Review of Infrastructuring Urban Futures: The Politics of Remaking Cities by Alan Wiig et al

Silver, the volume offers a vital contribution to contemporary urban studies by shifting the focus from infrastructure as object to "infrastructuring" as a political, social, ecological, and affective process.The collection comprises empirically grounded and theoretically rich chapters that explore how urban infrastructures are made, contested, and imagined across multiple sites and scales.Importantly, the book provides a sustained engagement with environmental crises and ecological justice, inviting readers to rethink infrastructural futures in the context of climate change, environmental degradation, and planetary precarity.The editors open with a sharp introduction that sets the conceptual tone: infrastructure is not just a noun but a verb.They argue that infrastructures are continually reconfigured through struggles over maintenance, governance, and representation.This perspective anchors the book's interventions in three key ways: it reframes infrastructure as speculative and future-oriented; it foregrounds the uneven geographies of infrastructural provision; and it highlights the contested temporalities through which infrastructural projects unfold.They also stress that infrastructuring practices expose the inadequacy of existing governance structures to manage multiple, simultaneous crises-from climate adaptation to post-pandemic recovery-without reproducing exclusionary, racialized, or ecologically violent urban politics.In what follows, I trace the three key themes that structure the volume's interventions: Violent Temporalities: The Chronopolitics of Infrastructure Infrastructure projects often masquerade as neutral improvements while concealing what Kafui Attoh in his chapter "Infrastructure and the Tragedy of Development" calls the "moral violence" of their temporal politics (p.25).His dissection of Poughkeepsie's mid-century highway, where planners reduced a 200,000-volume bookstore to "16 minutes of travel time saved" exemplifies how infrastructural time operates through erasure: the past is demolished to serve speculative futures that privilege speed over community (p.26).This violence finds quieter but equally insidious form in Meredith Whitten's study of London's parks, "frozen in time" by Victorian nostalgia (p.149).Heritage funding prioritizes "rural idyll" aesthetics over climate resilience, rendering green spaces "little islands" (p.149) disconnected from contemporary urban needs.Together, these cases reveal infrastructure's temporal obduracy: the way material investments (highways, heritage codes) lock societies into past decisions, foreclosing alternative futures.