Concealed infrastructures: New perspectives on the sociotechnical production of the urban

Social sciences are now critically focusing on decentering the hegemony of knowledge production. The politics of knowledge and its colonial spatiality are starting to have an impact on how we theorize and study spaces. Against this backdrop, this theme issue brings together a diverse set of papers to politicize the multi-scalar spatiality of infrastructure studies. The papers are assembled using two provocations (as reflected in the title). First, we read the conceptual category of infrastructure as inherently plural. Reading infrastructures as plural, the articles highlight the multiplicity of knowledge constructs. Second, within these plural registers, the articles in this theme issue focus on concealed infrastructures. Overall, the contributions interrogate the notion of (in)visibility through the prism of power relations. In doing so, they draw attention to the epistemic struggles associated with how certain parts of infrastructures are made visible, or even how “infrastructures” get defined as such.