A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Foregrounds the built systems or networks that coordinate the circulation of things, people, money, and data into integrated wholes. Provides an analytical framework for critically interrogating the relation between built networks and their spatial mobilities, including attention to their institutional dimensions, political economies, and forms of life that interact with and reshape their geographies.
The matter, politics, spatial and labor dynamics of global waste plays a crucial, albeit frequently erased, role in our pandemic now. The understories of pandemic waste impacts are vast, and often framed in terms of loss: from grappling with food system and supply chain losses, to techniques for avoiding spoilage; from popular narratives of lock-down effects on single-use plastics, to PPE and hospital refuse management. Wastewater tracing, however, has gained particular interest and praise as a tactic of revaluing waste amidst outbreak. I examine the viral politics of sewer-shed epidemiological tracing trends as a complex tool for SARS-CoV-2 public health management and increased surveillance.
A short visual history of the Four-level Stack interchange, considering its early presentation as an engineering marvel, its symbolic role in film and TV, how it has come to signify urban complexity and machine intelligence as well as being a contested site of exclusion.
This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network.
This paper explores how water materializes and mediates uneven landscapes of livability, as well as new modes of living in common among those excluded from the urban commons. I introduce the concepts of “bluelining” and “blues infrastructures” in order to think through the contested assemblages of water, race, and space at the margins of urban life.
This paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure to understand the entangled histories of railroad colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and corporate power in the California desert.
I argue that there is intellectual and political ground to be gained by specifically accounting for the coloniality of infrastructure, in both its material and epistemic dimensions. I ground the analysis in the history of Recife, Northeast of Brazil, analyzing the role of British engineering in the production of the city's landscape and infrastructure, and address the epistemic dimensions of the coloniality of infrastructural by exploring infrastructural spectacle in 1920s Recife.
Through the case study of the atomic city of Visaginas, Lithuania, this paper addresses the question of how to account for forms of life that emerge in the aftermath of high modernity.