Ash Amin, “Lively Infrastructures” (published as an article in Theory, Culture and Society, 2014.
I had posted the talk description a while back, but finally got a chance to listen to the lecture this week. One of the signs of a good talk is when I’m frantically scribbling down the scholars referenced,
Amin talks about infrastructure (very broadly defined to include most of the built environment, esp. housing, and not only sewers, electricity, roads) via three analytical lens:
1. infrastructure as provisioning
2. infrastructure as symbolic/political, in which infrastructure functions as both material/symbolic constructions of modernity, regardless of the efficacy of the goods delivered AND sites of governmentality, social selection and discrimination.
Amin admiringly quotes Brian Larkin’s phrase "pipes turn out to be documents" from Larkin’s paper “The politics and poetics of infrastructure” in Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-343.
3. infrastructure as sensorium, immersive landscapes that shape sentiments and ethical dispositions. Here is where I got super excited and started scribbling down names - but it turns out Amin has posted the pre-publication version of the article (linked here as pdf).
Kenny, Nicolas. “From body and home to nation and world: the varying scales of transnational urbanism in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the twentieth century.” Urban History 36.02 (2009): 223-242.
Hirschkind, Charles. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. Columbia University Press, 2006.
The case studies include the Vila Viva program (in Brazil) which replaces favelas with modern housing complexes in the name of progress. Amin talks here about the violence of the new development’s aesthetic, buildings that offer no recognition of the long tradition of self-build, and deny residents the opportunity to alter the outside or inside of their dwellings (even washing lines are inpermissible).
