Infrastructural Geographies

Infrastructural geographies examine the material and organizational structures of social life in diverse settings, including the role of the state and a host of other mediating institutions.

In this group we explore infrastructure in three interlinked ways. First, infrastructure is an object of study, illuminating the materiality of space, the networks through which it is organised and the interconnections between objects and bodies. Consequently the infrastructures of urban life and public goods, their plurality, dynamism and spatial variations, are key areas of study. Second, infrastructure is a lens of analysis, highlighting the connections and dependencies that circulate in the production of seemingly distinct socio-economic phenomena. This approach permits the geographies of institutional life – such as law and the state – to be recast as infrastructures of bodies, things and affects. Finally, this group explores infrastructure as a means through which social and spatial wellbeing may be understood, considering how infrastructure becomes a tool to govern social life in highly uneven and unequal ways.

Our research comprises a wide range of interests (see research themes below). Beyond the sub-disciplines of urban, development, economic or political geographies, we consider the ways in which state / citizen relations are framed and shaped by the material world. This group is renowned for its work in deploying infrastructure as a lens to explore sovereignty and power through the mediums of: state construction and the law, war and violence, postcolonial policy construction, austerity, labour geographies, infrastructural citizenship, urban ecology and epidemiology, and difference, identity and belonging. A distinctive feature of our work is its global reach including comparative insights derived from research in Europe, North America, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and East Asia. Our research is supported by a wide range of sources including the AHRC, British Academy, ESRC, the European Research Council, the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust.

Themes

	State formation between law, society and informality In this research strand we are interested in using the concept of infrastructure as a means to cultivate new questions regarding the performance and materiality of the state. Advancing current post-structural and post-foundational approaches to state power, we are keen to explore understandings of the sites, bodies, materials and affects through which sovereignty is made meaningful and legitimate. This research has led to considerations of the role of new legal systems in the consolidation of post-conflict states; the nature and purpose of diplomacy and paradiplomacy; the everyday embodiment of state institutions, and the production of ideas of formality/informality in the operation of state power.
	The material of city making In this research strand we recognise the socio-technical nature of infrastructure in making the city. While the networks of roads, electricity, water, sanitation and housing for example, are all provided through the technology of road, pipes, cables and wires, they are also socially regulated, and in many parts of the world, these supplies are provided through a mix of human and technical effort. We are particularly interested in how these socio-technical materials of city making are frequently employed as tools to exacerbate existing social difference and perpetuate marginalisation, contributing to broader processes of exclusion.
	Austerity as Infrastructure Contemporary austerity policies have forced national and local state structures to change in fundamental ways which has changed the architecture of public service provision and citizens’ relationship to the state, their communities, and each other. The state has withdrawn from some services or passed them to the private sector, cut back on other functions, while at the same time expanding in other ways, such as the security state. Through this lens we explore the ways in which the changing infrastructure of the state becomes a tool to govern social life in highly uneven and unequal ways.
	Disputes over colonial-modern development policy This field of research examines the governance dynamics around territory, resources and populations of colonial-modern development. At ‘global’ and national scales, it focuses on the policy infrastructures designed to overcome stubborn social and spatial exclusions, and the exclusions that result from policy and built infrastructures. For example in Ecuador, state policies favour infrastructures for resource extraction yet contribute to uneven development and marginalization. Informed by critical development and political geography, third world feminism and Indigenous theory, this research provides insights into the ambiguous, contested and contingent aspects of policy infrastructures.
	Infrastructures of urban nature At Cambridge we are undertaking a range of work on “urban nature”. The meaning of “urban ecology”, for example, is undergoing a transition that includes new forms of methodological innovation derived from DNA sequencing, phenomenology, ethology, filmmaking, and other fields. Questions of agency connect with other-than-human natures and “new materialisms” including stratigraphic conceptions of space, time, and the “technosphere”. Specific facets of the urban landscape such as wastelands, hydrological imaginaries, and infrastructure systems are being re-framed as a set of embodied and intersecting socio-ecological realms.

