Historical Geography of Infrastructure

by

Richard Nisa

• LAST MODIFIED: 19 February 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199874002-0285

Introduction

Given the centrality of themes like scale, place, circulation, and power to geographical research, the discipline is well represented in the literature of the so-called infrastructural turn of the past two decades. Geographers have explored the ways that infrastructures are not just technical and material objects—roads, canals, bridges, dams, and power lines—but also enroll many of the external conditions that shape the possibility for their construction, maintenance, or failure—things like politics, climate, visible and invisible/undervalued labor, and technological protocols and innovations. Their focus on infrastructure has offered interested scholars new paths through which to explore the production of, among other things, urban space, energy geographies, media and communications, and care networks. While all existing infrastructures (as opposed to speculative or imagined ones) are historical geographical sites—constructed over time in specific places—a historical geography of socio-technical systems might intuitively be limited to the modern state era, or at least the time period loosely termed “modernity.” State capacity, and more specifically state centralization—be it in colonial extraction or the distribution of material—is a major, if not the major, focus of much infrastructural development as such. Infrastructures, however, are material and relational formations that circulate power across multiple spatial and temporal scales. They are designed and constructed by historical actors and are themselves contemporary actants—continually shaping the nature of power, exchange, and circulation well beyond the specifics of state power. Across the contours of existing infrastructures, there are historical traces of interconnectedness and disjunction, inclusion and neglect. These pathways—woven through countless intersections and sedimented in overlapping layers—reflect people’s collective pursuit of resilience and a better tomorrow. They are also iterative and have afterlives, with new regimes of circulation often built on the sites provided by now-defunct connective sinews. Given the expansive historical manifestations of infrastructures, and the fact the infrastructural studies is an interdisciplinary pursuit, it is difficult to identify core texts that sit within just one scholarly tradition or archive. There is, however, a rich and diverse literature that situates and defines infrastructure more broadly. As this bibliography posits, geographers interested in delving into such a capacious term, then, would benefit from reading across and between literatures that seek to outline the broad textures of infrastructural space-making. Historical geographers will find much to offer in the varied theoretical entry points provided by scholars across the humanities, social sciences, engineering, and art. Undoubtedly, infrastructure has extremely broad historical and geographical impacts, so the lists below should be read as entry points and, almost by necessity, provisional and incomplete.

Overview

Anthropologist Brian Larkin refers to infrastructures as “matter that enable the movement of other matter,” the material, social, and cultural systems “that create the grounds on which other” forms of power rest (Larkin 2013, p. 329). These often-globe-spanning systems permit or hinder intimate bodily and personal relationships while also establishing the spatial conditions of struggle that are fixed in space. Infrastructure, the late Lauren Berlant argued, “binds us to the world in movement and keeps the world practically bound to itself” (Berlant 2016, p. 394). It does so not just in the flows and circulations that give form to everyday life, but also in the architectures and organizations that continually allow these mobilities to be accomplished and sustained, as Graham and Marvin 2001 notes in a foundational work on urban infrastructures. Furlong 2014 challenges the Northern focus of most science and technology studies approaches to infrastructure and complicates its assumed universality by extending a critical focus to the sociotechnical systems of the South. Taking an ecological approach, Easterling 2016 contends that infrastructures can be aggregated into an operating system that shapes everyday life beyond the limits of traditional statecraft. Cowen 2014 notes that these systems, whose logics rest at the intersection of capitalist political economy and the military regimes that secure their uneven geographies, rely on highly instrumentalized management of difference and the annihilation of space by time to secure their flow. Thus, while Chachra 2023 approaches infrastructural analysis through the lens of materials science and engineering, the analysis is both spatial and historical, and, just as importantly, it positions infrastructures as deeply political. As the contributions in Anand, et al. 2018 make plain, the historical claims of infrastructure are also framed around a vision of the future, an idea of what kind of tomorrow a population might build, and the political organizing that might call that future into being. And yet the recursive nature of infrastructure’s political lives mean that these imaginaries don’t overdetermine their future. In exploring the complicated relational nature of large-scale technical systems, Susan Leigh Star’s influential methodological study (Star 1999) demonstrates that infrastructures can serve as both a connective apparatus and a barrier, depending on a person’s or group’s differential relationship to structures of race, gender, class, and ability. Or, as LaDuke and Cowen 2020 argue, even the extractive and repressive systems of the past do not foreclose the possibility of fugitivity, radicality, or the ability to imagine and build an “infrastructure otherwise” (p. 246).

• Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

  This volume engages with the temporal, political, and affective dimensions of large-scale socio-technical systems. Its three sections—“Time,” “Politics,” and “Promise”—frame out a suite of cases that suture together successes and failures from the past with the tools for charting out potential futures. The text offers geographers a challenge to the dominant narratives about state power and instead highlights the varied forms of infrastructural power that emerge from below.

• Berlant, Lauren. “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34.3 (2016): 393–419.

  DOI: 10.1177/0263775816645989

  Berlant here defines infrastructure as that which “binds us to the world in movement and keeps the world practically bound to itself” (p. 394). They suggest that the commons involves the analysis and transformation of existing infrastructures of power, knowledge, and value, and that the commons can confront or resist forms of infrastructural violence that threaten the survival and flourishing of those that are marginalized, exploited, or seen as disposable.

• Chachra, Deb. How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2023.

  Chachra deploys expertise as a materials scientist and engineer to articulate how key infrastructures function, how they reflect societal values, but also how they remain vulnerable to forces like systemic neglect and climate change, and thus require ongoing maintenance and adaptation. Chachra also argues that through engagement with the people and places that they impact, infrastructures can and often should be transformed to be more equitable, resilient, and sustainable.

• Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

  DOI: 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680870.001.0001

  In this, one of the most impactful works on logistics and infrastructure to come out of the discipline of geography, Deborah Cowen explores the spatiality of global logistics, and in doing so traces the link between markets, militaries, and infrastructures over time. The book reveals how logistical systems, often invisible, impact places and shed light on the violence inherent in global trade networks.

• Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. New York: Verso, 2016.

  Keller Easterling’s influential book situates infrastructures, including free trade zones, smart cities, and broadband networks, into conversations about global politics and urban development. Infrastructures create new spatial logics that enable a mode of governance—extrastatecraft—that transcends the boundaries and authority of nation-states. It also proposes some strategies for engaging with and resisting the power of extrastatecraft, such as hacking, storytelling, and others.

• Furlong, Kathryn. “STS beyond the ‘Modern Infrastructure Ideal’: Extending Theory by Engaging with Infrastructure Challenges in the South.” Technology in Society 38 (August 2014): 139–147.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2014.04.001

  Furlong’s paper critically discusses universalizing ideals about infrastructure frequently deployed in science and technology studies. Too often focused on interconnection, she argues that this work can overlook the unique challenges faced in the Global South, where conditions may more accurately resemble archipelagoes or hybrids. In emphasizing the importance of recognizing hybrid infrastructure systems in these regions, particularly in water supply, the paper forefronts themes like coping, learning, obduracy, and disrepair.

• Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge, 2001.

  As a study of the role of networked infrastructures in shaping urban dynamics, this book has had a significant impact on the study of historical geographies of infrastructure. It encourages scholars to explore and challenge the common narratives of infrastructure history that tend to be evolutionary or universalizing, and instead pushes them to look for the messiness and multiplicities of infrastructure histories.

• LaDuke, Winona, and Deborah Cowen. “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure.” South Atlantic Quarterly 119.2 (2020): 243–268.

  DOI: 10.1215/00382876-8177747

  This essay argues that infrastructural power is not inevitable, but is rather the result of political choices and struggles over the movement of people, resources, and ideas across space and time. Readers will learn here that infrastructures can be reimagined and remade in ways that are aligned with the values and visions of Indigenous and other marginalized peoples, who have long resisted and survived the violence of infrastructural power.

• Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42.1 (2013): 327–343.

  DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522

  In this influential essay, Larkin defines infrastructure as the physical, social, and cultural systems “that create the grounds on which other” forms of power function. As such, they are both a substrate and an actant across multiple scales. They are not purely technical here, but infrastructure also has an important aesthetic form that shapes the nature of sensorial life.

• Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43.3 (1999): 377–391.

  DOI: 10.1177/00027649921955326

  One of the key early texts of the infrastructural turn; Star explores the idea that when infrastructure works as it should, we often stop seeing it, and also argues that infrastructures are dynamic phenomena that shape and are shaped by human practices and power relations. The article also encourages scholars to push beyond the spectacular or massive scalar implications of infrastructures and to instead investigate their hidden, mundane, and relational dimensions.