Interventions on Democratizing Infrastructure

The proliferation of civic demands for democratisation through material infrastructures, including those pertaining to energy, water, currency, and transport, indicates a desire to transform how societal needs are provided, and how technologies of provision might act as ‘loci of hope’ (Bernardo, 2010) for achieving a more desirable and equitable future (Dawson, 2020). However, while activists use the language of democracy to advocate for a transformation of the social, economic, and political relations enacted through infrastructures, neither they nor the academic community necessarily agree on the form or purpose of these new, material, forms of democracy. The aim of this intervention is to better equip political geographers and others to analyse calls for democratic practices rooted in (material) infrastructures.

Set against the ‘infrastructure turn’ (Appel & Kumar, 2015; Furlong, 2019), and amidst political demands to democratise basic service provision, this intervention connects analytical work on infrastructures with civic calls for (re)democratisation. It does so by developing a research agenda that broadens and regenerates thinking at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and democratic action and governance. It builds on, but also departs from, existing geographical scholarship that has challenged the notion of democratic politics as ‘fundamentally the same everywhere, [consisting of] a set of procedures and political forms that are to be reproduced in every successful instance of democratisation, in one variant or another, as though democracy occurs only as a carbon copy of itself’ (Mitchell, 2011, p. 2).

To this key insight we wish to add infrastructure as a specific geographical lens through which to understand and analyse the spatiality and temporality of democracy. The contributions included here demonstrate how an infrastructural lens can offer new insights into democratic spaces, practices, and temporalities, offering more expansive versions of what it means to act politically (Von Schnitzler, 2018).