What's behind the infrastructure? A framework for analysing modern and modest infrastructure

Modern infrastructure has long dominated scholarly conversations, but there is growing attention paid to alternatives in and beyond the global south. Modern infrastructure is underpinned by a modern imaginary and a foundational assumption that nature can be known and controlled. However, the imaginary behind other types of infrastructure remains underexplored. In light of the growing concerns about the limits of modern infrastructure, political ecologists are increasingly asking whether certain kinds of infrastructure might respond better to environmental change and social injustice – and if so, what understandings of nature might underpin them. This paper builds on empirical studies across three cities on three continents and the broader scholarly literature, including recent work proposing a ‘modest imaginary’. It contributes to ongoing efforts to explain the imaginaries that shape infrastructure by providing a framework for contrasting the well-established modern ideal of infrastructure with a modest imaginary. The framework begins by contrasting assumptions about the extent to which humans can know and control nature, and then shows the implications of this for knowledge, agency, spatiality and artefacts. Specifically, it unpacks what kinds of knowledge matter, who should act and how (agency), what should flow where (spatiality) and what things are needed to make this all work (artefacts) across these two imaginaries and types of infrastructure. We conclude with reflections on the implications of such a framework, and how it might provide grounds for further research and theorisation of infrastructure in a world increasingly shaped by environmental and political uncertainty.