Group members

Dr Maan Barua Convenor	Urban ecologies, Nature/Capitalism, Biodiversity, Posthumanism, More-than-human geographies
Dr Evelina Gambino	Research description to follow.
Professor Matthew Gandy	Landscape, urban bio-diversity, infrastructure, and modernity, including corporeal and sensory geographies.
Professor Mia Gray	Research explores the social underpinnings of labour markets and the social component of work, as well as the changing political-economy of work and employment and of labour politics more broadly. Recent research includes an analysis of work in the global firm, labour representation in the service sector, and the social mechanisms through which privilege and power are reproduced at work.
Professor Sarah Hall	Public economic geographer whose work focuses on the uneven impacts of profound economic change including Brexit, the changing economic position of China internationally and the rise of finance led capitalism.
Professor Alex Jeffrey	Research has explored how political territorialities are communicated, materialised and challenged after conflict. His work has particularly focused on the role of civil society organisations, both as an arena of associative life but also as an imagined site of civic virtues. This has recently involved ethnographic studies of practices of transitional justice and war crime trials.
Professor Charlotte Lemanski	Urban geographer interested in the ways in which everyday inequality is experienced in cities of the global South, with a primary focus on citizenship, governance and infrastructure in South Africa.
Professor Sarah Radcliffe	My research uses the insights of postcolonial and decolonial intersectionality and institutional ethnography to explore the unexpected fallout and persistent exclusions that arise in policy to address inequality and exclusion. I am interested in how intersectional relations of gender, indigeneity, and location give rise to experiences and rethinking of citizenship and participation, and how policy approaches and administrations address social heterogeneity conceptually and in practice. The dynamics between postcolonial policy cultures and subaltern knowledges are grounded in ethnographic and collaborative research in the Andes.
Dr Ayesha Siddiqi	Hazard-based disasters and their intersection with politics, security and development in the Global South.

Graduate students

The following graduate students are also associated with the group:

Kate Brockie	The characteristics, opportunities and aspirations of young women not in employment, education or training (NEET) in Bangladesh
Emiliano Cabrera Rocha	Genomic Utopia in the Jungle: Indigenous Knowledge, Instruments, and Infrastructure in the Remaking of the Amazon
Tiffany Dang	Dispossession By Design
Ellen Gordon	Street-level bureaucracy and inclusive governance in Ecuador
Coco Huggins	A New Poor Law Politics? Exploring a Dickensian Discourse of UK Austerity from 2010 to 2020
Dino Kadich	Young people at Europe’s margins: An intimate geopolitics of the future.
Priti Mohandas	The Politics of Power: Understanding “transformation” through gender, energy and domestic space in Transitional Housing in Cape Town, South Africa
Grace Mueller	Theorising Back the Market for Labour: A Co-Produced Socio-Spatial Analysis from Nepal
Matipa Mukondiwa	The Pursuit of Knowledge: coloniality and decoloniality in Zimbabwean Secondary Schools
Tami Okamoto	Territory and indigenous geographies in the Peruvian Amazon
Catriona Parpworth	Brexit as rupture or just more of the same?: women’s everyday lives within and beyond the ‘lost decade’
Ben Platt	London in the 'Anthropocene': morphogenetic landscapes and environmental power.
Viviana Pupeza	Cecil Rhodes’ Cape to Cairo and Urban Transformations, 1890 - 1961
Chloe Rixon	Memory, Cinema and Polish Deathscapes: Re-membering the Holocaust
Lily Marie Rubino	Universal Access? Exploring everyday experiences of urban water insecurity in Newburgh, NY.
Hafsah Siddiqui	The Politics of Mobilisation in Urban Pakistan
Joanna Watterson	Infrastructural entrepreneurship in the off-grid city: energy access and provision in Cape Town and Johannesburg’s post-apartheid townships

Initiatives

Global Energy Nexus in Urban Settlements (GENUS) Global Energy Nexus in Urban Settlements (GENUS) is an inter-disciplinary, research group connected to the Infrastructural Geographies thematic research group.