Progressive infrastructures: on the emancipatory possibilities of urban infrastructuring

This article contributes to current research on urban infrastructure and its transitions by developing the notion of ‘progressive infrastructures’. Over the past two decades, scholarship on the infrastructural turn in urban studies has mainly engaged an understanding of infrastructure, which illuminates how inequalities and asymmetrical power relations manifest materially, analysing ‘infrastructuring’ as a mode of governance entailing violence and control. However, against the backdrop of rising authoritarianism, we propose a research agenda that foregrounds the analytical value, and political necessity, of emancipatory possibilities of infrastructure. To explore and advance this progressive notion of infrastructure we ask: What actors and strategies are involved in the making of progressive infrastructures, what are possible outcomes of progressive infrastructuring? Based on existing literature and empirical observations, the paper combines three conceptual dimensions with empirical illustrations of infrastructural struggles that reveal progressive potentials in the Global South and the Global North. Stemming from these explorations, we coin ‘progressive infrastructures’ along the three dimensions of resistance, reform and care to craft a heuristic for studying these developments. Together, we argue for an understanding of the progressive character of urban infrastructure in a twofold way. First, progressive infrastructures are able to catalyse processes of urban transformations towards justice, sustainability and democracy, albeit not in linear ways. Second, progressive infrastructuring offers a means against authoritarian developments in cities and regions.