaces, also in response to an increase in traffic, and were developed and integrated with the help of infrastructures. Globalization and nation-state formation were dialectically interrelated processes.10

This became noticeable, among other things, in so-called corrections to waterways and the building of canals, with which permanent navigability, the shortening of routes, and in addition the control of landscapes were made possible even beyond the open sea. The goal was the reliable, low-risk, and cheap transport or exchange of goods, people, and ideas in space. Transportation made possible by infrastructures aimed at punctuality, speed, and reliability, as well as relative independence from landscape formations and the weather.

These infrastructures of transport and mobility have dynamized spaces not only in the ways people perceived them but also in terms of their concrete use and have gradually made changes of location – which in pre-modern times might have been reserved for individual messengers, itinerant craftsmen, or long-distance traders – an everyday occurrence, a possibility for many, and sometimes even an everyday necessity if one thinks of later commuters or the increasingly complex logistics of goods. Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls...