On the Road: New Approaches to Infrastructure and Society

Roads generate, amplify and symbolise power relations.State-sponsored infrastructure systems such as the Roman Via Appia, Qin China's road network or the pre-Columbian Inca roads all were meant to serve as instruments of spatial and social transformation.Roads direct human movement, thereby reshaping both mobility and the space through which they cut, including by providing authorities with the means to carry governance upcountry. 1 The road, if we follow Michel Foucault, is a 'crystallization of state power' . 2 This perception is backed by the laden symbolism of roadways in history.Not only are roads prime spaces for protest, but their very materiality is political as well.Since at least the July Revolution of 1830, revolutionaries in Paris and elsewhere have repeatedly dug up paving stones to use them as weapons.Art historian Kathrin Rottmann contends that the act of 'removing the orderly arranged paving stones symbolized an attack on the established political order' . 3 The barricades, which were set up on a large scale for the first time during this revolution, also served to strip the authorities of their monopoly on mobility. 4 Roadblocks have since developed into an effective form of protest.Recently, German climate activists sparked national outrage by enforcing 1 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: