Where Social Worlds and Urban Infrastructures Collide
What happens when our urban infrastructures fail us or don’t do what they were initially intended to do? Social infrastructure is a powerful feature of urban spaces that serves to mitigate problematic features of material and technological infrastructures. Social phenomena lead to new directions in the development of technological infrastructures on large and small scales.
This is an ongoing list that speaks to the nexus between society, human values, and the material and technological worlds they both create and are created by.
Many of these pieces hail from the discipline of anthropology, but not exclusively.
People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg
Public Culture
Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency
Theory, Culture & Society
Buitiful
For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities
Duke University Press
The City: The Sewer, The Gaze, and the Contaminating Touch
Beyong the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life
Duke University Press
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis
Duke University Press
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Yale University Press
Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space
Verso
The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination
The MIT Press
Swedish Design: An Ethnography
Cornell University Press
Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise
Cornell University Press
Recoded City: Co-creating Urban Futures
Routledge
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
Cambridge University Press
Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
University of California Press
The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition
Verso
Anthropological Futures
Duke University Press
Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies
Science as Culture
La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (film)
A version of this is available online in Wolof with French subtitles.
Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations
Zed Books
Instincts and Institutions
Desert Islands and other Texts
"Blur"